A really nit-picky thing I discovered about 1995 Calbee

This week I picked up a few more cards for my 1995 Calbee/Tokyo Snack set.  I am actually really close to finishing the first series, I have 64 out of 72 so just 8 to go (I have both Ichiros already,  all the ones I need are commons so it should be pretty easy to finish that one!).

The high series (73 to 162) on the other hand I am nowhere near to completing, I only have 19 of them and need the Ichiros, which are among the most expensive of his cards out there. So that project will take a while. They seem to have been issued in much fewer numbers than the low numbers, hence my difficulty in tracking them down!

But in addition to bragging about how close I am to finishing the first series I also want to use this post to highlight a weird thing I have discovered about this set.  I was flipping through them yesterday when I noticed an odd thing: the cards are not all the same shape!

The difference lies in the corners, which seem to have been cut in three different ways.  This isn't really noticeable if you are looking at the cards one by one, but if you hold a stack of them you will notice that the corners on the cards don't line up evenly.

There seem to be three different shaped corners:

The right most card in the above photo (card 8 of Ken Suzuki) has a rounded corner.  The one in the middle (card 37 of Glenn Braggs) has been cut at more of a straight angle.  The left most card (51 of Shintaro Yamasaki) also has a rounded corner but the curve extends for a longer extent (ie its a bigger rounded corner).

Calbee used a similar design for most of its sets between the 1990 high series and 1996, with the same cardstock and rounded corners, I haven't yet checked to see if the cards from other sets have this same weird feature.  I'm not sure what caused it, they must have been using different machines to cut the cards from their sheets or something like that.

Anyway, just another obscure, nit-picky thing I thought I'd throw out into the card blogosphere!

A guy with different names on cards in the same set: Koji (Kohji?) Akiyama's 1995 Tokyo Snack Saga

One set I have been adding a few cards to recently is my 1995 Tokyo Snack set.

1995 is a confusing year in Calbee baseball card history because they had two sets that year but also didn't have any sets that year.  Due to a potato shortage they released their cards with popcorn instead of chips.  But their popcorn was sold under the Tokyo Snack brand, so these are labelled as Tokyo Snack rather than Calbee cards.

They also released a 72 card regional set under the Choco Snack label that year in the Tokyo and Saitama areas in 1995 so they did two sets,but neither of them were attached to Calbee potato chips (though the Choco Snack set does say "Calbee" on the back")

The Tokyo Snack set is the larger of the two with 162 cards issued in two series (1-72 is first series, 73 to 162 is second series).  It is also the one I am working on, the Choco Snack cards will wait for another day.

The Tokyo Snack set is kind of hard to find, but the second series (which unfortunately constitutes the majority) was short printed and is significantly more expensive.  I have about half the first series now but only a few of the second series.

One of the second series cards I recently picked up is #158 featuring Hawks Hall of Famer Kohji Akiyama.  I though this looked weird and on looking through my first series cards I found another one of him (#67) but with his name spelled differently - Koji Akiyama.

I though this was kind of funny - this must be the only time a guy appeared on two cards in the same set but with his name spelled differently and neither of them being an error.  The problem arises because there is a lot of confusion with respect to how to Romanize his first name and both cards are within the bounds of reasonable interpretations.

His first name is 幸二（こうじ）which if you spell it out the normal way would be Kouji.  But that looks a bit odd, so Koji is probably better.  Adding an "h" to make it Kohji is also a possibility but looks kind of awkward.

This is probably just a minor bit of sloppiness that occurs when you have two different guys writing names down rather than a deliberate attempt to update his name spelling in the second series, but its kind of cool.

Weird Shane Mack Card

Shane Mack is one of those names I remember from my high school days.  He had a brief period in the early 1990s where he arguably attained the status of minor star with the Twins, playing a key role in their memorable 1991 season.

After his days with the Twins he played for a couple of years in Japan with the Giants and has a card in the 1995 Tokyo Snack set (the de facto Calbee set from that year).

The front of the card is pretty cool, showing Mack taking batting practice.  The back though is strange:

It gives his statistics from the 1992-1994 seasons with the Giants.  Its not very impressive, he went 0 for 0 in each of those seasons for a cumulative .000 batting average.

The reason for this lacklustre performance is that he didn't play for the Giants in any of those seasons, he was still playing for the Twins in Minnesota. But the card clearly says "巨" next to each of those years in brackets, which is the kanji for "Giant".

It definitely gives him short shrift as in the 1992 season, where he hit .000 in NPB, he also hit .315 for the Twins and finished 5th in the AL batting race.

Anyway, this is just a kind of odd thing, I have no idea why they did it.  Other cards in the set with new players don't have 3 years of fictitious statistics on the back.  One possible explanation is that this set is one of the first Calbee sets where they featured a player's full career statistics (maybe the first? I have to double check that).  Perhaps, being new, they simply weren't very good at it.  This is evident in the confusing order they put the stats in, with the most recent season at the top and going down from there, the opposite of what pretty much all other card makers do. 

The card incidentally seems to have been released relatively late in 1995 as the text on the back makes reference to a game played against the Dragons on May 21st in which he hit a 2 run sayonara home run. 

In the Mail this Week: 1995 Calbee Tokyo Snack Cards

 I got a small pile of 1995 Tokyo Snack cards in the mail yesterday.  These are an interesting set.  Tokyo Snack is actually a subsidiary of Calbee, which for a couple of years in the mid-90s was given the role of baseball card producer in the conglomerate.  If you want to split hairs you could make the argument that in 1995 and 1996 there weren`t any Calbee sets, since both of them came with the Tokyo Snack brand, which is the maker name printed on the back of the cards:

But since Tokyo Snack is a wholy-owned subsidiary of Calbee, I think collectors are correct to regard this as a Calbee set in all but name only.  As such it fits into an interesting period in Calbee card development.  The 1990s are actually an odd decade for Calbee.  In the 1970s all their sets (except for part of the 75-76 set with the pink borders) had a standard form - full bleed photo with the player name and team written in small letters on the front.  In the 1980s they reduced the size of the cards but, except for part of the 1984 set with the little hats on it, kept the same design pretty consistently throughout.  In the 2000s and 2010s, they have pretty much had the exact same design throughout with only minor modifications from year to year.

In other words, in each decade Calbee had one basic design philosphy and applied it almost uniformly to every set year after year. Except the 1990s.

If you look at Calbee sets from year to year in the 1990s you`ll notice that it is the only decade in which the design of the cards changed, sometimes radically, from year to year.  This gives Calbee cards from the 1990s a degree of uniqueness not found in other decades.

It is kind of interesting to speculate why this was so.  My guess would be that the introduction of serious competition from BBM from 1991 forced Calbee to respond and they experimented with a series of design changes in a trial and error process.  In 1998 they seem to have had that "Eureka!" moment since from that year on they have kept pretty much the same design.  

The 1995 set is one of the more interesting ones from this period.  The shape and size are the same as that used from the latter half of 1990 through the 1996 set, but the design, which is quite colorful and distinctive, was only used in this one set.  Though I generally prefer the full bleed design they usually use, I kind of like this set.  It looks very 1990s.

I got a half-dozen cards in this lot.  Prior to that I only had one card - one of the low number Ichiros.  I will add this to my list of "sets in progress that I will hopefully one day finish but probably not."  The high number cards in this set are notoriously hard to locate, having been sold in very limited quantities and containing a couple of quite expensive cards of Ichiro (who, incidentally, had his first regular Calbee card in this set, though he had been featured in a regional set in 1994).