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.