1985: The Year Calbee's Lotte Orions Embargo Fell

 

One weird thing about Japanese baseball card history is that for a 12 year stretch between 1973 and 1984 the main baseball card maker (Calbee) and the corporate owner of one team (Lotte, owner of the Orions, now the Marines) had a feud of some sort so severe that Calbee didn't produce any cards of any Orions players.

The result is that for that entire period - spanning the entirety of Calbee's golden age of the 1970s and the first half of the mini card era of the 1980s - no Orions player features on any Calbee baseball card (except the odd one who gets a cameo on the card of a player from another team).  

In the US this would be the equivalent of Topps having had a feud with the owners of the Chicago Cubs and not producing any cards of Cubs players between 1952 and 1963.  That would have been weird if it had happened, right?

I really want to know more about the details of this feud but there is very little about it out there.  The main explanation given is that the main line of business for both Calbee and Lotte (then and also now) was not baseball cards or baseball teams, but rather producing snacks.  This meant that they were competitors in their main business and Calbee, not wanting to give Lotte a  backdoor form of free advertising on their cards, refused to make cards featuring Orions players. (Edited to add: as per the discussion in the comments by twycchang, the cause of the feud seems to have originated from the Lotte side rather than the Calbee side, rendering a bit of the discussion in the next paragraph redundant, but overall the fact that these two companies were in a feud remains the same). 

While its easy to see the logic at work there, this explanation has always fell a bit short to me.  This was not solely a rational business decision, it feels like there must have been some level of personal animosity or just sheer spite involved in that move.  I mean the amount of "free advertising" Lotte would have received by having Orions players pictured on cards would have been pretty minimal on the one hand, while the benefit to Calbee of featuring Lotte players (and thus attracting fans of Lotte players to buy their chips) surely would have outweighed whatever slight advantage Lotte would have obtained.  There must be a bit more to this story than we know about, but what that is would just be speculation on my part.

Equally interesting is the question of why, in 1985, Calbee's embargo on Orions players came to an end.  Unlike the question of why it existed in the first place, my Japanese language Google searches do not turn up any theories about this.  Both companies were still competitors at the time, so the purported rationale (no free advertising) would seem to have still made sense if that were the actual reason for it.  I was curious if maybe there was a change in leadership in Calbee that explained the shift, but there wasn't - company founder Takashi Matsuo was still the head of the company and wouldn't retire until 1987 (at which point his son took over).  Its a bit of a mystery that I'm curious about - why did Calbee and Lotte suddenly make up with each other after such a long and seemingly spiteful feud?

Anyway, the result of the end of the feud was that the 1985 Calbee set was the first in history to feature Orions players.  There were some really important players who thus had their first Calbee card that year.  Notable among them were Hiromitsu Ochiai, probably the best player in NPB during the 1980s who won a remarkable three triple crowns.  He had played his first game in 1979 but it wasn't until 1985 that Calbee collectors got a card of him.  Japanese collectors consider his first card in the set (71) to be his "rookie card", though he actually appeared on cards in Takara sets before 1985. He also appears on a few other cards in other series.

Hall of fame pitcher Choji Murata also has his "rookie card" in this set even though he made his debut in 1968 and was nearing the end of his career in 1985 (and like Ochiai had appeared in Takara and also Yamakatsu sets previously).  He is very famous in Japan for having been the first pitcher to undergo Tommy John surgery (edited to note: he may have been the second), and then making a very dramatic comeback in his career afterwards.

Michiyo Arito is another notable Orion who debuted in the 85 Calbee set. Unlike Murata and Ochiai he isn't in the hall of fame, but he is a member of the Meikyukai with more than 2,000 career hits.  His biggest claim to fame, at least in English language sources, is his appearance as the antagonist in the stories of other players.  He seems to have been a kind of hard headed traditionalist who just plain didn't get along with other people. Towards the end of his playing days he took over as Orions manager and famously decided to trade away Ochiai - by far the best player in the game who had just won the triple crown - because he didn't approve of his independent attitude.  The great Leron Lee, who played 11 years with Lotte as Arito's team mate (and set the career batting average record in NPB) also had some scathing things to say about his managerial style and personality (cited in Robert Whiting's book You Gotta Have Wa).  He was a disastrous manager and the team finished last place in 2 out of his 3 seasons as manager (and only second to last in the other).

Speaking of which, Leron Lee is probably the biggest  victim of the Calbee-Lotte feud since it encompassed almost his entire career in Japan.  For reasons that I don't understand he is the only big Orions star who Calbee didn't give a card in the 1985 set.  In fact they never gave him a card at all - he played until 1987 but doesn't feature in the 1986 or 1987 Calbee sets either despite being a regular (and productive) player right up until his last season.  His brother Leon, who played for other teams, has lots of cards in 1980s Calbee sets but for some reason they never bothered to make one of Leron, which is a massive historical injustice to one of the best players in NPB during that time frame.  I don't know why that happenned - in Whiting's book it is noted that Leron wasn't very well treated by Lotte fans despite being such a great player for them, which may have something to do with it -  but I think it stinks.

Yamakatsu: The Most Remarkable Card Maker You've Probably Never Heard of

 In addition to Calbee cards from the 70s and 80s, recently I've been focusing my collecting efforts on Yamakatsu cards from the 70s.  They are a nice compliment to a Calbee collection since they are so.....unpredictable.  Yamakatsu only produced baseball cards for a six year stretch between 1975 and 1981 and in that time period they produced 19 sets (according to Engel).  Do you know how many of those 19 sets are standard sized baseball cards?  One! The JY 6 set issued in 1978 is their only set made up of cards with anything close to standard card dimensions, an occurrence so unusual for Yamakatsu that Engel actually makes note of it in his description of the set.

The other 18 sets?  Well you've got:

Huge postcard size sets like this one.

Even Bigger card sets the size of 8 by 10 photos like these beauties.

Yet bigger still  sets whose card size is comparable to the landmass of some of the mid-sized 19th century pre-unification German principalities, like these which are probably the biggest regular baseball cards ever made.

Cards with metal badges in them like this baby that my scanner had a bit of trouble handling but I can assure you is totally awesome:

Then you've also got the tiny cards like the 1979 and 1980 sets where they made the unusual choice of going from making the largest cards in history to the smallest almost overnight.

There really is no parallel for a card maker experimenting with such a wide range of card sizes and designs in such a short period (or over a long period for that matter).

This also gives anyone collecting Yamakatsu an interesting point to brag about: These are the most difficult cards in the world to collect by far.

That isn't to say that they are the rarest or most expensive: they aren't.  But they are the most difficult in terms of the one thing card collectors fret more about than any other: how to store them!

Its so cute to see American card collectors constantly struggling to figure out how to store their pre-1957 cards because they are a fraction of an inch larger than post-1957 cards.  Ha!  The Yamakatsu collector has to worry about how to store cards so widely varied in size that the largest is about 40 times bigger than the smallest, and many sets fall somewhere between those.  Also some of them have jagged metal badges protruding from them which will damage any cards placed next to them in a stack or box.

Its the perfect collector's storage nightmare really.  Which is why I haven't jumped into Yamakatsu collecting with both feet yet.  In terms of set collecting I'm focused on the "Post card sized or smaller" end of things, with a smattering of the larger stuff as part of a type collection.

I just picked up the card at the top of this post, which is a 1978 Choji Murata from the set Engel catalogues as JY10.  Its postcard sized and I've decided to start working on this set because its actually quite beautiful - there are some really great photos in it and the bigger size and glossy surface of them gives them a striking appearance that my beloved Calbees of the same era don't quite match.

The fact that it is Choji Murata is also significant.  He was a popular pitcher (inducted to the Hall of Fame in 2005) who famously was the first Japanese player to have Tommy John surgery.  The story is recounted in Robert Whiting's excellent book You Gotta Have Wa.  From a card collector's perspective though its important because Murata played for the Lotte Orions.  Calbee refused to feature players from the Orions in its sets in the 1970s and early 1980s because their owners, Lotte, were a competitor with Calbee in the food and snack industry.  Murata, who debuted in 1968, thus didn' t have his Calbee rookie card until 1985!  So if you want cards of Murata and other Orions players from the 70s, you have to turn to Yamakatsu or some of the other short term makers of the era like Nippon Ham.

The backs of the cards from this set are also kind of cool.  They feature a little write up about the player and the bottom half is then some sort of a baseball lesson, Murata's demonstrating the difference between pitching over arm, side arm and under arm.

For more info on Yamakatsu sets you can check out Dave's excellent overview post on his blog here.  I'm going to try doing some more posts on my recent Yamakatsu pick ups in the near future.