The Sadaharu Oh Bottleneck

At heart I am a set collector. Mainly old stuff. Almost all of my collection is cards from sets I am, with varying levels of intensity, pursuing. This is sort of a default setting for me. Most of these are sets I’ll never seriously go after, but if I have at least one card from a set, the remainder are ones I’d like  to have.

Until recently it was relatively easy being a set collector in Japan because most sets didn’t have any insanely valuable rarities to discourage you. There are a few exceptions, like 1967 Kabaya Leaf or 1973 Calbee which have some hyper rare short prints but otherwise there were a lot of do-able sets out there (well, at least if you live in Japan where its easier to find them).

Over the past couple of years though this has quickly changed. Us set collectors now have a Sadaharu Oh problem.

In Japan, like the US, the pandemic led to a surge in prices on vintage cards. Here though the price bump has fallen disproportionately on a single player’s cards. Sadaharu Oh card prices have gone through the roof, with many increasing in price 5 to 10 fold over 2019 prices. 

To give one example, I paid about 10,000 Yen for my JCM30b Sadaharu Oh rookie card in 2019, which was about normal. Today that card goes for about 10 times that much, if you can find one. Other examples abound.

I’m extremely glad I was able to buy that Oh, and a few others, when I did because as it stands now I have been completely priced out of the market on any Oh menko at all, not just his rookies. As a set collector though this price rise has completely destroyed my menko collecting goals since there are quite a few other sets I was working on but hadn’t acquired the Oh yet. Now those are all dead ends.

The Oh price explosion has annoyingly also affected his Calbee cards from the 70s too, which have gone up quite a bit. A few years ago his cards (and those of other major stars) only commanded a small premium over common prices since there were so many of them. Now Oh cards sell for a noticably higher price. Fortunately this isn’t forcing me to abandon my set collecting goals for Calbee cards since the starting point for those cards was way lower. With some exceptions I used to be able to easily get his cards from the 1975-76-77 monster set that I’m working on for 200 to 300 Yen each. Now they are usually in the 700 to 1000 Yen range. More expensive, but still within my budget at least. It helps that the hyper rare cards from most Calbee sets in the 70s were in series that didn’t include Giants players, so no Oh card is too rare, though there are a few 1977 and 1978 cards of his that are quite expensive now.

I do wonder if this Oh price explosion will cause some tension among Japanese collectors. Its pretty obvious that most of this movement is due to Americans buying up his cards and not domestic collectors. I can still buy menko of Hall of Famers whose names are unfamiliar to Americans for insanely cheap prices, but the one guy whose name gets checked in a Beasty Boys song is the only one in the stratosphere. Not hard to put two and two together. 

Vintage Oh cards are a finite resource that Japan seems to be exporting at a high rate, meaning the remaining supply for domestic set collectors is getting smaller and smaller. The number of such set collectors is small, but then again so is the number of such cards. I was lucky to start collecting when I did, I think if I was trying to start a collection today I’d have taken one look at those Oh prices and walked away. Well, maybe not walked away, but at least have limited my collecting way more than I did.