1989 Mermaid Data Cards

I picked up a lot of 1989 Mermaid Data Cards on Yahoo Auctions last week. Dave wrote a post about this set a few years ago which piqued my interest (and he gave me a card from the set on one of his visits here) but until now I haven't found any in the wild. They seem to be a bit hard to come by.

They are a 50 card set and Dave had wondered in his post if they might have been issued in two series since he only had cards numbered in the first 25. On flipping through mine I discovered I had about an even mix of cards from the first and second half of the set. On looking at the backs though I noticed something that might lend credence to the two series theory.

The cards on the left in the above photo are from 1 to 25. The cards on the right are all from 26 to 50. Not sure if this is significant, but the reversed color scheme is noticeable. 

I've got about half the set now, though a few have dinged corners. I'll add this to my list of kind of fun, random sets I'm working on, the colorful borders have drawn me in.

2025 Calbee First Bag

 

I bought my first bag of 2025 Calbee baseball chips yesterday after what felt like the longest wait ever.

Actually, it didn't just feel like the longest wait, it was the longest wait.  For reasons that are only known to Calbee they postponed the release of this year's set until May 5th.  

I've been buying these things for over twenty years now and this is the first time I can remember then not scheduling the release date to roughly coincide with the start of the season in late March or early April.   In 2023 I had a lot of trouble finding bags in stores in April but that was because Japan's WBC win made them sell out, not because they hadn't been released yet.

I have to say that I absolutely hate the May release date and hope it is a one off thing.  It makes no sense - the first month of the season is when fans are at their "I want to buy baseball cards now" peak.  April for those in the baseball card business should be like December for those in the toy business.  

Anyway, the set is pretty much the same as last year, which isn't saying much.  A pathetic 60 regular player cards just isn't anywhere near enough.  The checklists which normally are the only cards that have interesting photos on them this year have cheaply animated images of team mascots on them.  

On the plus side the Title Holder subset has a much nicer design this year than in recent years. But that is about the only nice thing I can say.  This is what I got from my first bag:

Baystars mascot and Dragons infielder Kaito Muramatsu - who was hitting about .140 this year before going on the DL.  Not an exciting player to be devoting a full 20% of the Dragons cards in this set to and providing the perfect illustration of how frustrating these stupid 60 card sets are.

The backs of the cards feature a remarkable innovation - they moved the card number from the top upper right corner of the card to the bottom left of it.  This is about as radical a change as you can expect at Calbee these days.

I think all this laziness and descending quality of Calbee cards is probably the result of them trying to cut corners to save costs in an inflationary economy, but this hasn't prevented them from raising the cost of the bags of chips a bit again this year, which makes it even harder to stomach.  

Bleh. Anyway, I'll try to piece the set together bag by bag with my kids again, on the plus side I think my duaghter might like the mascot cards so they've got that going for them!

1979 Calbees?

 

I picked up a pile of 1979 Calbees the other day which has got me thinking about whether they might be a realistic set build. I have, with these new ones, more than a hundred 1979s which is usually about the point at which I make the move from dabbling to set building.

There are two things that have held me back on committing to this set. The first is that it is confusing as hell. It was released in 12 series of differing sizes, and none of the cards are numbered so keeping track of them is a nightmare.  The card fronts all look the same too, just having a photo and nothing else, which adds to the confusion. Having organized them into a binder I've figured out how to distinguish them from the card backs, but the lack of numbers is a real pain in the ass when it comes to searching  for cards you need.

The other stumbling block is that two of the series (Red Helmets and CL Championship Series) are short printed and quite expensive. I think they were only released in Hiroshima, though I'm not certain. I don't have any cards from either and they only occasionally come up for sale on Yahoo Auctions, always at high prices.

Another minor point against them is that the photos on most cards are a bit more boring than the ones from other 1970s Calbee sets. Its not as bad as contemporary sets, but there are way more boring posed shots and head and shoulders profiles in this one, which makes it less interesting to me.

On the other hand, this set was issued in an interesting way that has always intrigued me. Most of the series (and most of the cards I have) feature players who received the most votes in a given month from fans. So one series would have the top vote getters from April, another from May, etc etc. Its kind of cool.

I think this one belongs in my "soft" set in progress category - I'll pick up cards I need for it when I find a deal and don't have anything else exciting to spend my monthly card budget on, but otherwise its on the backburner.

Surprsing Jackpot

 

With the new season here I'm back into baseball card collecting.  But I have no cards to buy in stores - stupid Calbee has delayed release of its set until May for some reason this year.  So I'm left to browsing Yahoo Auctions for older cards.

Last week I came across an intriguing listing from a seller who doesn't specialize in baseball cards.  It was the above pictured lot, advertised as "junk" cards from the 1990s.  The above was the only photo of the baseball cards that I had to go on, but the written description noted that it included:

1987 Calbee: 15 cards

1988 Calbee: 9 cards

1990 Lotte Gum: 30 cards

1991 Calbee: 27 cards

1994 Calbee: 134 cards

1995 Calbee: 5 cards

1994 Takara Yakult Swallows team set

I was particularly intrigued in the 1994 Calbee.  That is a fairly tough set to find cards for and is one of the few Calbee sets from the 90s (along with the 1992 and 1993 sets) that I don't have too many cards from, so this seemed like it might be a good chance to pick up a starter lot for that year.  But all I had to go on, other than the number, was this image of the stack:

So yeah, its got Hideki Matsui on top which is the key card from the set so that is good.  But what about the condition of the cards?  Matsui (and the 1995 Ichiro next to him) look OK, but that is no guarantee that all the cards in that stack will look nice, and usually when a seller describes something as "junk" they mean there is something wrong with it. 

In my experience on Yahoo Auctions lots like these are a roll of the dice.  I've bought some in the past where the cards turned out to be fine. On the other hand I've also had experiences where I've spent a lot on a big lot of old Calbees based on grainy photos and on receiving them disocvered that every card in the lot had writing or glue stains on the backs.  One time I even bought a lot of cards where every card in the photo looked like they were in penny sleeves but actually turned out to have been laminated.  That was frustrating.

In other words "Buyer beware" applies in Japan as well.

Despite that I decided "What the hell,I've hardly bought any cards in the past 6 months so I can splurge a bit" and I put a bid on it. 

I ended up winning the auction for 7750 Yen (about 55$ US).  Even for just the 1994 Calbees that would be a steal if they turned out to be in nice shape.

Would it pay off?  Several anxious and exciting days of waiting by the mailbox ensued.

Yesterday they finally arrived and I got a big surprise when I went through those 1994 Calbees.

To explain my surprise I must digress slightly.  The 1994 Calbee set consists of 144 cards.  But that year they also issued a famous 36 card regional set known as the Hokkaido/Sanyo/Kyushu set that was only sold in those areas (which you can read more about on Dave's blog here).  That set is much rarer than the regular 1994 set and common cards from it usually sell for 5-10$ each (just perusing Yahoo Auctions listings right now and there are only a handful available, starting from about that price range).  It was the first Calbee set to feature color backs and in addition to the 36 regular cards there are three cards of Ichiro Suzuki (#37 to 39) which don't seem to have been distributed in packs and nobody seems to know how they were distributed.   The Ichiros are incredibly rare (like maybe only a few dozen legit copies exist of each) and the market is flooded with forgeries of them.  

Anyway, when I got the cards in the mail and started going through the stack of 1994 Calbees I was amazed to discover that most of them (about 70 out of 134) were cards from that rare regional issue rather than the regular set.  And all of the cards (not just the 1994s) were in pack fresh mint condition!

Until yesterday I only had one card from the 1994 regional set which Dave gave me when he visited Nagoya a few years back (he lucked into a pile of them at one point too).  The pile I got yesterday had 33 out of 36 cards in the set so I am now only 3 cards shy of completing it (not including the Ichiros).  They all went straight into a nice binder!

I got pretty much all the key cards from the 36 - there are three Hideki Matsui cards and cards of Hideo Nomo and Shinjo among others.

In addition to the regionals I also got a decent pile from the regular 1994 set.  All of them were from the first two series (cards #1 to 72) and I noticed when adding them to my previoiusly owned 1994s that I don't have any from the upper two series (cards #73 to 144).  I'm not sure if this is just coincidence or if the higher numbers are rarer than the lower ones, Yahoo Auctions listings at the moment suggest there are more of the lower number ones available for sale, but also that there isn't much of a price premium for the higher numbers.  Anyway, I now have most of the first two series of that set complete (just 10 cards missing) too. 

The 1994 Takara Swallows team set is pretty cool too.  It had been opened but all the cards were there and nice and minty.

The other thing I was excited about were the 30 cards from the 1990 Lotte Gum set.  I'm about 20 cards short of completing that (out of 120 cards in the set) and was hoping that I'd get at least a few.  The cards were all in nice shape but I was disappointed to discover that none of the twenty I need were in it. There were a couple of 1991 Calbees that I needed but the cards from the other years were mostly doubles too.

As a bonus the lot also came with a pile of about 150 mint Calbee soccer cards from the early 90s (1992-93 and 1993 sets).  I've never collected soccer cards but these might get me interested and were nice to get.

So this turned out to be a nice purchase.  Every once in a while it pays to roll the dice like this!

What is happening here.

 

Takashi Yamaguchi is either giving an unidentified Braves player a back massage, or subduing him until the police arrive following a violent outburst or using chest compressions trying to resuscitate him following a heart attack only he hasn't yet noticed that he needs to turn him over to do that.

I"m not sure which, but I like cards like this with oddball photos.  This one gets bonus points for having a kei truck in the shot too, something you rarely see on baseball cards these days.  Also there are very few cards which feature pictures of one player sitting on another.

This is cared #135 from the 1977 Calbee set (or I should say one of the 1977 Calbee sets, the one with the star borders on the back that makes it easy to confuse with the 1975-76-77 set).  I picked it up the other day mainly on the strength of the photo.   

Yamaguchi had a short-but-decent career mostly as a relief pitcher between 1975 and 1982 (50-43, 3.18 career ERA) and won a few honors in that time (ROY, Nippon Series MVP, All Star).

I'm curious who the guy he is sitting on is.