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!

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.  

Willie Davis 1977 Calbee

 

I picked up another nice card the other day, this is Willie Davis' card from the 1977 Calbee set that Engel refers to as the "Pro Series" (JC 5c) (keeping track of 1977 Calbee sets is difficult as Dave recently noted in his write up on late 70s Calbee sets).  

I've been wanting to get this card for a while, I have a a couple of Yamakatsu cards of Davis that I got a few years ago but they both depict him as a member of the Crown Lighter Lions. As a Dragons fan I wanted one of him in that awesome 70s Dragons uniform, and this one displays it perfectly.  The Coke billboard in the background is a nice added touch.

This particular 1977 Calbee set (out of the eleven that were made that year, which Dave has also recently written about) is somewhat harder to find singles for than most, so this one took a while to find.  A dealer on Yahoo Auctions had listed it for 5,000 Yen and last week he suddenly had a 40% off sale and I knew I had to pounce.  I'm quite happy with it, its in very nice condition by the standards of 1970s Calbees.

The back of the card shows us Willie's MLB career totals (batting average, RBI and stolen bases) which reminds us that he was one of the elite group of MLB "Hall of Very Gooders" to play in Japan.  The career totals on the back are not his final totals though, since he played 43 games for the Angels in 1979 after his stint in NPB and nudged his totals up a bit (and brought his career batting average down a point).

Davis features prominently in Robert Whitings "You Gotta Have Wa", mostly about how his Buddhist chanting annoyed his teammates on the Dragons, which is one of those pieces of Dragons history that I just love.  

Japan's Greatest Pitcher's only Calbee Card isn't even his own Card

 

I picked up this card on Yahoo Auctions this week.  Its Shigeo Nagashima's manager card from one of the 1977 Calbee sets.

Nagashima appears on a ton of 1970s Calbee cards as a manager.  The other guy, who is not mentioned anywhere in the text of the card front or back, is what makes this card way more interesting.  

That is Masaichi Kaneda, arguably Japan's all time greatest pitcher who racked up 400 career wins.

Kaneda retired as a pitcher after the 1969 season, which was four years before Calbee started making baseball cards and thus he doesn't have any Calbee cards from his playing days.  He started managing the Orions in 1973, the same year as Calbee's debut, but owing to the legendary Calbee/Lotte feud Calbee didn't produce any cards of Orions players until 1985.

Thus Calbee never produced a card featuring Japan's all time wins leader.  Except this one.  Its only a cameo appearance, but its a prominent enough one to I think describe this as a Nagashima/Kaneda card rather than just a Nagashima card.  

Dave picked up a copy of this card a couple of years ago on his trip to Japan and it intrigued me, so I am glad to add it to the collection.  In addition to Kaneda, this is one of the very few cards to feature anything related to the Lotte Orions in a Calbee set from the 70s so its interesting on that account to.

This 1977 set is kind of the "main" one from that year, featuring 216 cards.  With this one I have about 60 of them, so I'm mulling over whether to add this to my list of sets to start actively trying to complete.  Its a nice one.  

Sadaharu Oh's 756 Home Run Ceremony Card

 

I picked this card up the other day. It is card #50 from a 1977 Calbee set dedicated to Sadaharu Oh in commemoration of his 756th home run.  I've written about this set before, its pretty scarce so I only had a couple of cards from it before adding this one.  I was pretty happy to win this one for a reasonable price given the apparent explosion in the price of some 1970s Calbee cards recently.

I liked the photo on the front of the card which according to the text on it is from the post-game ceremony held after he hit #756.  When I say "like" I don't necessarily mean that it is a great photo, but its an interesting one.  The player depicted, Oh, is dwarfed by the backs of four old guys in suits, who I assume to be Yomiuri executives.  Not many cards feature such an odd composition.  

The highlight though is the cool shot of that scoreboard with the message "Congratulations player Oh for #756" and a crude rendition of his head next to it.  There are a few Calbee cards from the 70s which prominently feature that scoreboard in the background commemorating some major milestone, usually of either Oh or Shigeo Nagashima, which would make for an interesting collecting sub-set.

The back of the card is kind of interesting.  It shows the 15 pitchers who Oh hit the most of his 756 home runs off of.  The most were 23 he hit off of  Hiroshima Carp pitcher Yoshiro Sotokoba (who was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2013 (despite having a career record of 131-138).  This is only through home run #756, I'm not sure if Sotokoba maintained that lead through the rest of Oh's career.

Anyway, its a nice addition to my collection!

The 1977 Oh Series

 

One of the hardest Calbee sets from the 70s to find is the 96 card set dedicated entirely to Sadaharu Oh on the occasion of him passing Hank Aaron's 755 career home run total.  

I only have 2 cards from this set, number 38 and 42.  The card above (#42) features a photo taken at exactly 7:10 PM (and 7 seconds!) on September 3, 1977 as the text on the card front tells us.  It shows him high fiving Giants coach Akira Kunimatsu while rounding the bases after hitting #756.

The back of the card is kind of interesting.  It shows some stats on each of his milestone home runs over his career that you don't often see.  For each, in addition to the date, it also tells you how many other players had hit that many (at the time),  the pitcher he hit it off and the number of games it took to get there.  So we can see for example that when he hit his 100th career home run on July 28, 1963 off a Hiroshima pitcher named Ooishi there were only 32 other players in the NPB "100 home run club". When he hit #200 a mere 2 years later there were only 12 other players with as many.  Two years later he joined the 300 home run club, which only consisted of 3 players.  And when he clobbered #550  five years after that he was in a club all by himself.  There seems to be an error in the last two entries of the number of games played column, it seems highly unlikely that it took him 2318 career games to reach 715 home runs, but didn't reach #755 until career game 10,145 (which would take about 70 seasons).  

Card #39 is also pretty neat.  It shows him on August 31, 1977 being interviewed after tying Aaron with his 755th home run.

The back of this card is also pretty cool, it shows a side by side comparison of the careers of Oh and Aaron from 1954 to 1977. The first few years are blank for Oh since he didn't play his first game until 1959, while 1977 is blank for Aaron since he retired after the 1976 season.  Its actually quite impressive that Oh accomplished his feat in four fewer seasons than Aaron, especially given the shorter season in NPB.  

The most famous, and valuable, card from this set is #93, which features Oh with Hank Aaron on the front.  I don't have that card, its pretty expensive (Engel lists it for $750 and I think that is about right, there is a graded copy in EM condition with a BIN price of 78,000 Yen available right now).  Even the regular Oh cards like these two cost a fair bit. Engel lists them at $200 which also seems to be in the right ballpark for the cards in high grade.  Some seem to sell for more, card #29 (which just features Oh, no Aaron) is currently the subject of a bidding war on Yahoo Auctions which currently stands at 36,000 Yen (about $350 US) with 3 days to go.   As you can see from the scans, mine have some condition issues which made them affordable enough to be in my price range!

Missing Noses, Chins, Eyebrows and Foreheads: The Worst Baseball Card Photo Cropping in History

 

I recently added the above card, #177 from the 1975 NST set featuring Shigeo Nagashima, to my collection.  

Its notable for the fact that although it depicts Shigeo Nagashima it does not depict all of Shigeo Nagashima's nose.  Or his left eye.  Or his left eyebrow.  Or the top and back of his hair.

You can really see those beads of sweat running down his face though.

This is the 1970s Japanese baseball card paradox.  On the one hand they feature some of the best photography in baseball card history and completely blow away the boring posed spring training shots that appeared on most Topps cards in the US from that period.  They are loaded with interesting shots, some candid, some in action, almost all taken during the regular season during games in the player's home stadium.

On the other hand they also feature some of the worst photos ever, mostly due to really bad photo cropping like the one above.  For all its faults, I've never seen a Topps card which cut the tip of the depicted player's nose off.

I have a small type collection of these on the go now.  They include:

Card: 1977 Calbee #17

You wouldn't know it but this card features all time home run leader Sadaharu Oh and all time hit leader Isao Harimoto singing a victory song after winning the pennant.  You can't see the top half of Oh and Harimoto's head.  They cropped it out in order to create more space at the bottom of the card for.....the backs of some photographers.

Card: 1976 Calbee #646

This card features 1975 PL MVP award winner Hideji Kato.  All of him except the top of his head.

Card: 1987 Calbee Tatsuo Komatsu

Ever wondered what former Dragons' pitcher Tatsuo Komatsu's chin looks like?  To this day I still don't know.  

Are there any examples out there of American cards (or other Japanese cards) cropped this badly?

Stuff on Cards: Beer

 Here is something you don't see everyday: a baseball card with a bunch of beers dead centre in the photo!

This is card 11 from the 1977 Calbee set (Jc 5(a-j)).  And I love it.

If anyone out there is pursuing an "odd stuff to find on cards" type collection, I'm finding that Japanese cards, especially Calbees from the 70s, are a gold mine.  You've got everything from cards with girls in kimonos on them to cards with vintage cars on them to cards with American pro wrestlers on them.  And now a card with beers.

My casual Google search for "beer baseball cards" doesn't turn up any other baseball cards with beer visible on them.  I see a lot of 1958 Hires Root Beer cards, and cards of some rookie prospect named Seth Beer and a bunch of doctored fun cards people have made over the years (Rob Deer gets a lot of these since the D in his last name can easily be rendered a B).  But no baseball cards with a beer just casually sitting in the background or anything, let alone three of them prominently featured in the foreground. So unless somebody corrects me (and please do if you find something I've missed) I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is the only baseball card from a regular set in history to ever feature guys drinking beer on it.

This makes sense of course, its definitely not a good idea for a product for kids to feature alcohol on it.  I mean, there must be rules somewhere about that sort of thing.  Right? Anyway, obviously those rules didn't apply to Calbee back in 1977 as this card's existence attests to.

The reason for the beers and smiles all around is that this picture features members of the Hankyu Braves celebrating their victory over the Giants in the 1976 Japan Series.  Pictured are star pitcher Mitsuhiro Adachi  who won the series clinching 7th game, Braves manager Toshiharu Ueda, and series MVP Yutaka Fukumoto.

I am starting to work on this set, so this card is going with the rest of them, but if I can ever track down another copy (these are not easy to find) I'll put the other one in my new "stuff on baseball cards" type collection!

The Destroyer!!!!

I like this card.  Its probably one of the most famous Calbee cards from the 70s.

This is card 178 from the 1977 Calbee set which Engel catalogues as JC 5(a-j).  As I noted in an earlier post there are eleven different Calbee sets from that year, so its pretty hard to keep track of which is which.  This series has the weeds on the back border.

This was another one of those white whales that I've been chasing around for a while.  One seller on Yahoo Auctions has had a copy of it for a while with a BIN price of about 800$ which is insanely overpriced (Engel lists it at 80$).  Its a very popular card so that has been the only copy of it I've seen for sale for the past couple of years, but recently somebody put a lot of a couple dozen Calbee cards from the 70s up which included this and I put a high bid in and won (for less than the 80$ this card alone lists for).  I was so excited.

The card features Sadaharu Oh on the left and Dick Beyer, AKA the Destroyer, on the right.

The Destroyer is a really interesting guy.  He was a wrestling star in the US in the 50s and 60s, going by various identities before settling on his mask wearing Destroyer persona.

He has an interesting connection with the post I wrote last month about Hankyu Braves star Roberto Barbon, who as I mentioned had a run in with a Japanese wrestler named Rikidozan who was later stabbed to death by a Yakuza gangster.

After a match with Giant Baba in Los Angeles in 1963 the Destroyer came to Japan to go head to head with the same Rikidozan.  You can watch their match here:

Incredibly that match took place on December 2, 1963, just 6 days before Rikidozan received his fatal stab wound.  I'm not sure but it was probably his last time in the ring.

After that, the Destroyer went back to the US for a few years.  But in 1973 he returned to Japan and spent most of the 1970s here, both as a wrestler and as a major TV personality.  Definitely WAY more interesting than his wrestling is his output as a TV talento.  Here you can see him freaking out Wada Akiko and contributing to the general chaos and mayhem of a 1970s Japanese variety show, which is.....hard to describe in words but definitely worth watching:

My card of him with Sadaharu Oh would have come out at the height of his fame on Japanese TV and I assume he was at Korakuen for some sort of TV event.

One weird thing about this card is that it is a straight up normal Sadaharu Oh card.  The text on the front and back just mention Oh, but doesn't say anything about the guy he is standing next to.  Its basically a cameo appearance by the Destroyer on an otherwise normal Sadaharu Oh card.  Even in Engel card #178 is just listed as "Sadaharu Oh".  I get that this is a baseball set, but come on ,there are hundreds of Sadaharu Oh baseball cards out there, but only one with the Destroyer on it!  This deserves some sort of mention.

Anyway, after retiring from wrestling in 1984 he went back to his regular job as a high school PE teacher in Akron New York.  Before becoming a pro wrestler in the early 50s he had trained as a teacher, and in fact had a Masters in Education from Syracuse University.  That must have been pretty cool for Akron high school students in the 80s and 90s to have a guy with such an interesting background as a teacher.  Well, maybe, I could also see how having a teacher called "Destroyer" would be somewhat intimidating.

In 2017 he was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun for his contributions to cultural exchange between Japan and the US.  He passed away last year at the age of 88.

All in all, a great card.

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.

1977 Calbee is Confusing

 1977 Calbee is very confusing.  They put out about a dozen sets that year, many of them rare regional issues that are too expensive for me to even contemplate going after.  The only ones I'm actively collecting are the series at the end of the 1975-76-77 Calbee set which just happen to have been issued in 1977  but are really part of that monster (as opposed to the other sets which were released solely within the 1977 calender year).

I did, however, accidentally get a decent start on one of the 1977 Calbee sets, the "Grey Border Star Back" set of 216 cards of which the above, featuring Isao Harimoto, is an example.

When I first started work on the 1975-76-77 Monster, I just knew that the backs of the cards had a star patterned border, like this:

So my early collecting strategy was to just buy up as many cards like that as I could find. When I finally accumulated enough to start organizing them in a binder and getting serious about completing the thing, I realized that for some of the low numbered cards I had (up to 144) there were two cards with the same number.

It took me a while but I eventually learned that the extra cards were actually from the 1977 Grey Border Star Back set which is visually almost identical to most of the 1975-76-77 Calbee card backs.

To add to the confusion, about half of the 1977 Calbee Grey Border Star Back set cards do not have grey border star backs.  From 144 to 216, the borders have more of a vine like border that looks like this:

OK, as I am writing this I realize it is making no sense because no matter what explaining these sets in an easy to follow manner is just impossible.

TLDR version: I accidentally collected cards from the wrong set because they looked the same as cards from a set I was collecting.

I'm actually thinking though that maybe this one 1977 Calbee set might be another project for me to work on.  I already have about 40 cards from it so I have a bit of a start.  And unlike the super rare regional issued sets from that year (where single cards go for hundreds of dollars each) they aren't too scarce (at least by 1970s Calbee standards) and you can sometimes find them for a couple hundred Yen each.

There is also a certain sunk cost that I'm looking to put to use here.  While these sets are extraordinarily confusing at first, once you've spent some time learning about them it actually is possible to gain a full understanding of what they contain and how they are different from each other.  With this set in particular I have already made that investment when I had to disentangle them from my 1975-76-77 set, so my brain has been trained to identify them on sight. And they are pretty cool cards, like any Calbees from that era.  So why not?  1977 Calbee, here I come.

1977 Path to Stardom: Featuring Stars Then and Slightly Before Then

 I haven't really been working on the 1977 Calbee set like I am with its predecessor, the 1975-76-77 Monster.  The 77 set is way more confusing since it is really several different sets, each of which they start the numbering again from "1" with.  The first of these (numbered to 216) really threw me off when I started seriously organizing my 75-76-77 set since the design of the cards, front and back, is identical and it took me a while to figure out that some of the cards which I though were part of my monster set were actually part of the 1977 set, which wreaked havoc on my checklist!

But since I've hit a wall with my monster acquisitions, I've also been picking up the odd card or two from the 1977 set.  One series from it which I thought was interesting is this one "Path to stardom" (numbers 73 to 109 in the confusing first set with the same design as the 75-76-77 set that cause me so many problems).

I have a couple of cards from it, featuring Dragons star and Meikyukai member Kenichi Yazawa (above) and Tigers star catcher Koichi Tabuchi below.  As you can see, the cards have two photos, a "now" one in color and a "then" one in black and white.

There is a similar series in the 75-76-77 set which has the same "Path to Stardom" name and also features the dual photo look.  That one is more like the "Boyhood photos of the stars" series that Topps put out in the 70s, featuring a picture of the player as a kid.

These 1977 ones though the "then" picture is one from their rookie year in NPB.  Its kind of odd, since neither of these players were exactly grizzled veterans when these came out: Yazawa had debuted 7 years earlier and Tabuchi 8.  The black and white pictures thus aren't ancient history, but just a few seasons old and for all anyone knew could have been contemporary with the set (except some uniform updates).

Its kind of a cool set though, these are a nice break from the full bleed photos of 1970s Calbee sets.

42 Year Old Potato Chips for Sale

There is a kind of neat thing available for auction right now: an unopened bag of Calbee baseball snacks from 1977. I've seen the empty wrappers for sale before, but never an actual full bag of chips still intact.

Its kind of weird, the chips actually still look like chips, they haven't decomposed or anything in there (vacuum sealed!).  Well, actually they technically don't look like "chips" since they are actually "snacks" - look closely and you'll see that they are some sort of snack with a bunch of holes in them, not the standard potato chips they sell today.  Still though, they look about as new as they probably did in 1977.

The seller has it listed with a 5,000 Yen starting bid.  I have no idea if it is worth that but I guess it certainly could be.  I'm not sure if its something I would ever want in my collection though.  It seems like the sort of thing a die hard Calbee collector like me should want, but I have no idea what I would do with it if I bought it. It'd be a neat display piece for anyone with a vintage Japanese baseball themed man cave, but I live in a tiny Japanese house that doesn't have room for man caves.   So I think I'll let it go, interesting though it is.

Mystery wrapped in a riddle: How is this card supposed to have been centred?

Another week, another 1970s Calbee pickup, in this case card #17 from the 1977 set (famous scenes series).  It features members of the Yomiuri Giants taken on October 16 at Korakuen Stadium singing a "song of victory" after going from worst to first under Shigeo Nagashima`s management.

The card carries a huge mystery to it which I am having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around. It seems to have been miscut on both the top and bottom, yet on both sides the nature of the miscut precludes the possibility of the other side`s miscut.

Look at the top of the card.  The heads of Sadaharu Oh and Isao Harimoto are cut off from above the eyebrows.  It seems the card should end a bit higher than that, so at least you get the entire faces of the two main players in the centre, right?

But then look at the bottom of the card. The lower, smaller bottom line of text says "巨人Ｖ１” but it has clearly been cut in half, with the lower part of the text completely off the card.

The miscut on the top suggests the card was cut too low, while the miscut on the bottom suggests it was cut too high.  Under the laws of physics currently in force in the known universe it is not possible for these to both be simultaneously correct, yet they both exist.  What gives?

In case you are wondering, the card has not been trimmed at all, it is identical in size to a standard card from that set.  I can`t make heads or tails of this.  The only explanation I can come up with is that the image on the card itself was somehow accidentally printed at 1.1 or 1.2 times magnification, making it too big to fit on the card.  But I`ve never seen a card with that before.

Kind of a mystery, I almost feel like I am looking at an MC Escher painting or something.  Anyone else come across similarly weird card cuts?

UPDATE:

Raz in the comments made a pretty good find, locating the above image which seems to show how the card was intended to look when correctly centred.

This just really opens up a whole new can of "what?" worms.  Calbee actually intended this card to have Sadaharu Oh and Isao Harimoto`s faces cut clean out of the photo?  In order to provide more room on the bottom for that lovely image of....the backs of photographers?

I`m guessing there were a few quality control issues related to how images were centred on printing plates with Calbee cards in the 70s, there are a couple of other cards I have with questionably centred images.  On most it isn`t noticeable since moving the centre of the image a bit only crops out a bit of random background, but on cards where some key element (like say the faces of the NPB all time home run king and hit king) is close to the edge, errors like this become really hard to miss.