The Most Valuable Card is a Lucky One

This is the most valuable card by far that you can get in packs of 2020 Calbee Series 2.    It is a "Lucky Card".  

Calbee Lucky Cards have been around for a while.  Back in 2004 I tried putting the Calbee set together the old fashioned way: buying lots of bags of chips.  I didn't get anywhere near to finishing it (and 16 years later I am still short), but one thing I did get that year was a few lucky cards.  In 2004 you had to collect three of them, then cut the tabs off the top of them and glue them to a postcard which you would mail to Calbee.  In exchange, Calbee would send you a pretty cool boxed set of "Star Cards" featuring gold embossed signatures on them.  There were 3 of those boxed sets for each series and I was able to get the first two, but fell one Lucky Card short of being able to get the Series 3 one.  

It was fun though, slowly accumulating them over the course of the summer, then sending the envelope off and waiting by the mailbox until my sets arrived.

The Lucky Cards work roughly the same way this year, when you get one you cut the green tab off the upper left hand corner of the back, glue it to a postcard and mail it in.  In fact, the card looks almost identical to the ones I remember pulling back in 2004, with the colors changed a bit.  

This year instead of collecting three you just have to get one.  But also instead of getting a box set you just get two cards out of a 24 card set featuring various stars ("Kira Cards"), so there is a bit of a tradeoff there.  You would need at least 12 of these cards to finish that set.  You are allowed to designate which of the 24 cards you want, so you don't receive random cards and can avoid getting doubles, though they actually ask you to nominate two alternative card choices in case they run out of certain players, so it isn't guaranteed that you will receive the ones you want. 

Back in 2004 there wasn't much of an online market for Japanese cards so I had no idea how much they were worth.  But these things are really "Hot" on Yahoo Auctions, I've been following auctions of them and they always sell for over 3,000 Yen each (about 30$ US).  The photos I'm using here come from an auction that just ended at 3400 Yen.  There are dozens of them up at any given time and they don't seem to be having trouble finding buyers.  

At that price, factoring in shipping and also the cost of sending the postcards, you'd be looking at spending about 43,000 Yen (430$ US) to complete that 24 card set.  Which is way too much for me to be interested.

Happily though this also explains why I can buy complete base sets of Calbee for  900 Yen including shipping.   The Calbee case breakers basically make all their money off the Lucky Cards and everything else is just leftovers.  

I've bought a few bags of Calbee chips this year despite having purchased the base sets, in part just to see if I could land a Lucky Card, but I've come up empty so far.  I'd like to land one just so I can mail in the postcard and wait by the mailbox for the cards to come.  Actually, that is another thing that makes 2020 much different from 2004.  Back in 2004 getting baseball cards in the mail was a huge novelty since I didn't have a Yahoo Auctions or even Ebay account back then and made all my purchases in person at stores.  Now I get cards in the mail all the time so the novelty value is kind of lost.  But it would be cool nonetheless.

Incidentally another interesting thing about these cards is that they are ticking time bombs.  They expire on March 31, 2021 after which they can no longer be redeemed and basically become worthless.  Yahoo Auctions has a ton of 2020 Lucky Cards being bid on like crazy, but any remaining Lucky Cards from 2019 or earlier are basically worthless and very few sellers even bother to list them for sale.  I still have my two unredeemed 2004 Calbee Lucky Cards sitting around somewhere, I held onto them for sentimental reasons!

2020 Calbee Series 2 Complete! And Boring!

This is Taisei Makino's card from Series 2 of the 2020 Calbee set.  I just picked up the complete base set of 87 cards off of Yahoo Auctions.  Dave did a great write up of the set's details which you can read here so I won't repeat what he's already written there about it.

But I wanted to bring the Makino card to everyone's attention since its the only one (save the manager checklist cards) which deviates from the dreaded Three Rules of Contemporary Calbee Card Photos.  With every other card in the set, including the average leaders subset, every photo features a player either at bat (all position players except catchers), in his catchers gear (catchers) or on the mound (pitchers).  

The Makino card is the only one which shows a player doing something else, in this case fielding.  

This is a huge step back from Series 1, which featured a much better selection of photographs than usual.  I guess that was just an exception rather than the start of something new.

As I've complained about many times (and since Calbee is still doing it, I'll complain again) none of the photos on their own are bad, but when you've got the whole set in your hands the standardized photography gets extremely boring.  

This is made worse by the fact that the photos are almost all taken in the player's home stadium and from the exact same angle.  So for example here are all of the cards featuring Hiroshima Carp pitchers:

You really get nothing in the photos other than the same grass and dirt background because of the stupid angle.  Hiroshima has a really great stadium, I'd like to see more of it on the background of these cards!  Again, none of these cards looks bad on its own, but when you've got the whole set looking at you the monotonous repetition gets really boring.  With Hiroshima at least they are playing outdoors under natural sunlight which make the photos a bit brighter.  The cards of teams that play in domes, like the Nippon Ham Fighters, Yomiuri Giants and Orix Buffaloes look way darker and the players don't really stand out very well.  Its just awful all around.

The only kind of "interesting" thing that I have noticed is that the set contains some of the first cards of the Pandemic.  Years from now collectors will probably be able to tell the 2020 cards (and with the way things are going  I fear maybe also the 2021 cards) by the empty stands in the backgrounds of a lot of cards:

At the same time this of course also contributes to the general misery of looking at this set, so while interesting it isn't helpful!

On the plus side, the whole thing only cost me 900 Yen (about $9) with shipping.  Which is a kind of stupid thing to say I suppose after devoting the whole post to describing how much I dislike this thing.  But yeah, its way better to spend 900 Yen to discover I dislike it than to spend 10-20 times that much on bags of chips which I also don't like trying to put the thing together by hand.  And as a collector its not like I could just NOT buy it, right?  Its what we do after all. 

PS: This was my 300th post on this blog!

2020 Calbee Series 2 Has Hit the Shelves

 

Bags of 2020 Calbee Series 2 have hit supermarket shelves here and I picked up my first bag yesterday. 

I like how Calbee sets have been released in 3 series at regular intervals over the year pretty much ever since I first arrived in Japan over 20 years ago.  The release of each series has become a ritualized means of marking the passing of the seasons for me.  Series 1 is Spring, Series 2 is Summer and Series 3 is Fall.  Winter is the only one that doesn't get a series, which adds to my dislike of that season. 

Normally the arrival of a new series is a happy event, but this year its just hard to work up the usual amount of enthusiasm. Look at how the world has changed since series 1 came out just a few months ago.  Or maybe not so much, at least here in Japan.  In March infections were rising in Tokyo and I was worried we'd have a major outbreak here.  Thankfully that didn't happen.  This week infections are rising in Tokyo again and we're worried we're going to have a major outbreak.  Again.  Hopefully we won't.  Again. 

Of course, when I say "cases are rising" I mean there have been about 200 cases in a city of 30 million people.  I think there are small towns in Florida right now getting more cases.  So I do feel incredibly lucky to be riding this pandemic out in Japan.  Which is another odd reversal since Series 1 came out, back when the NPB season opener was postponed but MLB was still set to go because Japan got hit with this first.  At the time I thought we'd get crushed while the US might get lucky and avoid it.  Man, that has changed. Sorry to my fellow bloggers out there in the US going through all that right now. 

These are the cards I got in my first bag of the year.  Adam Jones, a bona fide MLB star who was fortunate enough to sign a 2 year $8 million contract with the Orix Buffaloes just days before the virus arrived.  That card is from the Star Card subset, which is a pretty decent pull.

The other is of Dragons pitcher Kodai Umetsu, who had a pretty good rookie season last year with a 4-1 record and 2.34 ERA. 

Otherwise there doesn't seem to be much to note, the set looks pretty much the same as it does every year, which is nice.  Good old stable Calbee sets, the one thing that never changes!

2020 Calbee Photography is less mediocre than usual

I decided to do my usual thing this year and buy the Calbee set off a re-seller on Yahoo Auctions rather than try to put one together by hand.  This is not a hard decision to make, as I've calculated on here before it could set you back about $2,000 to complete a series of Calbee cards if you do it bag by bag.  These cost me $4 plus $3 shipping.  The economic logic herein is that the re-sellers only break cases of these to get the rare inserts and treat the base set as more or less junk, so its great for those of us who don't care about the inserts.

This wasn't actually a complete set though, it was a near set of 78 different cards from the base set and various subsets (League Winners, Japan Series, The Record and checklists) so I'm still a few short of the set, which keeps it interesting (I still need 5, 15, 24,35, 39, 42, 46, LC-1, Tr-9 and C-02 to complete the set if anyone has doubles!)

One thing I was happy to see is that Calbee's photography wasn't as horrible as usual this year.  Dave had mentioned this to me earlier and I was happy to see it with my own eyes: there are actually a few pictures in this set of players doing something other than batting or pitching.

Its really refreshing to see some pictures of guys running the bases, playing the field or just messing around with the mascot or whatever. I put 8 cards from the base set which have pictures like that up above.  The subsets, which Calbee has always generally used better photographs for, also have a lot of good shots in them, here are a few:

Looking at these cards makes me hope they are able to salvage at least part of the season this year, but it doesn't look good. They indefinitely postponed the opener this week and don't plan on having one until June at the earliest, so at best we might get a very shortened season, much of which will probably be played in empty stadiums.

This leads to an interesting question for 2021 baseball sets both here and in the US: if there is no season this year, what are the pictures on next year's cards going to look like?  Are they going to use photos from 2019?  Or maybe push back the releases so they can get some photos in spring training in 2021 (assuming that goes ahead)?  Are we going to see the return of some 70s style airbrushing of old photos to replace logos on cards of players who have been traded?  Or if we do get at least a partial season this year, are the cards next year going to have a lot of photos of players taken in front of empty stands?  Or wearing face masks?

I guess we'll find out next year.

The Hanshin Tigers take the field to brighten your spring!

Doesn't that sight cheer you up?

It just doesn't feel like spring without baseball players on the field.  So I thought we needed some.

Let me back this up a bit because I have an amazing shopping experience to share at a time when amazing shopping experiences that don't involve spending two hours in line to buy face masks are in short supply.

With my kids home I've taken to giving them little Pokémon figures every day as a reward for being good.  I have a stash of them that I keep in my office. The other day I was getting low on Pokémons so I stopped at a big second hand store which sells huge bags of them very cheaply to re-stock.  While grabbing a bag of Pokémon I noticed this on the rack next to it.

 That is a package jam packed with Hanshin Tigers figurines, several dozen of them. Look at how tightly squeezed they are in there:

 I don't normally collect figures but this was a bargain I couldn't pass up: the whole thing only cost 380 Yen!  That is about 3$ US.  Don't tell me you would have walked out of that store without these guys if it had been you!

So I've had this bag of Hanshin Tigers sitting unopened in a cupboard for a few days.  Today is a really nice spring day, sunny and warm.  The day you want to see baseball.  I ride my bike my work now to avoid the trains and I decided kind of on a whim this morning to take them with me and do a location photo shoot at a baseball field that I ride past during my commute.

Behold the splendor of baseball played before a backdrop of Nagoya's suburban sprawl!

 I didn't know exactly what I had until I sat down at the ball field and opened the bag up, which made for a bit of fun.  Turns out there are figures from 3 different sets in there, without doubles which is a real plus.  The ones pictured above with the green bases are the "Hanshin Tigers Chibi Pro Figures" which seem to have been released in 2007.  There are a few of them up for auction on Yahoo Auctions right now, it looks like they were sold individually back then.  It looks like there were 26 in the set, I think I am a couple short (the photos don't have all the ones I got though).

 

Next up are these awesome guys:

I was able to find an old Amazon listing for these ones. It looks like they were sold as a set of 16 back in 2007.  I have all 16 of them!

They look like they are having a great time on that bench.

They are pretty easy to identify by the yellow and black bases they have.

The third set were the only ones that were bobbleheads.  Yay, bobbleheads!

I haven't actually been able to find any information about these guys.  My Google searches for Hanshin Tigers figures or bobbleheads in both English and Japanese don't produce any results that match them.  They are pretty decent quality and from the player selection were likely sold in the early 2000s (Trey Moore, who played for the Tigers from 2002-2003 is among them for example).  That really brings back good memories for me since I was living in the Kansai region back in the early 2000s and was a Tigers fan at the time (still am really, but feel obliged to root for the Dragons now that I live in Nagoya).

Anyway, this kind of illustrates why second hand shops in Japan are so awesome, you can find treasures like this for insanely low prices sometimes - these probably set the guy who originally collected them back a couple of hundred bucks, but are now mine for only 3!

My photo shoot also resulted in an unexpected bonus, I actually found some baseball cards!  Like literally just lying there on the ground right next to the bench where I took the above photos.


That is two cards from Series 1 of the 2020 Calbee set which I happen to be working on!  What are the odds?

I picked them up and found Shohei Takahashi and Yoshiyuki Kamei staring back at me.  They were a bit damp with morning dew on them but the coating on the cards prevented that from seeping into them. I guess somebody ate a bag of chips there, opened the cards and thought "Not interested" and just left them there. I need both of them so I dried them off and put them in my bag.  This is the weirdest way I've ever been able to knock cards off a checklist, but I'll take them.

So anyway, this was my morning attempt to bring some baseball into spring.  Looks like we might need some follow ups in the summer with the way things are going unfortunately.  Stay safe!

Baseball Card Collecting in the Age of the Coronavirus

So I picked up my first bag of 2020 Calbee chips yesterday.  Normally this is my favorite time of the year: the first bags of Calbee chips signify the start of spring and the new baseball season.

This year.....yeah, they are coming out in the middle of a global pandemic that is screwing the world over in ways we couldn't have imagined just a couple months back.  So its a bit of a downer this year.

But life goes on and I am quite lucky that I'm safe and healthy and haven't lost my job (knock on wood).  

I've been thinking a bit about how this pandemic is going to affect the hobby.  It could be either beneficial or disastrous for it, or a bit of both depending on your perspective.  

On the one hand, a lot of people are  under some form of lockdown and most of those who aren't are (I hope) at least doing their best to maintain social distance from others.  Fortunately neither of these are incompatible with our hobby.  Its not like competitive arm wrestling where we really have to stop what we are doing right now.  In fact, people having a lot of time at home is a positive boon to hobbies like ours since "time alone to sort cards" is an essential element of it.  

There is of course also a social element to it, but that doesn't necessarily require being in the same room with people.

So the hobby is good to go.

But then there is the other thing.  The scary virus and the chaos that it is raining down on the global economy and shutting down businesses left right and center.  

This is either going to expose our hobby's Achilles Heel and destroy it, or it is going to save it from the problems that currently plague it and make it even better than before (once the big scary virus has passed, of course).

Cards cost money.  People are going to have way less of that this summer than they did last.  People are losing jobs or having hours cut, and their retirement funds are being decimated by the stock market collapse.  Cards are also not toilet paper that people will irrationally throw what money the have remaining at because, apparently, in times of crisis we quite literally prioritize our own asses above everything else.

So a lot of collectors aren't going to have money to spend in the near future, which will likely lead to a sharp drop in demand.  At the same time, people are going to need more cash and those who have collections are going to be very tempted (or perhaps forced) to sell them, which may lead to an increase in supply.  If this happens I don't see any way that such a situation will not lead to a drastic decline in card values.  

From my own perspective, I'm putting a halt to all card purchases over 1000 Yen (about 8$) for the foreseeable future.  I'm by no means a big spender, but I do tend to buy cards in lots that usually sell for more than that, so this means I'll be doing way less card shopping.  And, like I said, I still have a job and am not in dire straits right now.  But the uncertainty surrounding all of this and the possibility that I might end up in that situation down the road is forcing me to re-arrange priorities rapidly, with card spending going way to the bottom of the list.  I suspect a lot of people are in the same boat right now.

If I'm right on that it means the hobby is going to be starved of cash in the very near future, something likely exacerbated by the fact that the baseball seasons (both MLB and NPB) are likely to be cancelled, which can only further dampen interest.

Is this a bad thing though?  I mean, if you've got a lot of money invested in cards then yeah I guess it would look like a really bad thing.  I wouldn't put myself in that category, but I do have a few valuable cards around that I'm realizing are probably going to be worth a fraction of what they are worth now in a few months.  And that is kind of a bummer.  And if you make a living selling cards this has to be extremely worrying and I really have a lot of sympathy for those who do right now.

But one could also argue, and a lot of people have been arguing for years, that the money has ruined the hobby in so many ways that scaring it off isn't a bad idea.

Card trimmers no longer able to make a living out of scamming people?  Nobody caring about the difference between a PSA 9 and a PSA 10 anymore?  Maybe even PSA going bankrupt?  The schadenfreude associated with seeing millionaires selling off their vanity collections and only getting a fraction of what they paid for them?  There are definitely a lot of people out there who would welcome these types of things.

This isn't necessarily to say those would be entirely good outcomes.  Nobody would miss the card trimmers, but they are really only a few bad eggs out there and a lot of good people would be hurt in the process.  And PSA for all its faults (of which there are many) also has a useful function to play.  

We are in interesting times now and nobody has a crystal ball that allows them to see into the future, but I haven't seen any convincing arguments put forth to tell me that card values aren't about to collapse, barring some miracle cure coming around soon.  The only ones I've seen are those on Net54 watching current auction prices which don't seem to have been affected yet.  Which is interesting, but it only tells us where the hobby is at now, not where it is going to be at when the macro economic consequences of this crisis start hitting home in the next couple of months.

Anyway....oh shit, look at that.  This was supposed to be a post about my new bag of Calbee potato chips cards but it got sidetracked a bit there into a big discussion about the Coronavirus.  Anyway, returning to my bag of potato chip cards, I got these two

So basically the 2020 Calbee baseball cards look exactly the same as every set they've issued for the past twenty years, no surprises.  The card on the right is from a "The Record" subset and thus deviates from the stupid Calbee photography rules by giving us a picture of Seichi Uchikawa fielding rather than batting.  Looking at the regular card of Hisayoshi Chono on the left though it seems like the stupid rules are still in effect for them!

I might actually try to buy a few bags of these this year and return to the simple roots of collecting a set pack by pack.