Wednesday, May 29, 2024

Randy Bass's "True" Rookie Card

 

I picked this 1983 Calbee Randy Bass card up the other day.  He has five cards in that set (217, 330, 355, 478 and 561) which was his rookie year in NPB.  Back in the 80s Calbee sets would routinely contain more than one regular card of players.  Actually they did that in the 90s too (when I have time I need to try to figure out which year it was that they stopped doing that).  Anyway I already have some of the other ones, but this one had eluded me for several years. 

This one is his first card in the set (#217) which I think counts as his true NPB rookie card among the five in my book (though since he played in MLB and had several American cards before that and it doesn't seem to be recognized as a rookie card among Japanese collectors).  

I'm actively collecting the 1983 set and outside of the hyper rare short printed series I have more than half of it complete so this is a nice addition.  

Its also a nice addition to my "cards with bat boys/girls in bizarre uniforms visible in the background" collection.  The horizontal red/white/blue stripes on them are pretty cool.  NPB teams in the 70s and 80s had some very eye-catching uniforms for them, including some bright yellow ones noticable on a few cards from the 70s.  These days they are a lot more toned down, and the way Calbee crops their photos you can't really see anything in the background anyway.  But in the 70s and 80s these were a nice detail that showed up on a few cards.

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6 comments:

  1. FujiMay 29, 2024 at 7:53 PM

    I had heard about Randy's career in Japan... but I just looked up his numbers to refresh my memory. Holy cow... that guy was a beast for the Tigers.

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    1. SeanMay 29, 2024 at 8:07 PM

      Yeah, two triple crowns! His career here was relatively short, but insanely dominant. Even though I'm a Dragons fan, Bass is one of my all time favorites.

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  2. NPB Card GuyMay 30, 2024 at 5:01 AM

    Because I can't resist being nit-picky....

    To this day, Calbee has multiple regular cards for players in their sets. Well, maybe not THIS day, but as recently as 2022 when Calbee was still publishing three series a year, typically a handful of the players who were in Series Three would have also had cards in either Series One or Two. And for some reason in 2013 Calbee included a card of Kazuhiro Hatakeyama in all three Series.

    So while they no longer have five cards of a player in their sets (or 30-ish like some of the Giants players had in the 1970's sets), it's not uncommon for Calbee to still have two regular cards of a player in their sets. Or at least it wasn't when they were still doing more than two Series.

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    1. SeanMay 30, 2024 at 5:43 PM

      Thanks, I had a feeling that was the answer. Even as I wrote that sentence I had a few more recent examples of Calbee doing that in mind, but had the feeling that they had stopped making it a kind of standard practice to put at least one card of the top star players in every series at some point.

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  3. Zippy ZappyMay 30, 2024 at 10:23 AM

    "Randy Bass walked so Sheldon Neuse could run" - Drunk Osaka man circa 2023

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