1997 Calbee complete (sort of)

 

I picked up the last two cards (51 and 89) that I needed for the 1997 Calbee set, which is now finished!

Sort of.

What I have completed is Series 1 to 3 - a total of 216 cards.  Unfortunately Calbee didn't stop with those and tacked on a 20 card set of Giants cards (217 to 236) to the end of it.  Those last 20 cards were short printed (probably only regionally released but I'm not sure about that) and are extremely rare compared to the rest of the set. I only have one of them so am technically still 19 cards short of the complete set.

The idea of spending a ton of money on late 90s cards of Giants players is not particularly enticing to me, which is why I've decided to declare this set "done" without those last cards (though if I ever stumble on any at a good price I'll be quite tempted to buy them, they only show up for sale every once in a while).

I started seriously building this set about 3 years ago when I bought a big lot of them on YJA.  Compared to Calbee sets from the 70s or 80s this one was a lot easier and a lot cheaper to complete. I was aided in finishing it off by a seller who had a huge stockpile of late 90s Calbees putting a whole bunch up for sale last week.  The key cards in the set are three Ichiro cards (one for each series) and I was fortunate to get all of them in the big lot I started out with.  No single card cost me more than 50 Yen, and I think the whole project only set me back about 6,000 to 7,000 Yen total, which is not bad. 

One thing I'm debating now is what to do with them.  They are just sitting loose in a box along with most of my other Calbee sets.  I'd like to put most of them into albums some day, but right now its only a select few (1975-76-77, 1986 and 1987) that get that privilege, mainly because my budget for albums and pages is limited.  Over time I'd like to get all the vintage ones into albums (which is tricky for the 1980s sets due to a shortage of 12 pocket pages), but I'm not sure where to draw the line between "sets that are good enough to be in albums" and "sets that stay in boxes".  The late 90s seems to be roughly where I'll be drawing that line, but I'm not sure which side the 1997 set will fall on.  

Some more 1997 Calbees

 

I picked up 15 singles from the 1997 Calbee set this week.  Nobody particularly exciting, the whole  lot only cost me about 4$, but they were all cards I needed for the set.  

These get me to 202 out of 237, just 35 to go.  Unfortunately 19 of those are from the rare high number series, but I'm very close to finished with the low numbers.  

Thus far my Calbee collection has been mainly focused on cards from the 70s and 80s, as well as the obligatory purchase of contemporary sets as they come out each year. This has left the 90s as the decade with the biggest holes in my collection.  I am pretty close to finished with the 1999 Calbee set, which is by far the easiest to complete.  I also have a decent start on the 1998 set, which is also fairly easy to do.  And the 1995 Choco Snack set I  was lucky enough to pick up as a set a year and a half ago ( in retrospect that was an incredible deal, prices on those have gone up a lot since then and there is no way I could replicate that find today).

But most of the other sets from that decade (particularly the 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 and 1996 sets) I only have a smattering of cards each for.  Except for 1991 those are really hard sets to find cards for.  The  1994 and 1996 sets in particular have fewer than 100 listings each on Yahoo Auctions right now, indicating how rare they are.  Once I've finished the 1997s I might move on to one of them, but for now those years don't really exist in "set" form in my collection yet.  

The 1997 Calbee Set

 I made a pretty great score on Yahoo Auctions the other day, a 300 card lot of cards from the 1997 Calbee set.

The 1997 Calbee set is an important one.  It is the grandfather of all Calbee sets that have been issued in the 23 years since it came out.  For the 1997 set they went with a simple design - full bleed photo with the player name, number and team name and logo being the only design elements on the front.  Pretty much every Calbee set since 1997 has followed that look with only minor variations.

Likewise, the 1997 set was the first to have a full color back with a player photo,  another design element that every set since has emulated. 

Its got a lot of big stars of the 90s like Ichiro and Hideki Matsui.  It also has one of the first Japanese cards of Tuffy Rhodes, a young Kenji Johjima and a very old Hiormitsu Ochiai.

This 300 card lot was a major score for me because the 1997s are pretty hard to find.  I only had a couple dozen cards from this set before getting these.

In terms of scarcity there is a huge difference between 1997 and 1998 onwards.  You can see this in Yahoo Auctions listings, the below table shows how many cards from each Calbee set from 1990 to 1999 are currently available.  As you can see, from 1990 to 1997 its pretty consistently in the 100 to 300 listings range.  Then in 1998 it jumps to 873 and in 1999 it absolutely explodes to 1916.  Though not in the table, its pretty much remained high like that ever since (with 2002 being one exception, it has only 358 listings which is more in line with pre 1997 numbers)..

This is of course also reflected in the price.  Pre 1997 cards sell for significantly more than what post 1998, and especially post 1999, cards go for.

I've often kind of wondered about that - why did Calbee card production take off in 1998?  Maybe baseball got more popular that year?  Or they just decided to market and distribute their chips more aggressively?  I've never seen anyone answer this question.

Anyway, this scarcity explains why I pounced all over this lot.  Its not uncommon to see post 1998 Calbee cards in big lots like that, but you almost never find 1997 Calbees or anything earlier than that in lots that size.  In fact, I've never seen a 1997 Calbee lot with more than a few dozen cards before.  And since I didn't have many cards in it, this presented the perfect opportunity to get to work on that set.

The set, I should mention, contains 237 cards.  It was issued in four series and the last one (cards 217 to 237) just has 20 cards but was a short printed series in a set that was already fairly scarce so they are almost impossible to find.  I couldn't tell from the listing how many I would get, obviously there would be doubles, but I decided to take a chance.

The cards when they arrived were all pack fresh in the near mint to mint range, which was a nice surprise since a lot of Calbee cards even from the 90s often come with a lot of wear (its usually more like buying a lot of 60s or 70s cards in the US, from a time before people seriously collected).

I was kind of shocked  though that the seller had just thrown them into an envelope with no bubble wrap or anything to protect them, with the cards divided into stacks held together with rubber bands.

So I was a bit like:

But then I was able to take the rubber bands off and found that the cards were all OK, so then I was like:

Its all good.

On the plus side, I was able to put together about 80% of the first three series (1 to 216) including the Ichiro and other star cards (update September 28, 2020: picked some more up, am now over 90% of the way there).  On the downside, the lot didn't contain any of the short prints from 217 to 237, so I'll probably have to shell out serious money for those at some point.

I'm pretty happy with these though and can now add 1997 Calbee to the list of sets I'm getting close to finishing!  The cards I still need are:

 51,  89,  217-221, 223-237.