Set Complete! 2012 Georgia Coffee Pro Baseball Foreigner Helpers

 I got the remaining 5 figures I needed to complete my 2012 Georgia Coffee Pro Baseball Foreigner Helpers set!  Ralph Bryant, Orestes Destrade, Randy Bass, Bobby Rose and Alonzo Powell arrived in the mail from a Yahoo Auction seller to finish them up.

I really do like these guys.  They just cheer me up in a way that I need in the middle of a pandemic.

 The player selection is pretty good, all these guys were all stars. Everyone played during the 1980s or 1990s.  Randy Bass and Boomer Wells with their 1983 debuts are the earliest, while Bobby Rose, who played his last season in 2000, is the latest.  Rose was the only guy still playing when I arrived in Japan in 1999 and thus is the only one I remember as an active player here.

Given that these came out in 2012, I'm curious why they didn't have any stars from the 00s in the set.  Tuffy Rhodes would look pretty cool on one of these. 

I got two of the booklets (for Bobby Rose and Orestes Destrade) that came with the figures.  They are pretty cool, featuring a picture of the figure, a player bio and an ad for a Georgia brand battery charger on the front.

 And the back has a checklist of the whole set, along with an illustrated diagram showing how to assemble the figure for those who may have difficulty with whole the "round peg goes in round hole" thing.

This means I still "need" the booklets for the other 6 in order to have the things really complete, but I'm pretty satisfied to go without.  The figures themselves are enough for me.

Cans of Coffee that Come with Baseball Players Attached are Best Cans of Coffee

I made another great discovery at the second hand shop that sells Pokémon figures which I get for my kids.  More baseball figures!

These are from a specific set: the Georgia Pro Yakyu Suketto Gaikokujin set, which translates into the somewhat awkward and maybe a little offensive English title "Georgia Pro Baseball Foreigner Helper Set".

These are one of the things I used to love about living in Japan in the 2000s and early 2010s: free high quality stuff with canned beverages.  These were released in 2012 and came with cans of Georgia coffee.

In Japan, coffee comes in cans, like soft drinks.  People often drink it cold, and you can get them out of vending machines or from fridges in convenience stores.  Tommy Lee Jones is famous here mainly for the surreal ads he used to appear in for canned coffee, like this one:

Back in 2012 if you bought a can of Georgia Coffee you'd get one out of 8 figures of famous foreign ballplayers.  They came in little orange bags attached directly to the cans, you can see a contemporary blog post of what they looked like here.

I was living in Japan in 2012 but wasn't aware of this promotion at the time, probably because I'm not a canned coffee drinker (I am a major coffee drinker, just not from cans).  It used to be really common for drink makers to attach little toys to their products to encourage people to buy them and I used to get really excited about them.  In the early 2000s I remember Pepsi did this quite a bit with various tie ins (Star Wars figures, Gundam figures, model cars, etc - really good stuff considering it was free with a bottle that only cost like 140 Yen).   Since the early 2010s they've become way less common, possibly because they were so expensive to run, which is a shame.

Anyway, I found these figures at the second hand shop for 100 Yen (about 1$ US) each and decided to buy the three they had, featuring Boomer Wells, Warren Cromartie and Brad "Animal" Lesley.

Cromartie is featured just after completing a swing:

Animal is doing his thing:


And Boomer looks like he is about to hit a long ball.


The checklist is pretty good.  The set features:

Boomer Wells
Warren Cromartie
Animal Lesley
Bobby Rose
Randy Bass
Alonzo Powell
Ralph Bryant
Orestes Destrade

In addition to the figure you also got a little full color booklet featuring your player on the cover and an illustrated checklist of the set inside.

That is pretty insane value for the 130 Yen (about $1.20 US) that each of these cans of coffee cost.  And you got coffee with it too.

I was so enamored with these that I went on Yahoo Auctions last night and tracked down the other five that I needed for the set and bought them.  So when they arrive in the mail I'll have the whole thing.

I'm not a huge fan of figurines in general, but these little ones featuring charicatures of the players (rather than attempts at more realistic depictions of them) have really caught my fancy.  They are just so....so....."cute"  I guess is the word I am looking for.  Which isn't a feature I normally weight highly in making baseball collectible purchase decisions but with these (and my earlier Hanshin Tigers purchase) I think that is exactly what attracts me to them (as well as my being a fan of the players themselves of course).  Their small size also helps since they don't take up much space.

Georgia also released another similar set of baseball figures in 2006 featuring stars of the 1980s (not limited to foreigners) which I think I'm also going to go after.  If I get it, I'll do a post about them too!

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!