1952 Calbee / Matsuo

 

In 1952 and 1953 Calbee produced a small number of baseball card sets that were distributed with its snack products.   These are so old that back then Calbee wasn't even called Calbee yet.  The company, identified on the card backs, was still called the Matsuo Ryoshoku Kogyou Corporation (Matsuo Food Industry Corporation) rather than Calbee. The Engel guide (in describing set JF62a) notes this confusion, stating:

 "The Calbee Company was originally called the Matsuo Company.  Apparently the name change occurred around the time these cards were being produced."    

This seems to be slightly inaccurate.  Its correct that today's Calbee was called Matsuo when these cards were produced, but the company actually changed its name a couple of years later, in 1955.  In 1952 and 1953 when these cards were produced the name "Calbee" (which appears on some of them) was merely the name of a product produced by Matsuo, not the name of the company itself. 

Anyway, that nitpicking aside, these cards are quite hard to find and only rarely come up for sale on Yahoo Auctions or elsewhere.  For many years as a Calbee collector I have wanted at least one for my collection, but every time I'd find one for auction I would inevitably get outbid on them, year after year.

Last week that losing streak finally came to an end and I won an auction for one!  It features Mainichi Orions pitcher Takeshi Nomura (listed as Kiyoshi Nomura in Engel, but his Japanese wikipedia page lists him as Takeshi.  From the same source it seems that when he joined the Senators in 1946 his name was listed as Kiyoshi, but after that season he changed it to Takeshi and thus would have been Takeshi when this card came out if I'm not mistaken).  Nomura had a satisfyingly mathematically average career - finishing with a 73-73 record  mainly compiled between 1950 and 1956 (plus a few games in 1946).  Between 1950 and 1952 he was a pretty dominant starter for the Orions, including an 18-4 record in 1950, but his career fell off pretty rapidly after that brief period of dominance (which fell right when these cards were produced).  

The card back is a bit interesting.  The text in blue ink describes a redemption in which you can send in a specific combination of 10 cards that you collect (consisting of one manager, one pitcher, one catcher, four infielders and three outfielders) and in return they will send you a prize - either a glove, a bat or a French doll.  

The red ink part seems to contain an update on the redemption as it differs from what the blue ink says.  Instead of a glove, bat or French doll, it says you can get a glove, a French doll, a harmonica or a fountain pen.  The company must have run out of bats and stumbled across a supply of harmonicas and fountain pens at some point during the sale of these. 

Some of the Calbee sets from this time period are pretty plain to look at, with promotional ads taking up most of the card fronts on some (JF63a and Jf63b in particular) but I quite liked the look of this Nomura card which is why I decided to put in a bid that was serious enough to actually win it!

Star Cards without the Sparkles

 

Sparkles are missing!

There is an interesting notice that was posted on Calbee's website about a month ago which I only just noticed. As usual they issued a 24 card "Star Card" subset with Series 1 this year.  Those are commonly called "Kira kira" cards in Japanese since they have a sparkly finish on them which will reflect a pattern when you hold them up to the light.  They've been adding that to the Star Cards for many years now, but this year some of the Star Cards were accidentally distributed without the glittery finish on them (as illustrated in the above image.  No sparkles on the cards on the left, cards on the left are sparkly as intended).

According to the notice, anyone who received a Star Card without the sparkles can send in their sparkle-less Star Card and have it replaced with a Sparkly Star Card.

This got me excited and I scoured my collection to see if I had pulled any of those sparkle-free Star Cards.  Much to my delight I discovered that I had!  My copy of Go-Matsumoto's Star Card (S-23) is distinctively lacking in sparkles!  Here it is next to a Daiki Sekine card that has sparkles for comparison:

These sparkle-free Star Cards seem to be legit rarities.  The Matsumoto is the only one I have out of more than a dozen Star Cards I've pulled.  I perused the Yahoo Auctions listings for 2024 Star Cards and of the many available I wasn't able to discern any that didn't have sparkles on them (though its hard to tell from a lot of the photos).  

This is a big difference from the regular card of Hiromi Ito that erroneously listed him as 176 metres in height.  For a couple of weeks there those were getting bid up like crazy on Yahoo Auctions.  Since that initial hype-induced boom interest in those has evaporated and of the many available on Yahoo Auctions right now not a single one has a bid on it.  I just pulled one from a newly released pack (its possible to discern from the expiry dates on the bags of chips they come with how recently a pack of Calbee cards was released) which this late in Series 1's run means they probably won't correct it.  In other words, its basically just a common card of a fairly average pitcher.    

Its the absence of sellers flogging these no-sparkle cards on Yahoo Auctions after they made such a huge deal about the Ito card that makes me think these are quite rare.  Otherwise you'd expect them to be hyped up like crazy by everyone who had one and wanted to pull a quick buck.  

Anyway, word to wise to anyone who finds one of these: You probably shouldn't take Calbee up on their offer to replace it with a corrected one!

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.

Opening a box of 1979 Yamakatsu

 

A few weeks ago I made a pretty good score on Yahoo Auctions: an unopened box of 1979 Yamakatsu packs.

The 1979 Yamakatsu set is, according to the Engel guide, one of the rarest Yamakatsu sets and was one I didn’t have many cards from until picking this up. Its one of the two mini sized card sets alongside the 1980 set.

Judging from previous auctions on Prestige these boxes seem to go for 300 to 400 bucks when they come up for sale, but this one flew under the radar (something that almost never happens these days) so I lucked out and got it for way less than that (about 80 bucks including shipping). Having it fall into my lap like that I decided what the hell, lets open it up. The box has 50 three card packs so I figured this would get me a decent way to the full set of 128 cards.

When you open the box up there are three albums that come with it. 

These are neat and contain a checklist of the set, but are kind of useless since they were designed to have the cards pasted in them which I am definitely not doing.

Under that are the packs! 

Each individual pack is stapled shut.  These would have been extremely easy to search had there been any valuable chase cards in them as all you have to do is pry the staple open, look at the cards, then bend the staples back.  I don't think anyone bothered doing that to these, but word to the wise if you ever see individual packs of these for sale online.

I had two opening options: rip the paper or gently remove the staples and preserve the pack.  I opted for the latter.

Lovely cards! Here is Isao Harimoto!

And Sadaharu Oh:

And.....oh yeah, this happened with two of the packs. Very frustrating to get doubles in a pack with so few cards.  Fortunately I didn't get any with triples, though that might have been neat.

Three of the packs came in a little plastic baggy.  These ones had winner cards (regular cards with a stamp on the back) which could be redeemed for one of the three albums. Otherwise they are just normal packs.

It was a lot of fun opening the packs though I didn't get quite as close to completing the set as I would have liked.  I got 76 different cards out of 128 total, so I am still 52 shy of completing the set.

The cards I still need to complete the set are:

3, 4, 9, 10, 14, 22, 23, 27, 28, 29, 35, 38, 40, 45, 46, 49, 53, 56, 57, 62, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 84, 88, 89, 92, 93, 94, 97, 99, 101, 102, 106, 108, 110, 116, 118, 121, 122, 124, 126, 127

Error Bag Has been Corrected

 

As detailed in my previous post error card mania has hit Japan due to Hiromi Ito's Calbee card listing him at 176 metres in height (roughly half the height of the Empire State Building for American readers still using the ancient imperial measurement system).  

A bit less attention has been paid to Calbee's other error, which was on its bags of chips.  On the back it explains the Lucky Card promotion in a green box on the upper left corner.  They made a mistake in the spelling of "Lucky" in katakana.  It should say ラッキー but instead they wrote ラッキ.  

They corrected the error on the bags and since about a week ago bags with the correct spelling started showing up on store shelves.  In the above photo I've put both versions (with the error circled in blue, the bag in the foreground is the corrected version).

What I'm curious about is if the corrected bags also contain corrected copies of the Ito card or not.  Frustratingly I've only been able to buy a few bags of the new ones since they have been selling pretty well and most stores sell out shortly after getting them in. I haven't pulled an Ito card from the new bags so I'm not sure.  Looking at Yahoo Auctions listings there are a huge number of the error cards still listed for ridiculous prices (one would think the sheer number of them available would be a signal to collectors that these are not particularly rare, yet they seem to still be attracting bids) but no sign of any corrected version yet.  This might however just be because nobody has bothered to put copies of the corrected versions up since presumably they are just common cards though.  I'm not sure.

Anyway, I've decided to keep a single error bag in unopened condition (cards and chips both included) just as a memento!

Error Card Mania hits Japan

 

As Dave recently noted, the regular card of Fighters pitcher Hiromi Ito in this year's Calbee set contains an error.  On the back of the card it lists his height as 176 metres rather than 176 centimetres.

I pulled a copy of the card a few days ago but hadn't noticed the error until seeing Dave's post.  My kids thought it was pretty cool.

Japanese collectors have taken note (Calbee itself put an announcement on its website about the error, promising to replace them with corrected versions).  Yahoo Auctions is now full of Hiromi Ito Error cards with asking prices much much higher than a 2024 Calbee regular card of a pitcher with a 27-28 career record would normally command.

These aren't just sitting there either, a lot of them have bids.  This one for example is up to 1900 Yen (about 13$ US) with 63 watchers. 

This reminds me a lot of the late 80s/early 90s error mania in the US, when 1989 Fleer Billy Ripkens or 1990 Upper Deck Ben McDonalds were the hottest cards on the planet for a brief period. 

The problem for anyone paying real money for an Ito error card is that it doesn't seem like its even remotely rare - there are dozens of copies of it available on Yahoo Auctions right now.  According to Calbee they will start distributing corrected versions of the card from May, so it stands to reason that all of the cards they've issued in April will be the error card, likely a significant number of total production.  It'll probably end up being harder to find than your average Calbee card, but I don't see it being a major valuable card in the future.

Nonetheless, its kind of cool to see some buzz around a card.  Brings me back 35 years......

Checklist time!

 

I printed off a checklist for the 2024 Calbee set yesterday and last night after work my daughter and I sat down with the pile of cards we've accumulated so far, opened a couple of bags of the chips, and she got to work checking off the ones we have. We have 35 different cards now and are making good progress.  She also pulled a Lucky Card which was her first (the past two years her big brother had pulled them but she hadn't) so she was extremely excited about that.

A lot of the cards now have salt and chip grease marks on them from being handled by hands that were simultaneously being used to eat potato chips.  And they also have some dinged corners from being dropped.  But its moments like this that guarantees that if I'm still around 40 years from now some banged up Calbee cards from the early-mid 2020s are probably going to be the only thing in my collection that will put a genuine smile on my face.  

Minor 2024 Calbee Complaint

 

As I've mentioned in my most recent posts, I've been enjoying  collecting the 2024 Calbee set so far this year.  

But for the sake of throwing some rain on my own parade I thought I'd raise one complaint I have with the set.  Too many damn Title Holder cards.

For many years Calbee has been fairly consistent with how it structures its sets.  With each series you get the regular base set, plus several subsets.  The subsets usually consist of:

1) a 24 card "Star Card" set that is a bit harder to find than the regular cards (as noted in my previous post these have a parralel version that are the main "chase" cards in the set).

2) A checklist subset that is usually 4 cards per series.  These are usually my favorite since they tend to feature the best photography.

3) Some kind of throwback subset, often featuring reprints of older Calbee cards.  Numbers in these sets have varied.  These are pretty cool.

4) Some "other set".  Depending on the Series they throw in another kind of random set with some sort of theme - Title Holders, Opening Day, Exciting Scenes, Draft Picks, All Stars, etc etc. These usually have between 18 and 24 cards, though it varies by year and series.

With these "other sets" the quality is pretty hit and miss.  Last year Series 2 for example had a First Victory set that I liked since it featured cool photography from each team's first win of the season that broke with the usually boring Calbee photo selection/framing.  Other sets though often have really dreary designs and when they do its always a let down to find one in a pack.

This year the "other" set is a 2023 Title Holder subset which features league leaders in various categories.  Its got the worst design possible - the player is superimposed on an extremely generic background of out-of-focus lights of some sort, with "2023 Title Holder" in big white letters.  Every card  in the set has the exact same background which means that they all look exactly the same.  Its almost as though the folks at Calbee were challenging themselves to design a subset of cards which would make the regular cards with their predictable, standardized photography look thrilling in comparison.

The really super annoying thing I've noticed this year, which is prompting my complaint,  is that due to Calbee's reduction of the regular base set to 60 cards from 72 the ratio at which you pull these awful Title Holder cards is a lot higher than it previously was.  Over the past 6 packs my kids and I have opened we've pulled 7 regular cards and 5 Title Holder cards.  

These things are truly miserable.  

Good luck with 2024 Calbee so far

 

I've been having a bit of luck with 2024 Calbee Series 1 so far.  My kids and I have opened 8 packs (for a total of 16 cards) and we've just gotten one double.  That double is Munetaka Murakami's Star Card with the gold signature.

This is really weird.  This is one of the big "hit" cards in the set this year. The Star Cards are a kind of "premium" subset that is slightly harder to pull than the regular cards.  The gold signature version of it in turn is a much harder to pull parrallel which is basically the main thing that the box-breakers chase in these.  And Murakami is arguably the biggest star in NPB (at least among batters), so his card is one of the best in the 24 card set.  There is a copy of this card on Yahoo Auctions which has currently been bid up to 1600 Yen.  

This is a rather auspicious way to begin the baseball card collecting year.  The odds of me pulling just one, let alone two of this card are pretty long.  This guy just opened 5 whole cases (120 bags) and only pulled 3 of the gold signature parallel cards so they seem to be lightly seeded.  

I don't really collect these chase cards, but at the same time I'm happy to get them when they fall out of a pack (both of these coincidentally came in packs that I opened rather than my kids, so I've actually hit Murakami gold cards in the majority of the packs I have opened thus far).

In related news I can say that the supply problems that plagued the roll out of Calbee cards in retail stores in 2023 don't seem to be an issue this year.  Bags started appearing in convenience stores within a few days of the official release date on April 1st and I've been able to find them at several different Family Marts so far (I haven't had any luck at 7-11s though, if you are looking).  This is rather handy as I can buy a bag on my way to work in the morning, eat the chips as a snack after lunch, and then buy some more bags on the way home from work to share with my kids (my daughter is very into them this year, my son's interest seems to be waning a bit though.....)

From the 15th they'll be available in supermarkets.  This might seem a minor detail, but they are usually a bit cheaper in supermarkets and their supply is a bit more reliable (convenience stores tend to run out quickly) so I'll probably switch to buying them at the AEON on the way home from next week.  

This, combined with the Dragons being on a winning streak, has been a nice way to start the 2024 season.

2024 Calbee Series 1 has arrived

 

The 2024 season is finally here!  After watching my Dragons drop their first series against the Swallows in Tokyo I was extremely pleased to see them win their home opener last night against the Giants on a dramatic Sayonara home run by Seiya Hosokawa in the bottom of the 11th.

That good baseball mood carried over into today when I stopped at a convenience store in the train station while on my way to work and found bags of this year's Calbee baseball chips were on sale.  It was the same convenience store that I bought my first bags at last year, they seem to get them earlier than others (I had already struck out at a couple of places).  

I pulled cards of Ryosuke Kikuchi and Kaima Taira.  Design wise the cards are more or less the same as they've been since 1997.  The names are in kanji this year and they use a different way of identifying the team (writing the team name out in the stylized font, which I prefer to last year's little box with the team logo in it).  Photography looks as predictable as ever.  

Backs are also the same as usual.  I like the use of the team logo a bit better on these ones compared to last year but otherwise its the same as always.

The bag cost me 126 Yen.  That is both a price increase and a price decrease depending on what kind of money you express it in.  In Yen it is more than the 116 Yen per bag I paid at the same shop last year.  In dollar terms though its less than what they went for a year ago owing to the collapse of the Yen.  At current exchange rates the bag cost me 83 cents today, but were closer to a dollar last year.

Dave wrote a good post a few days ago noting that the base set contains only 60 cards (5 from each team), which is a continuation of the drop from the usual 72 (6 per team) that happened in last year's Series 2.  Also its not clear if they will do just two series this year like they did last or go back to the usual three.  We'll see.  One positive thing is that they've resumed the Lucky Card promotion which they had dropped from the Series 2 release last year for the first time in decades.  The prize is just a lousy card holder, but its still nice to see that back.

That is about it I guess.  I'm not sure how excited I should be about these.  I'll pick up some bags on the way home and see if I can get me kids into them again this year, which will probably go a long way to determining my own level of interest going forward.  At the moment though I'm quite happy.  The release of Calbee chips in the stores is the Japanese retail environment's way of telling my brain that spring is here and adds to the other signals - cherry blossoms, leaves opening up on trees, ball games on TV.  This is my favorite time of the year by far and I'm going to relish it for a few days.  

The Moment Before the Camera Broke

This recently acquired card of Carp pitcher Souhachi Aniya from the 1973 Calbee set (#131) is a cool addition to my collection.

It might not be in the best of shape, but that photo is a classic. That ball looks like it must have hit the camera (or at least nearly missed it) the second after this photo was taken. The blurry form at the bottom of the image suggests this was not planned and might indicate a cameraman rapidly moving to get out of the way.

Calbee sets from the 70s are hard to beat with photos like this.

Mystery Kids

 

I’ve been focusing a bit of my recent collecting attention on the 1975-76-77 monster Calbee set’s slightly smaller but equally appealing older cousin, the 1974-75 Calbee set. I’ll devote a more elaborate post to it at a later date, but I thought I’d do a post about card #754 from it which I picked up a few days ago.

It features a scene from the opening day game between the Giants and Whales played on April 5, 1975. What I love about the card is that the pitcher and catcher are both Elementary School kids. According to the card back, the two kids were chosen to throw out the first pitch. This is pretty common at games, but rare to see on a regular baseball card.

What I find really intriguing s the question of who those kids are and if they ever knew that they appeared on a baseball card. The card itself doesn’t name them or their school and I don’t know if anyone would have told them. The Calbee photographer might have just been snapping photos all day and weeks later some guy at Calbee might have just grabbed this one to make a card out of, not knowing who the kids were.

Or maybe they were told right away that they would be on a card, who knows? 

If its the former though….man, I couldn’t imagine anything more exciting than being a ten year old who got to be on a baseball card. To have done that and never known about it is  just…..hard to get your head around.

Those kids must be about 60 years old now, I’m deeply curious about who they are and whether they know that half a century ago they made it onto a baseball card.

Stuff on Cards: Sadaharu Oh Giving Flowers

 

October 14, 1974 was the last day that Shigeo Nagashima played a baseball game. The Calbee set that year produced a few cards in the Oh/Nagashima (ON) series which commemorated the occasion since it also marked the end of  Sadahauru Oh and Nagashima appearing in the same lineup. The end on an era.

Card 426 in the set is one of the more interesting ones. It shows Oh presenting flowers to Nagashima at the end of the game (the Dragons Yasunori Oshima is on the right, having also given Nagashima some flowers) Its a kind of neat picture, with all those 70s photographers in the background.

The back of the card says;

“At last the time for Mister to put down his bat. Everyone knew that this day would come, but hoped that it would last another year or two. At the end of the game on October 14, 1974 at Korakuen, Oh presented him with flowers on behalf of the Giants, Oshima on behalf of the Dragons.”

Baseball cards that look like Renaissance Paintings: 1978 Calbee Iwao Ikebe

 

I picked up this card featuring Iwao Ikebe of the Hanshin Tigers the other day.  It's from the 1978 Calbee set (JC 7C).  I'm not actively trying to complete that set mainly because it is as confusing as hell.  There were at least 11 different sets released by Calbee that year according to Engel's guide, most of which look the same and none of which have numbers on the cards so keeping track of them just looks like a nightmare. 

Despite that headache, I can't resist buying cards from that year because so many of them have really wonderful photography on them, which is what made me buy this Ikebe.  It reminds me of one of those photos that inadvertently resemble a renaissance painting that you sometimes see floating around on the internet.  Its a great action shot of Ikebe sliding into home, dirt flying, while the Giants catcher prepares to intercept a throw that is going to arrive too late.  Meanwhile a Tigers teammate (Hal Breeden I think) is bent over and keenly looking at the play, probably after signalling to Ikebe to slide.  The umpire is positioned to the left, about to signal "safe".  And to really add a Renaissance touch, a huge Tigers flag waves in the background on the far left of the image.  

How could I not add this to my collection?  

Monster Calbee set slowly draws nearer to completion

I reached another milestone in my 1975-76-77 Calbee set recently: I have surpassed 1300 cards (out of 1472). 

Its been a long, slow slog but in some ways it has become more satisfying the fewer there are left on my want list. This week I added a couple of new ones. 

The first was a big one, card #609 featuring Takeshi Koba. It is from the rarest series (Red Helmets) which, not surprisingly, is the one that I still need the most from. Over the past couple of years cards from it have become noticably harder to find. Normally there aren’t any to be found on Yahoo Auctions and they only pop up every once in a while. When this one showed up and was one I needed I had to pounce.

Its so satisfying to see it in its place in the binder.

 

I also picked up #378 which features four Dragons pitchers and is a nice center pocketer that completed the sheet it belonged in. That one leaves me just three short of having all the pink bordered cards in the set.

These are the remaining cards that I still need! 

40, 44, 45, 47, 58, 61, 67, 72, 83, 106, 113, 124, 190, 193, 196, 203, 209, 213, 271, 311, 312,  (star he no ayumi), 289, 295, 306, 321, 322 (Hiroshima series), 377, 477, 478, 481, 482, 483, 491, 499, 500, 525, 610, 611, 614, 616, 617, 620, 621, 622, 624, 626, 628, 629, 637, 643, 701, 742, 766, 770, 790, 794, 796, 801,803, 805, 807, 811, 815, 824, 828, 830, 838, 843, 847, 848, 850, 852, 855, 872, 894, 920, 923, 933, 936, 938, 939, 942, 943, 945, 946, 950, 951, 954, 955, 958, 959, 961, 963, 974,  1041, 1044, 1056, 1114, 1116, 1117, 1122, 1127, 1130, 1132,1169, 1207,  1293, 1298, 1320,  1357, 1359, 1361, 1363, 1365, 1374, 1378, 1379, 1383, 1384, 1388, 1393, 1394, 1396, 1401, 1403, 1404, 1405, 1408, 1414, 1426, 1428, 1430, 1433, 1434

Stop Motion Assembly Model Cards

 

I find myself in the baseball card collector January doldrums.  My collecting activity always takes a nose-dive once the season ends and January is pretty much the worst of it - the holidays are over, its cold, the days are short and the regular season is still more than two months away.  This, along with work keeping me busy, explains my lack of recent posts.

I did however pick up one interesting thing recently.  "Stop Motion Assembly Model" baseball cards of Shigeru Kobayashi and Masayuki Kakefu.

I'd never heard of these before and didn't even know that I should be looking for them.  They were in a big "junk" lot of random 70s cards I bought on Yahoo Auctions a few days ago.  I didn't even notice what they were in the lot pictures and it only became apparent when I had them in my hands. 

These are basically die cut wood figures that are meant to resemble the players on the card as you can see when you flip them over.

These are still sealed in their original packaging so I haven't opened them up, but you can see from the image on Kakefu's what they are supposed to look like when assembled.  Not impressive by today's standards when we are used to very life-like plastic figures, but not bad for the 1970s.

These were produced by a company called Mitsubishi Pencil which confusingly has the same name (Mitsubishi) and logo as the more famous Mitsubishi industrial conglomerate but isn't actually a member of it.  

Given the appearance of Kobayashi as a Giant and Kakefu as a Tiger, these would have been produced sometime between 1974 and 1978.  They had a retail price of 250 Yen (on the upper left corner of the package).  

I'm not sure what, if anything is on the back of the cards (which are roughly postcard sized) since I haven't taken them out of the package.  

These seem to be pretty rare.  Engel doesn't mention them at all, I've never seen them on Yahoo Auctions before and my Google search for them turned up a grand total of one relevant result.  That result was kind of intriguing, it was an image (on pinterest) of this ad here for them:

This is not actually an ad from Mitsubishi Pencil, the producer of them, but rather by Morinaga Caramel which produces a well known caramel candy (pictured in the bottom right of the ad) which is still sold in most convenience stores today.  I can't quite read all the small text in the image, but it seems like these were given out as presents to those who bought a certain number of Morinaga Caramels and sent in the proofs of purchases.  Given that Morinaga Caramels only cost 50 Yen each and the retail price of these figures was 250 Yen, I'm guessing these didn't sell well initially and they ended up giving the leftover stock to Morinaga to dispose of through this promotion, though I'm not sure.

Interestingly the ad gives us some indication of who else is in the set.  In addition to Kakefu it also mentions Hanshin Tigers catcher Koichi Tabuchi.  You can see there are four different posable figures - one batter (which is Kakefu), two pitchers (one of which is Kobayashi, not sure about the other one) and one catcher (Tabuchi).  There are also three cards visible, one of which is my Kakefu, another is Tabuchi and a third one which looks like Isao Harimoto (though I'm not sure about that).  There might be other players who aren't featured in the ad of course so I'm still not sure how many there are, but its a good start!