Surprsing Jackpot

 

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

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

1987 Calbee: 15 cards

1988 Calbee: 9 cards

1990 Lotte Gum: 30 cards

1991 Calbee: 27 cards

1994 Calbee: 134 cards

1995 Calbee: 5 cards

1994 Takara Yakult Swallows team set

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fake Ichiros and Weird Bidders

 
There is a seller on Yahoo Auctions who I've been watching for a few years now.  A few years ago I bought one of the rare 1994 Calbee Ichiro cards off of him.  This was relatively early in my Japanese baseball card collecting days and I wasn't aware of how prevalent fakes of those cards (there are three of them) were.  Of course mine turned out to be a fake as I discovered later.  Fortunately I only paid about 25$ so it wasn't a huge write-off.

If you click on the guy's Yahoo Auctions page you'll see a huge list of naked lady cards (very NSFW, proceed with caution).  Those are his specialty.  But about once every month or so he'll put out a few baseball cards for sale.  And almost every time he does so, he has one copy of each of the three 1994 Calbee Ichiros.

Over the years I've been watching his auctions (er...just his baseball card auctions) he's probably put up dozens of those Ichiro cards.  Bear in mind that those cards are so rare that there are probably only a few dozen legit copies of them in existence in the first place.  So this should be a huge red flag screaming "FAKE" to anyone out there paying attention.

Yet every time he puts them out, people bid on them and buy them.  This post was inspired by me watching three more end last night, all getting multiple bids (the one in the picture at the top got 14 bids and sold for 4501 Yen, about $40).  

It really doesn't make much sense.  They always sell, but they also usually sell in that 30-50$ price range, which is about 1/10th of what a legit copy would probably be worth.  

Its kind of hard to figure out what is going on with the bidders.  If they think the things are real, they should be bidding them up to much higher prices than that.  If on the other hand they think the things are fake, they shouldn't be bidding at all.  Yet everytime they manage to bid it up to a price that is way too high for a fake and way too cheap for a real one.  What do these bidders think these cards are?

In my case when I bid I thought it was real and I put in a higher bid than what I ended up winning it for with that expectation in mind.  Other bidders pushed it up to about the 25$ level, then jumped ship.  Perhaps there are shill bidders, but looking at the one I linked to above it got bids from 4 separate bidders, two of whom have a ton of feedback and are likely legit bidders, and two of whom have less than 100 feedback and might be shill bidders.  It was won by one of the two with high feedback, and one of the two with low feedback placed the second highest bid, consistent with what you would expect if shill bidding was going on.  But at the same time the other "real" bidder came close to winning it and the "shill" bid only bumped it up a couple hundred Yen.  So even if the two suspect accounts hadn't bid, the card would have sold for almost the same price and therefore shill bidding alone can't account for this irrational pricing.

So I kind of wonder if these real bidders are just suckers like me being taken in?  You'd think they would have caught on by now though, this guy has been at it for years now (though he does have near perfect feedback).  On the other hand, maybe they know and don't care - perhaps they are planning to flip these fakes themselves? 

I don't know exactly what is going on but it sure does stink anyway you look at it.  

Fake 1994 Calbee Ichiro Cards really are Everywhere

A board member over on Net54 just drew my attention to the latest Prestige Collectibles Auction which has a really useful listing that I think is worth drawing everyone's attention to.  They have a 1994 Calbee Ichiro, card C-37 which is one of three Ichiros in the set, all of which are his first Calbee cards and all of which were regionally issued and are quite rare.

The reason I wanted to draw the listing to everyone's attention is that it includes by far the best explanation of the differences between real and fake 1994 Ichiros that I've seen anywhere on the internet.

Fakes of these three cards are everywhere, I even have one (the one pictured at the top of this post, C-39 from the set).  They are extremely hard to distinguish from legit copies because they are almost perfect, made on the same cardboard and particularly on the front they are identical.  The only way to distinguish them is to look on the backs, the color of ink used by the fakes is not a perfect match and Ichiro's face has a bit of a purplish hue to it on the fakes (and the orange boxes with his biographical details are a bit darker).  Go to the Prestige auction to see what I'm talking about because me just explaining it in words doesn't help much, they have side by side photos that lay it out so its super easy to spot, something which didn't exist on the internet until they put it up (at least as far as I'm aware).

Another intriguing detail mentioned in the auction description was that the grading companies weren't aware of the fakes and graded a bunch of them, meaning that even a PSA holder isn't a guarantee that they are legit.  I was curious how much of a problem that was here in Japan so I looked up the Yahoo Auctions listings since I remembered these are one of the few cards out there that routinely appear in PSA slabs here.  Sure enough, looking through the auctions I couldn't find a single legit one among all the ones which had photos of the backs.  Like this one here, a PSA 10 for 30,000 Yen but which has all the telltale signs of being a fake on it.  And here is an ungraded fake with a starting bid of just 1,000 Yen that will be interesting to see how much it goes for.

The Prestige auction says that 99.9% of the 1994 Ichiros out there are fakes and that it would be virtually impossible for anyone to assemble all three.  I would quibble with both of those assertions - I don't disagree that a majority of the Ichiros out there seem to be fakes but I doubt its 99.9% (just doing the math if we estimate there are just 100 copies of each Ichiro, there would have to be 300,000 fakes to account for 99.9% of the total, and I don't think there are anywhere near that many).  Also while difficult I have no doubt that there are collectors out there who have put together all three of the legit ones (sadly, not including me).  But those are minor points of disagreement as the main point they make is absolutely correct: fakes of these cards are everywhere and its buyer beware.

Actually I might add another minor point of contention.  They and everyone else calls these the "Hokkaido" Calbee set, but it wasn't just issued in Hokkaido, it was also issued in the Kyushu and Sanyo (around Hiroshima) regions as well. Its pretty rare nonetheless!

1994 Calbee Hideki Matsui

I`ve been doing a lot of posts about 1970s era cards recently, but I`ve also added a few beauties to my early 1990s Calbee collection, including a 1994 Calbee Hideki Matsui.

The 1994 Calbee set is, along with most pre-1998 Calbee cards - kind of a hard one to collect since there isn`t a huge supply of them out there.  Yahoo Auctions only has 115 listings for 1994 Calbees at the moment, and these actually come from two different sets.  The main set, which this one is part of, has the player and team names written in diagonal stripes on the lower left and upper right corners of the card.  A second set, which I think was only sold regionally and is thus even harder to find, lacks these stripes, has colored backs (the main set has a black and white back) and each number begins with c. 

This Matsui card (#47) isn`t his rookie card since he appeared in both BBM`s 1993 set and also on a 1993 Calbee card (which has a similar design to this one), and he also has a couple of more cards in the 1994 set.  This makes it a reasonably affordable buy, they seem to go for around 500-1000 Yen each when they show up in auctions (which is how I go this one).  Not sure how much they go for on Ebay.

Anyway, its a cool card - showing Matsui when he was barely out of high school - and is the earliest calbee card I have of him so I`m glad to add it to the collection!