1985 Calbee Contest Badge

 

I discovered something really neat on a Yahoo Auction that ended yesterday and I'm racked with doubt about whether I should have stayed in the bidding (I dropped out and didn't win it).

This is a badge that was issued by Calbee in 1985.  As I've written about on here before that year Calbee had a contest in which kids could send in drawings of their favorite players and, if they were selected, they would be featured on the back of a Calbee card of that player.  As a result, about 100 cards in the 1985 Calbee set feature artwork by children on the backs of them, which makes them one of my favorite Calbee series ever.

I had never seen one of these badges before, but the "Contest 1985" that it refers to is this one (the kanji 似顔絵 that you can see on it means drawing of a face).  

These badges seem to have been sent out to kids who sent in drawings.  I'm not sure if these were sent out to everyone who entered the contest, or only those whose drawings were chosen.  This is a pretty big distinction from a collector's standpoint since if it was the former there were likely thousands of these sent out, while if it were the latter there would only have been about one hundred.

Either way, they are a neat piece of baseball card ephemera, especially for a Calbee collector like myself. That is why I have some regrets about having dropped out of the bidding.  It went for 3641 Yen (about 30$ US) and I was the second highest bidder.  I was of two minds about whether to bid more.  On the one side, this is a really neat find and not one that is likely to come along again any time soon (ten years of scouring YJA and this is the first I've ever seen).  On the other hand, its not a Calbee baseball card and I'm not a badge collector so it would have been an awkward fit with my collection.  And 30$ is a lot to pay for a badge.  The latter argument won out in the end and I let it go, but I would have liked to have added this to my collection so I'm a bit disappointed.

I really wish Calbee would do a contest like this again.  I say this as the father of a 7 year old who loves both baseball and drawing, and has even started to sketch pictures of his favorite players.  He would go absolutely bonkers with excitement at the idea of getting a drawing of his on a real baseball card.  But its 2022 and this hobby of ours is now dominated by grown ups who aren't into that sort of thing, which sucks (and yes, I realize as I say it that I too am a grown up collector.....).