Four cards for Three sets

As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm getting back into baseball cards (TM!) this year via 1970s Calbees, which have been my favorite kind of cards since I got my first Japanese ones.....26 years ago? Holy crap I'm getting old.

Anyway. I bought four new ones which came in the mail yesterday. These are from three different sets which I have in binders which allowed me to do my favorite hobby related thing: flipping those binders open to the relevant page and filling in an empty pocket. I pity the graded card collectors out there who will never know how satisfying that feeling is!

Let me show off what I got and the pages they joined today.

The first card is the one pictured above, featuring Sadaharu Oh and Isao Harimoto. It is from the1977 Calbee set, part of the famous scenes series at the start of the set (#72). I've actually made pretty good progress on this set (which has 216 cards) and am more than halfway there. The back of the card refers to them as the "OH" pair, which is kind of a play on the ON combination of Oh and Nagashima, and also a play on Oh's own name.

Speaking of the ON combination, my next card is from the ON series in the 1974 Calbee set, honoring the retirement of Nagashima and the end of that combo. I love this series for its awesome photos, like Oh standing in front of the mirror there. The new addition was card 403 which shows Oh awkwardly fielding a ball that might have taken a tricky hop, a contrast to most of his cards which show him swinging.

Next up is card 193 in the 1974 set, featuring Sachio Kinugasa. You can tell from the empty pockets in the photo that I don't have as many cards from this part of the set as I do from the ON series. I'm glad to have at least filled it up a bit, but obviously have some work to do.

Last but not least is card 1404 from the monster 1975-76 Calbee set. This is from the final series in the set which is one of the scarcer ones so it is a good addition. I now only have 112 remaining cards to track down to finish this one. That sounds like a lot, but the set has 1472 cards in it so I am well over 90% of the way there!

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, 628, 629, 637, 701, 742, 766, 790, 796, 803, 805, 807, 815, 828, 830, 838, 847, 848, 850, 852, 894, 920, 923, 933, 936, 939, 942, 943, 945, 946, 950, 951, 954, 958, 959, 961, 963, 974,  1041, 1044, 1056, 1114, 1116, 1122, 1130, 1169, 1207, 1298, 1357, 1359, 1361,1374, 1378, 1379, 1383, 1384, 1388, 1394, 1396, 1403, 1405, 1408, 1414, 1426, 1428, 1430, 1433, 1434

Celebrating my 10th Year of Trying to Finish the 75-76-77 Calbee Set

 

With spring weather having arrived this week and the season just around the corner, I've re-started the engine on a baseball card collection that has lay dormant since November.  The first project I dusted off over the weekend was the 1975-76-77 Calbee set.

I realized as I did so that I've been working on this set for a full decade now, having gotten my first cards for it back in 2013.  At 1472 regular cards its probably the biggest set ever made, and having been originally sold one at a time in bags of chips almost half a century ago they aren't super easy to find.  Thus this has been a decade long collecting project, which is not yet complete.

Doing a bit of stock taking though I realize that I am finally nearing the "home stretch".  I picked up five new cards that I need this week off of Yahoo Auctions, which brings me to a grand total of (drum roll):

1273 cards.

That puts me at 86.5% complete!  Not bad. Just 199 cards to go.  

I've got the set in two binders.  The first binder holds the first 900 cards, the other one everything above that. At some point I'll splurge on a proper second binder, but for now it is sufficient.

Binder #1 is pretty thick:

I love opening the first binder and being greeted by the lovely All Star cards that begin the set.

There are three regional series in the set which are fairly scarce and hard to track down, two issued in the Hiroshima area and one in the Nagoya area.  I've made pretty good progress with the Nagoya ones (pictured below) and am almost finished with one of the Hiroshima ones.

That said, the second Hiroshima regional issue (the "red helmet" series from 609 to 644) seems to be the rarest in the whole set and I'm still less than half of the way to completing it.  This creates an aesthetically displeasing run of pages near the middle of the first binder which still have a lot of empty pockets in them.

Fortunately one of the five cards I picked up this week was from that series, the very last card (644) featuring Sachio Kinugasa which now satisfyingly sits in its place.  It was a bit expensive (5250 Yen), but I decided to treat myself.

Another thing that really stands out in the first binder are the pink bordered series cards, which have clear 1975 Topps influence in their design.  I've got almost all of those now and just need to round up a few stragglers to finish them off.

The last series in the set, from 1400 to 1432, is also pretty hard to find.  I have about 2/3 of them but still need quite a few.  This is the last page of the entire set:

Nothing is more satisfying to me as a collector than the feeling of flipping through pages of cards that you have painstakingly spent an entire decade of your life putting into their little places.

In related news, a complete set of these has recently been listed on Yahoo Auctions, with a starting bid of 980,000 Yen or a BIN price of 1,200,000 Yen (about 8900$ US at today's exchange rate).

This is the second time I've seen a complete set for sale, one sold a little over two years ago for 880,000 Yen.  This is definitely not the same set being re-sold as I know where that previous set ended up (er...not with me, but they buyer, who requested I not disclose his identity, and I had a little back and forth email discussion about it).  Between these two and a third that I read about in an Asahi News article back in 2012 when Calbee was marking its 40th anniversary that makes three complete sets that are known to exist (in addition to one, cough cough, almost complete one).  Not bad, and I think that the price of the above is a pretty decent deal (though as the owner of a near complete set I have an obvious incentive to talk the value of this thing up now, so take what I say with a grain of salt).  

These are the remaining cards that I need to complete my set, hopefully when 2023 comes to a close I'll have whittled this list down a bit further!

40, 44, 45, 47, 58, 61, 63, 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, 615, 616, 617, 618, 620, 621, 622, 624, 625, 626, 628, 629, 632, 634, 637, 638, 641, 643, 691, 701, 707,  728, 742, 766, 770, 790, 793, 794, 796, 801,803, 805, 807, 811, 815, 824, 827, 828, 829, 830, 833, 838, 840, 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, 1312, 1320, 1329, 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

That Escalated Quickly: Unsettling Auction Result a Threat to My Quest?

 

My quest to complete the 1975-76-77 monster Calbee set has made some decent progress over the past month, I picked up a few additional cards last week which I'll have to do a post about.  At the same time however, I was blindsided by the results of an auction that ended yesterday for a card that I (thank god) already own.  

It was for the above card, #71 featuring Ron Woods.  I  did a post about this exact same card last year.  Its from a rare series that was only issued in the Tokai area (where the Dragons play) and is thus among the harder to find cards in the set (which is why I was watching the auction despite already having the card, since they are rare they only pop up for auction occasionally and I like to keep tabs on how much they go for).  

The copy of the card that I picked up last year is in really nice shape, like probably Ex or Exmt (which is rare for 1970s Calbee cards).  I don't remember exactly what I paid for it but I think it was in the 2,000- 3,000 Yen range which is (or was) typical for cards from that series.  

Since the card in yesterday's auction is in  lower grade - maybe a G or so due to those corner creases - I was expecting it to go for a bit less than what I got mine for.  Boy was I wrong, this was how high the auction went:

15,500 Yen (about $150 US)!  About 10 times more than I was expecting and at least 5 times more than I paid for a higher grade copy of the same card just last year!

I should be happy about this (and yay, a card I have is more valuable, I'm happy!)  but I'm also worried about what auction results like this might portend for my quest to finish the set.  

With the rare Tokai regional series that this card is a part of I am still missing 12 cards (one of which also features Ron Woods).  Until now I've been expecting they would set me back maybe 2-3,000 Yen each in mid-grade condition (less if in lower grade), but this makes me wonder if that will be feasible.  If they are going to cost me anywhere near 15,500 Yen each there is no way I'll be able to afford them.  So far as I can tell this auction result is a bit of an outlier, I've never seen a card from the set sell for more than 10,000 Yen and maybe the seller was just lucky to have two guys who desperately wanted that specific card right now bidding each other up over it.  But its also one of those things where once that line has been crossed, no doubt others will follow.

Even more worrisome is that there is another series in the set, the Red Helmet series (609-644) that was only released in Hiroshima and usually sells for even more than the cards from the Tokai series.  I'm only about half-way there on completing that series and was hoping to finish those without spending more than 3-4,000 Yen (30-40$ US) per card, but if a card from the Tokai series can go for over 10,000, then definitely cards from that series can too.  And, again, at those prices the set becomes unaffordable to me, barring some huge pile of cash unexpectedly falling from the sky into my back yard or something (one can always hope).

On the plus side, auction results like these do make me quite glad that I started my quest to build this set a few years ago and have already knocked a decent number of cards from the rare series off my want list!  If I was looking for a set to start working on today, prices like these would have discouraged me from even trying.

I'm still alive!

 

I stepped away from the blog for three months there.  Everything is good!  Its just that my day job is one of those ones where after years of work your employer subjects you to a months long process the outcome of which is that you either end up with a guaranteed job for life on the one hand, or they let you go and your whole career is over in an instant on the other.  No pressure, ha! Anyway, I'm going through that now so I've stepped away from the blog because I'm too busy, but I've found a few spare minutes and thought I'd devote them to a little update post. 

Despite being busy, I'm still collecting, albeit at a lower rate than usual.  Here are a couple of updates on stuff with my collection.  

1975-76-77 Calbee Monster

Last week I picked up 7 more cards that I needed for my monster 1975-76-77 Calbee set, including the Sachio Kinugasa card (#510) pictured above.  These are the first additions I've made to that set all year and I'm really psyched about finally being able to fill in a few more pockets in those binders. 

My progress on the set has slowed to the crawl over the past couple years, something I've moaned about in previous posts.  The problem is that I've basically picked over what all the established dealers have for sale and so now I'm just waiting and pouncing on new listings, which only come up occasionally.  If you look on Yahoo Auctions at any given moment there are usually more than 2,000 listings for cards from this set so you might think it would be easier.  But that is for a set with 1472 cards, and most of those listings are of cards from a few of the easier to find series so there is heavy duplication of some cards and none for most of the others.  Within those 2,000 plus listings there are probably only 500-600 or so different cards available from that set, and the other 900 or so just don't come up for sale that often. 

I can also tell that I'm not alone in this situation because I'm always getting into bidding wars on those cards when they pop up, even for common cards in common series which just coincidentally happen to not be in any other dealer's inventory.  

The Menko Collection

My menko collecting has kind of fallen off a cliff recently just because of a recent market trend that  economists refer to as "Holy crap when did everything get this damned expensive???"

Basically the market has exploded here like it has in the US.  I think there was a bit of a lag and vintage cards didn't really start skyrocketing in price until a few months after they had in the US, but its happenned here too.  So while I'm still bidding on stuff that I would have won easily a year or two ago, nowadays I find myself getting blown out of the water and not even coming close to the winning bid on anything.  Especially Sadaharu Oh stuff is just no longer attainable in my price range, so I'm glad I knocked a lot of his cards off my want list when they were (though there are still a lot out there I would like to own!)

Anyway, that is my update. In all honesty I'm probably not going to have enough time to resume blogging at my normal rate until the above mentioned work thing-y is resolved, which won't be until later this year.  I'll try to find a bit of time here and there to post updates though, I find that my collection doesn't really feel complete without it being  blogged about!  

Big News For Vintage Calbee Collectors

 

There was some big news in the vintage Calbee collecting world last week: Somebody bought a complete set of the 1975-76 Calbee "monster" on Yahoo Auctions.

This is the same set that I have been working on for years and devoting a lot of posts on here to. At 1472 cards, many of them extremely rare, it is easily one of the most difficult sets of baseball cards in the world to complete.  

As far as I know, only two complete sets exist.  One is in the hands of a long time collector who has been collecting Calbee cards since the 1970s who was featured in an article in the Asahi Shinbun about a decade ago which seems to have disappeared from the internet because I can no longer find it.  The other one was this one, which has been listed on Yahoo Auctions for the past three years ( I wrote about it when it was first listed here).  

The starting bid on it has been set at 880,000 Yen (about $8,500 US) and somebody finally pulled the trigger!

This sale isn't surprising. When it was first listed I thought the price might have been a bit on the high side since the price of cards from the set was still pretty reasonable and I figured I could put the whole thing together for less than that.  In the intervening 3 yeas I have been disabused of that quaint idea.  The price of cards from this set has increased significantly and the cards from the rarer series in particular have become much harder to find (not that they were ever easy).  

It got to the point that for the past year or so I'd gone from thinking it was a bit overpriced to thinking it was one of the best bargains out there and was wondering why nobody was pouncing on it.  Of course my baseball card collecting budget isn't anywhere near big enough for me to be dropping that kind of money on cards, but if I was rich I would have bought this thing ages ago.

Anyway, now it is gone, in the hands of some lucky collector who with the click of a button has accomplished something that I have been slaving away at for 7 years and am still only about 70% of the way to finishing!  Probably the next time the world will see one of these available for sale will be 40 years from now when my kids inherit my estate and start dumping all the crap I collect that they aren't interested in, assuming I live that long and that 40 years is enough time for me to finish this monster!

Ron Woods: Who is this Guy?

 

I picked up card #71 from the monster 1975-76-77 Calbee set this week.  This is from the rare series that was only issued in the Tokai area and is thus a key addition to my set.  

This gives me 23 out of 36 cards in that series, more than halfway there!

The card depicts Ron Woods. He is kind of an intriguing player about which we know very little.  He played parts of several MLB seasons between 1969 and 1974, getting the most playing time with the Montreal Expos between 1971 and 1974.  He then went to Japan for two years with the Chunichi Dragons in 1975 and 1976.

Beyond the numbers: silence.  Nobody has bothered to write a biography of him on his Wikipedia page, or on his Baseball Reference Page, or on his SABR page.  

This is frustrating because there are two intriguing facts about the Ron Woods story that I've been able to glean just from 1) this card, and 2) Googling him, that suggest stories of human interest at work.

The first is from the back of this card.

Japanese baseball likes players who sacrifice everything for the game and their team.  A lot of these Calbee cards from the 70s have write ups on the back which extoll this virtue.  This card, titled "Big league Pride" tells us that Ron Woods is a player who forgets everything else in the world when playing.  To illustrate, it states that he recently got tragic news from his family back in America. While he made a short visit back to the US as a result, he was so serious about the game that (on getting the news) he considered waiting until the off season to go back.

So this tells us that Woods experienced a serious personal tragedy during his stay in Japan and faced a difficult decision about whether to go back home to deal with it or not.  This is a recurring theme that shows up in the stories of many American players here - Randy Bass was famously criticized for returning to the US during the season to be with his son who was having major surgery.  So Woods had one of those too, but we don't know anything about it.

The other interesting thing I learned from a Google search is that in September of 1975, probably shortly after this card was made, Woods was among four members of the Dragons who were injured in Hiroshima after being attacked by fans.  This was mentioned in a very brief article in the New York Times at the time, but I haven't been able to find any more info on what happened.

So anyway, it seems like Woods' two year stay in Japan featured some drama, yet we know very little about him.  

I've Waited Years To Find This Card

 

My 1975-76 Calbee set made a massive jump towards completion yesterday with the addition of The Most Valuable Card In The Set (TMVCITS)!

This is card #630 featuring Hiroshima's Municipal Stadium during a night game from the 1976 season.  As I wrote in a post last year about a different card I got (#157 which coincidentally also features Hiroshima's Municipal Stadium)  this is basically the key card in the entire set.  It comes from the extremely rare "Red Helmet" series  which runs from card #609 to 644.  It was only released in limited numbers in the Hiroshima area and is very rare today.  I'm not sure exactly why, but of all the cards in that series, the one featuring the stadium has long been recognized as the most valuable by Japanese collectors.

I have been waiting for one of these to come up at auction for a long time and when this showed up (alongside two other cards from the same series that I need) I pounced.  I ended up winning it for 7500 Yen (about $70 US) which is more than I usually pay for a card (and way more than my 1000 Yen per card limit that I tried to impose on myself earlier this year but have failed miserably at adhering to).  But its the key card in the set, and this basically means that I now know that I won't have to pay more than that for any other card in the set.  The downside of the bidding getting that high was that I had to let the other two cards from the series up in the same auction go, and they sold for about half what this one did.

This is actually a really nice copy of the card, probably in ExMt condition or so with a tiny speck of fluff on two of the corners being the only blemish.  And that makes me happy since I had figured for this card I would have to accept a lower grade copy since higher grade ones would be way too hard to find.  But nope, the marquee card in my set is a looker!  Yee haw!

I'm still not close to finishing the whole set, I'm about 400 cards short right now (out of 1472 total), but this is another milestone crossed!

A Sadaharu Oh for the Monster

 I made a key addition to my monster 1975-76-77 Calbee set yesterday with the addition of this card of Sadaharu Oh.

This is probably the hardest Sadaharu Oh card in the whole set to get.  It is card #1435, the second last in the whole thing, which means it is in the very hard to find final series (1400 to 1436).  I only have about 1/3 of the cards from that series so the last pages in my second binder (the set is so big you need two binders to hold it) are among the emptiest of all.

Oh doesn't appear in any of the scarce regional issues (which only feature Hiroshima Carp and Chunichi Dragons players).  The only other Oh cards which might match this one in scarcity therefore are card #474 (from series 14 which was short printed) and #943 (from series 27, also short printed).  I don't have either of those so this is the first of what I guess might be called the "Big 3" Oh cards from the set that I've obtained. Series 23 (cards 789 to 824) also tend to sell for a bit more than cards from the rest of the set and every one of them features Sadaharu Oh (its a series in commemoration of his 700th home run) but I think they just sell for more because they feature Oh and not because they are scarcer.  

This came up for auction last week and I was expecting it to sell for around 3000 Yen or so. I decided to bid high and break my self imposed 1,000 Yen spending limit since this card only comes up for auction rarely.  Much to my surprise and delight I won it for about 1,000 Yen with shipping, which was a steal.  It arrived in the mail yesterday and is now resting comfortably in the last page of binder #2 for this set.  I don't have card #1436 yet so for now this is the highest one I have.

The card is pretty cool.  It features a scene from a game played on July 23, 1976 against the Whales.  The text refers to him hitting his 700th home run during that game (though obviously not during the at bat depicted in which he has clearly hit a liner back to the pitcher) and notes that later in that season he reached 716, making him #2 in the world.

The Calbee Regionals Part 2: Tokai

 In this post we'll take a look at the Calbee regionals that were issued here in the Tokai region. Starting here makes sense both because I live in the Tokai region and because a lot of regional series were released by Calbee here over the years.

The Region

Tokai is centred on the city of Nagoya, home of the Chunichi Dragons.  With about 10 million people living in Nagoya and its suburbs its Japan's third largest urban area.

The city has kind of a bad wrap as an ugly, grey industrial blight on the landscape.  Actually its a fairly well earned wrap.  This for example is the type of scenery that accompanies your typical Nagoya wedding hall.

Its not all bad though.  The Osu area has some cool side streets with lots of neat shops that are fun to stroll through

The TV Tower is kind of a neat landmark too:

It was actually destroyed by Godzilla in 1964, a fact which very few landmarks can boast of:

Its also got a castle and the tallest train station in the world.  Its hard to believe but this city actually has a long history which has unfortunately mostly been bulldozed out of existence.  But the same can be said of pretty much any Japanese city so I wouldn't hold it against Nagoya too much. 

It is also the location where most of Mr. Baseball was filmed.  So Tom Selleck spent a bit of time here shortly after Magnum P.I. ended, which is sort of neat if you think about it.

The Calbee Tokai Series

As far as I can tell, Calbee released six series between 1973 and 1984 exclusively in the Tokai region.  Some of these are extremely hard to find.

1973 Calbee

Cards #210 to 236 of the 1973 Calbee set were only released in the Tokai area.  They feature Dragons players including Hall of Famers Morimichi Takagi and Senichi Hoshino.  It also features a manager card of Wally Yonomine, which I think is the only Calbee cards of his ever produced.

This is one of the hardest series from one of the hardest sets out there to collect.  There are probably only a few dozen copies of each card still in existence and since this is probably the most popular set among vintage Calbee collectors, prices are quite high - even the common cards are worth over $100 each.  There is a copy of the Yonamine card for 56,500 Yen (about $500 US) on Yahoo auctions right now.

The high prices have kept me from going after the cards from this series, but they are pretty cool.

1974-75 Calbee

The 1974-75 Calbee set is one I don't write about too much since I'm not actively pursuing it, but I do have a small collection of them on the go which I add to from time to time.  Its a 935 card set so quite big, and two of the series in it were only issued in the Tokai area.

The first (which came out in 1974) runs from card #73 to 90, featuring Dragons players including Tagaki, Hoshino and Yazawa.  These are pretty rare too.  There are only two cards from this series available on Yahoo Auctions right now, which is even fewer than for the 1973 series.  But prices are way cheaper, singles seem to go for between $10 and $20 each or so.  I'm guessing the lower price is probably attributable to fewer collectors trying to piece this set together.

The second (which came out in 1975) runs from card #792 to 827 and basically has the same player selection.  These seem to be a bit less rare than the lower numbered series since there are more than a dozen singles from it available right now.  The price range is about the same, $10 to $20 each or so.

This is one of the things that makes the 1974-75 Calbee set a bit more do-able than the 1973 one, the regional issues haven't been priced into the stratosphere.

I have a couple of the higher number Tokai series in my collection, but I'm not actively adding them to my collection right now.

1975-76-77 Calbee

The "monster" set has one series from #37 to 72 which was released only in the Tokai region.  This is the only Tokai regional series that I have actually tried to collect since I'm working on the set, and I've written about it here before (here and here). At the moment I am just 14 cards short of finishing it up, and I have 2 of the 3 cards of Senischi Hoshino, which are the most valuable.

The cards from this series are about the same as the ones from 1974-75 in terms of rarity and price.  Actually the price may have gone up a bit as a direct result of me buying them.  When I started I was able to buy them in the $10 each range, but these days its hard to find them for under $20 and I think that is because of me.  When there are only a handful of cards available, one guy buying them up can have an outsized impact on the price.  Maybe when I'm finished the prices will go back down again!

1977 Calbee

In 1977 Calbee released a stand alone set (as opposed to a series within a larger set). This seems to have been released only in Nagoya city itself as opposed to the Tokai region as a whole as each card has the "Na" from "Nagoya" on it.  It is a 36 card set (Engel lists it as JC 5d) and unlike other Tokai area releases it features players from other teams as well as the Dragons.

This set is very rare and very expensive.  Prices on commons start at about $50 and there is a Willie Davis card which is going to set you back a lot (one is available on Yahoo Auctions right now for 30,000 Yen, about $300 US).

I don't have any of these cards and don't think I'll ever make a pass at that set!

1984 Calbee

After 1977 Calbee took a bit of a breather and didn't release another Tokai series until 1984.  That year cards numbered 641 to 690 in its main set were only released in the Tokai area and all feature Dragons players.

These cards are also pretty rare and expensive, there are a few available on Yahoo Auctions right now and the cheapest starting bid of any of them is 4,000 Yen (about $40).

The existence of this series and a significant number of other very expensive short printed series were a major factor in me putting aside my 1984 Calbee project.  I like the set with its distinctive look and I have about 200 cards from it, but there are about 200 or so short printed ones (of which the Tokai regionals represent about 1/4) which would set me back 50-100$ each for and there is no way I'm willing (or able) to spend that kind of money on it.  So I'm kind of debating whether to give it up completely or just go for the non-short printed ones, which are way more affordable.


Anyway, that concludes my summary of the Tokai regional issues.  Basically the ones from the 1974-75 and 1975-76-77 sets remain affordable (despite seeming to be about equally rare) while the ones from the other sets are all insanely expensive.

The Patient Collector: My 1975-76 Calbee Set Proceeds at a Snail's Pace, but it Does Proceed

I am still plugging away at the 1975-76 Calbee monster set.  A dealer put four cards from the rare series that was only issued in Nagoya  (which runs from card #37 to #72 in the set) up for auction last week.  I put bids on three of them which I needed but only walked away with one, card #43 featuring Dragons slugger Tatsuhiko Kimata.  Kimata isn't a Hall of Famer but is a pretty decent Hall of Very Gooder, in a 19 year career, all with the Dragons, he made eight all star teams and finished up just 124 hits shy of the 2,000 mark.

The addition of Kimata gives me 22 cards from the Nagoya series, which is more than half of them, so I am making progress.  It was a bit disappointing to lose the auction for the other two though as the cards from this series (and the other two rare Hiroshima only regional issues in the set) are getting harder to find and almost never seem to pop up in auctions anymore.

Its also challenging to be working on a 1472 card set in which every card remaining on my checklist is one I have to devote a lot of time and effort to tracking down. The 1987 Calbee set, which has about 1/3 as many cards and is less scarce took me seven years of solid effort to finish.  I think the most realistic timeline for me to finish this one, barring some miracle, is about 15 more years.  Which is not a timescale most set collectors are willing to contemplate.  But this is Japan, where perseverance is a trait valued above all others.  So onward I go with this! A snail's pace is still a pace.

1975 Calbee Snack Bag

One interesting thing that is up for auction now is a bag of 1975 Calbee Pro Yakyu Snacks.  These were the snacks that the early series of the Monster 1975-76-77 Calbee set were originally sold in.

The text on the back says:

- Calbee Snack Pro Baseball comes with new 1975 edition pro baseball cards

-If you get a Home Run card you can receive either an "Album" (for putting cards in) or a "Pro Baseball Book".

- The Pro Baseball Book contains an introduction to all the players on both Central and Pacific League teams in 1975, a game schedule, stories about major records and famous players, baseball history and its rules.

Its neat to see how the cards were sold back in the day.  They were "snacks" rather than chips like they have been for as long as I've been collecting.  They also didn't come attached to the bags then like they do now, you'd get them separately at the cashier when you bought a bag.  That means that this one unfortunately doesn't come with any cards for the 9500 Yen (almost 100$ US) price tag, so I think I'm going to pass on it.

The seller helpfully reminds potential purchasers that these 45 year old snacks are not for eating, just for collecting.

Still Plugging Away at the Monster

I haven't posted about it in a few months, but I'm still plugging away at my 1975-76-77 Calbee "Monster" set.  By "plugging away" I mean adding to it at a rate of 1-2 cards per month.  I'm a little over 400 short of completing the 1472 card set, so that puts me on a pace to finish it in about 2035 or so.

I added a couple worthy of note the other day though, the above cards of hall of famer Koji Yamamoto and Gail Hopkins.  Both cards are from the rare regional series ("Defending the Lead") which was only released in Hiroshima and feature images from Hiroshima Carp games during the 1975 season.  Both of these (cards 167 and 176) were from the same game, played August 26, 1975 against the Yakult Swallows in Okayama Stadium which the Carp won 3-2.  Yamamoto's card shows him after hitting a home run in the 7th inning to give the Carp the lead, while Hopkins' card back describes him making a fine defensive play that allowed the Carp to keep the lead.

The cards are in near mint condition which is pretty rare for this set and this series.  They had been available from a seller on Yahoo Auctions for months but with a price tag of 2,000 Yen each which was just a bit too high for me to pull the trigger so they had been on my watch list for a while.  Then last week the seller knocked 50% off the price of each and I decided to jump on them!  This leaves me just 4 cards short of completing that rare series, which means I am almost done with one of the biggest challenges of completing the set (though the other Hiroshima only series is harder to complete and I'm still a long way from finishing that one).

Gail Hopkins is kind of an interesting person.  He played in the majors for a few teams in the 60s and early 70s, then finished his career in Japan with the Carp and Nankai Hawks.  He was a key player on the Carp team in 1975, hitting 33 home runs and being named an All Star.  After retiring from baseball he went to medical school and went on to have a very successful career as an orthopedic surgeon, a path very few big leaguers have followed.

Have I Somehow Screwed Myself Over (Japanese Card Collector Edition)?

Its been a few months since I did an update post on my monster 1975-76-77 Calbee set.  There are a lot of reasons for that but the main one is simple: I haven't made any progress in that time on it.  I'm stalled at a little over 70% of the way there.

The frustration at the drying up of the well of cards-that-I-need has caused me to question whether this might actually be 100% my own fault.

Basically my question boils down to this: Did just me buying up cards for this set cause the prices to explode?

Normally this wouldn't be possible, but this isn't a normal set. There aren't a lot of people out there collecting it, and there also aren't a lot of cards from this set on the market.  Low demand but also low supply.  When that type of market exists, even just having one more person enter it can have a huge effect on both supply and prices.

I went on a real tear for a year or so, roughly from mid-2018 to mid 2019, buying up as many singles for the set that I needed as I could find, particularly focusing on the scarce regional or short printed series.  I made good progress, I have more than half of the Dragons and Carp regionally issued series from 1975, and I made some progress on the Carp regional issue from 1976 (the Red Helmet Series) and also the high number series (1400-1436), but still have a lot of holes in those that I need to fill, as I outlined in a previous post.

What I noticed though is that prices on those regional issues shot up dramatically after I entered the market for them.  When I started last summer I could find singles for the two 1975 regional issues for about 1,000 Yen each, and singles for the 1976 regional issue for about 2,000-3,000 Yen each.

Now though you can't get those cards for those prices anymore.  The 1975 regional issues have starting prices about 2,000 Yen each, doubled in a year, and I can't find any of the 1976 Carp issue for under 10,000 Yen (though these are through a seller with very high starting bids.  Still, even in an auction with a low starting bid these cards go for way more than what I was paying last year for them).

With more commonly available cards it would be unlikely for a single buyer to have much effect on price.  But with cards like this, I have this feeling:

I think when sellers see a given series of cards being bought up at 1,000 Yen each, and there are only a handful of them available at any time, they take that as a sign that they are undervalued and up their prices accordingly.  I know for a fact that some of the sellers I bought from did this (and I don't blame them, I'm just observing that this is what they did).  Likewise having another determined buyer competing in auctions forces the other bidders to up their high bids if they want to win, which also has an inflationary effect.

You wouldn't see one person having this effect in the market for more readily available cards, like say US cards from the 50s or 60s, but with the extremely limited number of 1970s Calbee cards out there for auction (a large proportion simply aren't available at all at any given moment on Yahoo Auctions and the ones that are generally might only be 1-2 copies of it) the market is quite different.

So I'm pretty sure I'm personally responsible for having made these cards more expensive, which is a double edged sword.  On the one hand, it kind of validates my earlier purchases since they are selling for more than I paid for them last year.  But way worse than that, as a set collector, it means that buying the remaining cards that I need is going to be a way more expensive task than I had been planning for it to be!

The Damn Guides are Messing Up a Lot

I'm getting a little frustrated with the two guides I have to Japanese baseball cards: Engel and Sports Card Magazine (SCM).

These both have their upsides and are useful resources, but as someone collecting vintage Calbee I can say they are both quite a bit off on a few things.  I already noted in an earlier post that they often get prices wrong, but in this post I'd like to note how they don't accurately reflect the scarcity of some cards either.

I've been documenting on this blog my ongoing attempt to put together the entire 1975-76-77 Calbee "monster" set of 1472 cards.  I am over 70% of the way there, with more than 1,000 of them in my collection.

I recently took a bit of time to review my checklist (pictured above, I use my copy of SCM to keep track of what I have.  Analogue, baby).  In doing so I've become aware of some patterns in the cards I am missing that seem to coincide with scarcities rather than just random chance.  Some of these are reflected in both guides, some are reflected in neither.

The set was issued in 40 series.  According to the guides, 4 of these series are short printed (I'll refer to them as the "known scarce series"). These are:

Chunichi Dragons Defending the Lead Series (#37 to 72, issued only in Nagoya area)
Hiroshima Carp Defending the Lead Series (#145 to 180, issued only in Hiroshima area)
Hiroshima Red Helmet Series (#609 to 644, issued only in Hiroshima area)
High numbered final series (#1400 to 1436, not regionally issued but harder to find and more expensive)

So I've been paying more money for cards from those known scarce series and still have quite a ways to go on completing them (about half way there overall with these 4 series, but the Red Helmet Series in particular I need a lot of and they are the most expensive).

This leaves 36 other series which both guides view as "common" and don't note any distinction in price or rarity with respect to.

At this stage after years of collecting and scouring auctions for anything and everything I could lay my hands on, the remaining holes in my collection should therefore be more or less randomly scattered throughout these remaining 36 series.

But they aren't.

With 33 out of the 36 remaining "common" series I can describe my collection of them as almost complete, with just a few stragglers that I have yet to round up.  These 33 series I feel confident in saying are the easiest to find (relatively at least) and I am at least 80% complete on all of them, with many exceeding the 90% complete level.

But that leaves 3 outliers which I have noticeably fewer cards of. Instead of having 80% or more like I am with all the other series except the four known scarce series, with these three I only have between 30 and 40% of the cards.  They are:

Series 14: 76 Pennant Race Opening Game Series  (#465 to 500, I have just 11 out of 35)
Series 23: Sadaharu Oh 700th Home Run Series (#789 to 824, I have just 14 out of 35)
Series 27: Defending the Lead Series (#933 to 968, I have just 10 out of 35)

Looking around Yahoo Auctions, the pickings for these three series are extremely limited compared to common series and they seem a lot closer to the 4 known rare series.  Prices reflect this: these cards sell for more.

Looking at the guides, the only one of these series which are priced higher are the Sadaharu Oh 700 Home Run ones, and that is because the cards feature Sadaharu Oh (both guides list his cards at the same premium in this series as they do for his cards in others).

With Series 14 and 27 I'm fairly confident that they are short printed and quite a bit harder to find than the others (maybe the same ballpark as the 4 known scarce series).  With the Sadaharu Oh 700 home run series its possible that they are simply more popular because of Oh, which would explain why they are harder to find and more expensive, though I'm not sure I buy that  (the number I have are suspiciously similar to the other two, and Oh's cards in other series aren't particularly hard to find despite his personal popularity, which leans towards these being short printed too).

So there is another problem with the guides:  relying on them you would only think there were four expensive, rarer series in this set when in fact there are seven.

While frustrating, its actually also kind of fun to discover this sort of stuff on my own.  On the downside though I now realize that I'll have to shell out more money on those other three series if I am to have any chance at completing this thing!

An Album Full of 70s Goodies

 One unique thing about collecting Calbee cards is that sometimes they show up in Calbee albums.

In most (perhaps all?  Not sure) of the 46 years since Calbee started selling cards, they've also produced albums which were usually given away as mail-in redemptions.  So in addition to all the vintage cards floating around there are also a lot of old albums.  I don't collect the albums themselves, but sometimes a non-card dealer, usually antique dealers, will come across old collections stored in them and put them up for sale.  These are so awesome when you can find them.

And recently I did find one.  Or more accurately I found ten of them up for sale individually by the same seller.  Each album was from the 1970s and was stuffed full with 1970s Calbee cards from various years.  You can cram 72 cards into one of these albums if you put two cards per pocket, which is what these contained.

 My recent post lamenting the fact that auctions almost always end exactly as I am in the middle of putting my kids to sleep was partly inspired by these.  I put bids in on all ten of them.  I didn't expect to win all ten (in fact, couldn't afford to really) but was hoping to win three or four.  But while I was happily telling them the story of an epic battle between Pokémon and dinosaurs (I let them decide the topic of each night's story), the auctions ended and I was outbid on all but one of them.  When I looked at the final prices the ones I got outbid on went for I kicked myself since I definitely would have bid higher on a few of them had I been there to do so.

But I was also happy that I did win one!  And it was a great one.  The albums were sorted by team and mine contained cards of Hiroshima Carp and Hanshin Tigers players from Calbee sets issued between 1973 and 1979.  I paid around 7000 Yen total with shipping, so the cards cost  me about 100 Yen each, which is a good deal, especially for what I got.

 Look at those beauties!

There were quite a few cards from the 1975-76-77 Calbee set that I am working on, but most of them turned out to be doubles unfortunately (though expected).  The real highlights for me were the cards from the 1973 and 1974 sets, which I have way fewer of.

The Hiroshima Carp cards are especially distinct in the 1973 set since they still had their blue helmets and hats back then.  This makes it super easy to distinguish cards from the 1973 set from later ones after they switched to their red and white only uniforms. There were some really great Hiroshima Carp cards of Sachio Kinugasa and Yoshiro Sotokoba:

 Some cool action shots too:

 This card here though was the highlight.  Yutaka Enatsu (See Dave's great write up about his cards here and a great write up of his career here on Eye of the Tiger) is one of the most interesting players in modern Japanese history.  He holds the record for most strikeouts in a season (401!) and had a resume that should have made him a no-brainer as a hall of famer.  But he was involved in one of the most famous gambling scandals in Japanese history (the black mist scandal, kind of Japan's version of the Black Sox) early in his career, and then arrested for drug use after he retired, so he's been left on the outside looking in.

I have a few cards of him, but this one is now my favorite.  Its from the 1973 Calbee set and its one of those great 1970s Calbee cards that shows you a wonderful glimpse of stands full of spectators and colorful advertising billboards.

 I was surprised to find it in there because this is one of his most expensive cards.  SCM lists it at 20,000 Yen and it rarely shows up on Yahoo Auctions.  Its a bit lower grade (there is a crease to the right of his head) but this card alone made the purchase price worthwhile.

There were a lot of other beauties in there which were fun to flip through.

I'm not sure if these cards were actually put in this album a long time ago by their original owner, which would be neat, or if the seller just shoved them in there for the purposes of selling them.  Either way, except for the smattering of 75-76-77 Calbee singles I needed for my set, I've decided to keep these as they are in the album.  Its kind of neat to flip through them the way they were intended to be back in the day.