More Morinagas! With Ghosts.

Fortunately my recent decision to put a 1000 Yen cap on my baseball card purchases has not actually prevented me from buying stuff.  Yesterday's mail included two cards from the 1964 Morinaga Top Star set which, it seems, I have decided to try to complete.

Its a 12 card set and I already had two of them, so now I'm up to four!  These set me back 500 Yen each, so combined they just squeaked under my self-imposed spending limit!

And the card on the left is Shigeo Nagashima , an A-list Hall of Famer if there ever was one, so it was a good purchase even though both are in a bit lower condition than my previous two.  The one on the right is Isao Shibata.

One odd thing I noticed is that the cards are slightly different color, the Nagashima card is a lot darker than the Shibata.  This is noticable on the border on the card fronts and especially on the card backs.  This isn't the result of anything getting spilled on the Nagashima, I think they've just aged differently.

A much weirder and spookier thing I noticed is that if you look in the background of the Shibata card, there seems to be a ghost sitting in the stands:

I'm pretty sure this was an actual person sitting there which for some reason Morinaga decided to obscure.  They chose a very odd way of doing so, the dots they use really do make it look like a ghostly apparition, or some sort of alien super hero.

The Nagashima card also has a couple of spots that look like this, but its not as pronounced. I'm going to give my other Morinagas a check to see if they have ghosts too.

While the addition of Nagashima to the cards of Sadaharu Oh and Katsuya Nomura which I already had gives me most of the key stars in the set, according to Engel there are two short printed cards (Shigeru Mizuhara and Yasumitsu Toyoda) which are way harder to find than the rest and way more expensive (like 300$ expensive).  So for the time being I might satisfy myself with trying to complete the 10 cards of the set that weren't short printed!

Can Gum Wrappers be Baseball Cards?

Here is a really interesting addendum to my post last month about the 1964 Morinaga set. In addition to producing baseball cards, Morinaga also produced "Top Star Gum" featuring packs that had baseball players on them!

I've never heard of or seen these before, they must be incredibly rare.  They are up on Yahoo Auction right now.  I put a bid on them early on but was quickly outbid and they are up to about 4500 Yen as I write this with four more days to go.  I kind of had a long think about whether I wanted to go higher than that.  On the one hand, these look really cool and there probably aren't many copies of them out there, meaning this could be the only time in my life that I get the chance to add them to my collection.  And there are some big name players like Sadahaur Oh and Shigeo Nagashima in there.

On the other hand, did I really want to spend serious money on old gum wrappers?

This kind of brings up a definitional question of where we draw the line as to what is and isn't a baseball card, which Japan is always doing with its kites and cards shaped like airplanes and all these other wild things it used to put out!

These gum wrappers are definitely cool.  I suspect they were released at around the same time their card sets were in 1964 since they use the same name (Top Star) with the same font and everything, and the players are correct for that time period.

But gum wrappers are garbage, everyone knows that, right?  They aren't baseball cards, right?  And therefore I don't have to collect them, right?

Right?

I don't know.  I think I am going to reluctantly pass on putting any more bids in on them unless someone in the comments provides me with a convincing argument for why I should pay a lot of money for gum wrappers!

(Postscript: the auction for these ultimately ended for 12,833 Yen).

1964 Morinagas!

I finally got me some 1964 Morinagas!

If you live in Japan today you might know Morinaga mainly as the food maker responsible for making powdered milk for coffee which for some reason they called "Creap".  I have a jar of it right next to me as I type this in fact:

If you lived here in 1964 on the other hand you'd probably know them as....well actually even then you'd know them as the company that made Creap.  But you'd also know them as the company which put out probably the best baseball card sets of the 60s, next to Kabaya Leaf.

They issued two sets that year: "Top Star" and "Color Stand" (called "Standups" in Engel).  On the front they are basically the same, a color photo with a glossy finish and white border on a postcard sized card.  The backs differ quite a bit though.  The "Top Star" cards have a pretty simple back which gives some biographical information about the player depicted:

The "Color Stand" cards on the other hand have punch out tabs on them that allow you to fold them out into a little display stand, which is great.  It reminds me a bit of the 1988 Donruss All Star punch out stand ups I used to collect like 30 years ago.

 I picked up a lot of three of these on Yahoo Auctions a few days ago, two Top Stars and one Color Stand.  All three were pretty big names - Sadaharu Oh and Katsuya Nomura were my Top Stars (pictured at the top of this post) and Masaichi Kaneda was my Color Stand:

The three are in great shape and I'm really psyched to finally have some cards from those sets.  The Kaneda card I discovered might be an uncorrected error card.  If you look closely it spells his first name as "Shouichi" on the back instead of "Masaichi".  Both are correct readings for the kanji he uses for his name and its not uncommon for people to make mistakes like that, perhaps the guy editing it just didn't know the correct reading of his name (Japanese is hard because of stuff like this BTW).

Perhaps as interesting as the cards themselves are who I bought them from.  Larry Fuhrmann is kind of a legend among Japanese baseball card collectors since he is one of the most important pioneers in the modern hobby, he even played an important role in the creation of the first BBM set back in 1991.  You can read all about his history on Dave's excellent post here which I highly recommend.  I kind of like the fact that he got his start in Japan as an English teacher in Kobe since that is exactly how I got my start too, only I arrived in Kobe in December of 1999 (hit my twentieth anniversary just 3 days ago!) quite a bit later than him.  

Anyway, he is still in the hobby and runs a great business on Yahoo Auctions as dealer_Larry and I've bought a few things off him before, he is a good source for vintage stuff and I totally recommend keeping him on your watch list as he puts up some really interesting stuff sometimes.  I think he also sells on Ebay too, though I'm not really an Ebay guy anymore so I haven't checked!

Also, and this is something only people who collect cards via Yahoo Auctions Japan can appreciate - the cards arrived all stored in top holders which no Japanese dealer ever does no matter how expensive the cards.  Every other card I've purchased on Yahoo auctions (and there are a lot by now) has come sandwiched between two pieces of cardboard taped together, which is obviously cheaper for the seller but very annoying for the buyer since they never put any thought into the question of whether it will be easy for the buyer to extract the card from the wad of cardboard and tape they encase it in (its never easy to get them out!).