Calbee Series 2 and My First Post in, like, Forevers

 It has been a few months since my last post, which is unusual given that it is the middle of the baseball season which usually coincides with my peak collecting time in any year.

All I can say is that it is true what they say about parenthood - being a father becomes your only hobby because it kills all the others.  I have a 10 month old at home who can now move around and get himself into all sorts of mischief (I mean that in both an endearing and a "Oh my god, that is so dangerous stop that right now" sort of way) so pretty much every minute of my day is either spent at work or at home with him. 

Which is great, but it leaves no time for collecting baseball cards, let alone blogging about baseball cards, hence the lack of posts here recently.

I did just manage to pick up my first bag of Calbee Series 2 though so I thought I would do a quick post about them here during my lunch break as I eat the chips. 

As usual the stores seem to be stocking bags of Series 2 way later than the official release date provided by Calbee, it is almost September already but its only in the past week or two that these have started to appear on most store shelves here in Nagoya.

The bags are green.  They pretty much look like every other bag of Calbee chips released in the past 15 years or so.

My first bag contained (drum roll)

Regular cards of Takahiro Shiomi and Hirokazu Sawamura!

OK, not exactly the best cards I could have gotten but since they are the first they are both on my want list so I cannot complain.

I definitely won't have the time to be going to shops buying these very often so I'll probably just get the odd bag at lunch rather than trying to put the full set together (a job I will likely delegate to Yahoo Auctions).  Still, it wouldn't seem like a proper summer without getting some bags of these chips so I am glad to have found them.

Calbee Baseball Chips in the Wild

 When I look around baseball card websites, blogs and magazines I see a lot of pictures of baseball cards.  Pretty much any baseball card out there you can see a picture of it in an instant.

What there are a lot fewer photos of out there are baseball cards in their everday context, particularly in the time at which they were issued. I can see a picture of any 1952 Topps card, for example, but it is almost impossible to find pictures of shops in 1952 with wax packs of Topps cards available for sale.

This latter thing is much more interesting from a historical point of view but for some reason nobody ever thinks to actually take pictures like that and post them.  I`d be really interested to see what a counter display with 1952 Topps packs would have looked like back in the day. We can easily find out what the packs and boxes looked like, but what did the rest of the shelf look like?  What kind of products were being sold next to them?  Candy and the like?  Or toys?  I`m sure for people old enough to remember buying packs of 1952 Topps cards (like my dad) this sort of thing seems second nature, but for the rest of us its a bit of a mystery.  Heck, you don`t even need to go back to 1952, try finding pictures of interiors of baseball card stores from the 1980s and there aren`t that many of those on the internet either.

 Anyway, I thought I`d do my own extremely small part to alleviate this lacunae in internet image search engines by putting up some pictures of this year`s Calbee cards as they appear in shops near my place in Nagoya, for posterity`s sake. 

As you can see, they generally get put on shelves with potato chips and other snacks on them. If you live in Japan this probably seems ridiculously obvious, but I suppose for any collectors out there who have never been here this might be at least a bit interesting.  The top photo here is from a supermarket (AEON), while the lower two are from convenience stores.  They all charge 98 Yen per bag, plus tax.  The bottom photo is my favorite display, not only are the bags sold on the candy shelf rather than the chips shelf (some convenience stores do that, others don`t, I am not sure why), but they also have a cool hand-written sign for them.  Its kind of a nice touch.

2015 Calbees are here! And the set seems to consist of 2 cards.

Spring is here, the season has begun and the Dragons just swept a series against the Giants.  I am a happy camper.

And with the new season has come the annual ritual of visiting multiple convenience stores trying to get that first sighting of this year`s Calbee cards.  After taking in a few I finally found a 7-11 which had them last week at lunch so I bought a bag and brought it back to my desk at work.  I got Yamazaki and Higa.

The next day I bought another bag.  I got Yamazaki and Higa.

I wonder what the odds of this happening are. Probably pretty slim.  If only I had placed a bet on this happening beforehand, I could probably retire off the winnings.

Anyway, except for getting the exact same pack, which I assume is related to the way Calbee packs these (though it has never happened before to me), I kind of like the new set.  They made a slight change to the design this year, the player`s name is in a larger font and in black lettering with a thin white border.  While by no means a major change, it actually does give the cards a somewhat bolder look than previous sets with the solid white lettering, so I give them high marks for it. 

So I am looking forward to pack #3 and hoping it will have somebody - anybody - other than Yamazaki and Higa (though Ido  love the photograph on Yamazaki`s card).