I've been wanting to get this card for a while, I have a a couple of Yamakatsu cards of Davis that I got a few years ago but they both depict him as a member of the Crown Lighter Lions. As a Dragons fan I wanted one of him in that awesome 70s Dragons uniform, and this one displays it perfectly. The Coke billboard in the background is a nice added touch.
This particular 1977 Calbee set (out of the eleven that were made that year, which Dave has also recently written about) is somewhat harder to find singles for than most, so this one took a while to find. A dealer on Yahoo Auctions had listed it for 5,000 Yen and last week he suddenly had a 40% off sale and I knew I had to pounce. I'm quite happy with it, its in very nice condition by the standards of 1970s Calbees.
The back of the card shows us Willie's MLB career totals (batting average, RBI and stolen bases) which reminds us that he was one of the elite group of MLB "Hall of Very Gooders" to play in Japan. The career totals on the back are not his final totals though, since he played 43 games for the Angels in 1979 after his stint in NPB and nudged his totals up a bit (and brought his career batting average down a point).
Davis features prominently in Robert Whitings "You Gotta Have Wa", mostly about how his Buddhist chanting annoyed his teammates on the Dragons, which is one of those pieces of Dragons history that I just love.
Nice! I have an NST card (well, sticker really) of him that shows him posing wearing this awesome Dragons windbreaker but no Calbees.
ReplyDeleteOh cool, I didn't know he was in one of the NST sets....that is another one for me to keep an eye out for!
DeleteI've given up on trying to keep the various 1977 sets straight. There are so many of them, and they're so similar. I'm glad that I'm not a set collector and so don't need to worry about it.
ReplyDeleteThe 1977-1979 years are a kind of dark ages for us Calbee set collectors. The sets are beautiful and really great, but oh god is it ever difficult to keep track of what cards you have, where they go, and what you need.
DeleteSo, around $22 then? If so, from what you've said about this set in the past, that was a pretty good price, yes?
ReplyDeleteYikes, the Yen really has depreciated a lot against the Dollar recently (last year that would have been about 30$), but yes it was about 22 bucks at today's exchange rate!
DeleteThat Coca-Cola sign in the background really is great.
ReplyDeleteA seller just listed a bunch of late 1940s baseball menko cards on COMC, and it's making me wonder what's a fair price for them. He has most listed between $5-$10, and hall of famers like Takehiko Bessho, Fumio Fujimura, and Tetsuharu Kawakami at $10-$15. Is that a decent deal?
https://www.comc.com/Users/FrankPT/Cards/Baseball/1940s,sl,vDetails,i100
Actually, I just checked eBay for myself and it looks like his prices are okay, but not amazing. It's still pretty interesting that someone listed a ton of vintage Japanese cards on COMC.
DeleteI just took a look at those. If this was two years ago I would have told you that those prices were ridiculously high. But these days they would be more "A bit on the high side, but not ridiculously so". Even here in Japan prices on Menko have been going up quite a bit, the days of landing Shigeo Nagashima rookie cards for like 10$ are long gone I'm afraid.
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