They ended up appearing about a month later than the announced release date, mainly a result of increased demand due to Japan's WBC win and Calbee's apparent prioritization of Amazon over brick and mortar retailers,
Thankfully for about two months after they finally came out - roughly late April to late June - I was able to obtain a regular supply of them at my local supermarkets and would stop to buy three bags (one for me, and one each for my kids) on the way home from work several times a week. This ritual is by far my favorite baseball card collecting activity ever. We were able to slowly put together most of the set, we're about 10 cards short of the base set now and still need about half of the (harder to find) Star Card and Legends card subsets.
I picked up some cheap albums from the 100 Yen shop, and we also hit a Lucky Card which we redeemed for another album, so we've been putting them in those.
Frustratingly though at the end of June all of the stores pulled Calbee baseball card chips from their shelves.
This is actually normal because late June is when Series 2 comes out and replaces Series 1 on the shelves.
Only this year Series 2 is yet to be seen.
A few weeks ago Dave had an email back and forth with someone at Calbee who suggested that Series 2 might not come out until August 21st (or perhaps even October 9th, the message gave these two dates but was a bit cryptic about what they meant). Series 3 might be a write-off completely.
So here we are, the middle of the season - in fact this is exactly the All Star break - when demand for baseball cards is usually at or near its peak and yet there are no baseball card chip bags on store shelves like normal. And it seems we won't see them again until the season is nearly over and interest in collecting them is likely to be waning considerably.
The worst part is that my kids like them so much that they are actually asking me to go and buy more because they miss opening them! Even my daughter, who is five and not a big baseball fan, gets excited about them (she was the one who got the Lucky Card and that really got her into it. Whenever she gets a shiny star card she proudly shows it off to her mom and then gives it to me to put in the album if we need it).
So this is all very frustrating. I wish Calbee would get its act together, having their baseball card chips in stores is a key part of the "being a baseball fan in Japan" experience and the season really just isn't as fun without them (especially with my Dragons in last place. Its not a coincidence that I haven't been posting as much as usual for the past few weeks....)
I'm completely at a loss to understand what Calbee's doing this year. The one thing I wonder is if doing the Shin Kamen Rider cards is putting a crimp in their ability to publish baseball cards. Like whoever's doing their printing can't print both the baseball cards AND the Shin Kamen Rider cards. But that's just a wild guess.
ReplyDeleteⅠ hadn't even noticed those Kamen Rider cards being out there！
ReplyDeleteI think they likely cranked up the presses on the Series 1 baseball cards when they became hot sellers on release and somehow that screwed things up. But even that doesn't make sense since they stopped printing those weeks ago (and looking at their home page they stopped the Kamen Rider ones at about the same time) and right now they just aren't making anything, so their printing presses must be sitting idle.
I wonder if there might be some bottleneck in their supply chain that was caused by the increased production over the spring - like they ran out of a certain type of ink or some other input they need to make the cards and they won't be able to replenish their supply for a few weeks.
I remember reading a thing a year or two ago about European publishers dealing with a paper shortage. Given how screwy things still are everywhere, your theory seems entirely possible.
DeleteI like the backs on the cards.
ReplyDeleteThe backs are a lot better than the backs of Topps NPB cards.
DeleteJust popping in to say I am heading down the rabbit hole of Japanese baseball cards. (I'm thinking of focusing on pre-1950 to make it a bit simpler). I'm having great pleasure working backwards through your blog posts.
ReplyDeletegreat, welcome to the hobby! Pre-1950 (ish) is not a bad cut off, some of the most attractive menko sets out there (including the ones I use as background wallpaper on this blog) are from the late 1940s/early 50s. I might recommend pushing it a bit forward (maybe to 1953 or so) just to capture all those sets!
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