2024 Topps Stadium Club NPB complete set for $3.40

 
As I mentioned last week one of my new collecting hobbies is buying complete sets that I find for insanely cheap prices.  This week's installment is the entire 216 card regular set of 2024 Topps Stadium Club NPB which I bought for 500 Yen ($3.40 US).

As with my 2024 Epoch set I bought this one from an obvious case-breaker who was ditching surplus regular cards that people who do that constantly create.  This one came with the cards kind of interestingly wrapped. If you go to ATMs in Japan (not sure if its the same in North America) they have complimentary stacks of envelopes for people to put cash they withdraw into if they want one.  I guess this guy just grabbed a whole stack of them to use as free-to-him packing material since that is what the cards came enclosed in!

Dave wrote a good review of this set when he got one a few months ago in which he expressed surprise at the fact that he actually really likes it.  Flipping through the cards myself I have to say that I know exactly what he means.  I haven't really liked what I've seen from Topps' NPB sets in the past, but this is a pretty nice one.  Very good photography.  These are the cards of my beloved Dragons (and you can click on Dave's review to see more examples of nice photos on cards).

Also, and this is kind of random, but one thing I hate about BBM and Epoch is that they both use the same card stock and printing process as each other to make their cards which means that flipping through a stack of BBM cards has the same tactile feel in your hands, and also the same look, as doing so with a stack of Epoch cards.  I have no idea what it is called or what the technical aspects of it are, but Topps cards are obviously produced differently using slightly different material and the cards just feel different in your hands which I kind of like.  

Anyway, for $3.40 this was a pretty good deal.  

Also, on a side note, I attended my first ball game of 2025 at the Dome last night.  I got to sit in the right field seats with my family and watch the Dragons come from behind to beat the Swallows 4-3 which was an immensely satisfying experience.  The Dragons are coming off of three straight last place finishes which got so frustrating that I didn't go to a single game last season.  They still have a losing record this year but their mediocrity is a bit less pronounced and they are actually only 2.5 games out of third place (which would get them into the playoffs for the first time in over a decade if they can pull that off).  Its not much but its something!

Baseball Cards at a Dragons Game

 

I took my kids to a game at the Nagoya Dome yesterday.  It was an interleague game - Dragons vs. Hawks.  

My son has really gotten into baseball this year so there was a lot of excitement building up to the big day.  He made the above sign, which says "Dragons" and features the Calbee cards of some of this year's players (basically all the ones that appear in Series 1 that he has gotten so far - he's been getting lots of doubles of Yohei Oshima for some reason).  So it was pretty cool to get out there and hold that up for the first time.

The Dome was a sell out crowd (Sunday plus interleague play = everyone wants to go).  We had seats on the first base side, near the outfield.  

The Hawks scored once in the top of the 1st inning, so I was a bit concerned the game would end in disappointment.  But the Dragons came back to score three in the bottom half, including an RBI double by Dayan Viciedo who is my son's favorite player so we got to do a lot of excited cheering from that point on.

They went on to win 7-3, which was a great outcome.  The Dragons season had been collapsing prior to the start of interleague play - they dropped 9 out of 10 going into it, but the've picked up the pace now and took 2 out of 3 from both the Eagles and the Hawks and have crawled their way back to near .500.  

It was a pretty awesome day - I got to smother my kids in Dragons merch and except for my daughter falling asleep on my lap in the fifth (very difficult balancing act when you are squeezed into those tiny seats) everything went well and the kids were quite happy when we went to the train station for the ride home afterwards.  

The Calbee Regionals Part 2: Tokai

 In this post we'll take a look at the Calbee regionals that were issued here in the Tokai region. Starting here makes sense both because I live in the Tokai region and because a lot of regional series were released by Calbee here over the years.

The Region

Tokai is centred on the city of Nagoya, home of the Chunichi Dragons.  With about 10 million people living in Nagoya and its suburbs its Japan's third largest urban area.

The city has kind of a bad wrap as an ugly, grey industrial blight on the landscape.  Actually its a fairly well earned wrap.  This for example is the type of scenery that accompanies your typical Nagoya wedding hall.

Its not all bad though.  The Osu area has some cool side streets with lots of neat shops that are fun to stroll through

The TV Tower is kind of a neat landmark too:

It was actually destroyed by Godzilla in 1964, a fact which very few landmarks can boast of:

Its also got a castle and the tallest train station in the world.  Its hard to believe but this city actually has a long history which has unfortunately mostly been bulldozed out of existence.  But the same can be said of pretty much any Japanese city so I wouldn't hold it against Nagoya too much. 

It is also the location where most of Mr. Baseball was filmed.  So Tom Selleck spent a bit of time here shortly after Magnum P.I. ended, which is sort of neat if you think about it.

The Calbee Tokai Series

As far as I can tell, Calbee released six series between 1973 and 1984 exclusively in the Tokai region.  Some of these are extremely hard to find.

1973 Calbee

Cards #210 to 236 of the 1973 Calbee set were only released in the Tokai area.  They feature Dragons players including Hall of Famers Morimichi Takagi and Senichi Hoshino.  It also features a manager card of Wally Yonomine, which I think is the only Calbee cards of his ever produced.

This is one of the hardest series from one of the hardest sets out there to collect.  There are probably only a few dozen copies of each card still in existence and since this is probably the most popular set among vintage Calbee collectors, prices are quite high - even the common cards are worth over $100 each.  There is a copy of the Yonamine card for 56,500 Yen (about $500 US) on Yahoo auctions right now.

The high prices have kept me from going after the cards from this series, but they are pretty cool.

1974-75 Calbee

The 1974-75 Calbee set is one I don't write about too much since I'm not actively pursuing it, but I do have a small collection of them on the go which I add to from time to time.  Its a 935 card set so quite big, and two of the series in it were only issued in the Tokai area.

The first (which came out in 1974) runs from card #73 to 90, featuring Dragons players including Tagaki, Hoshino and Yazawa.  These are pretty rare too.  There are only two cards from this series available on Yahoo Auctions right now, which is even fewer than for the 1973 series.  But prices are way cheaper, singles seem to go for between $10 and $20 each or so.  I'm guessing the lower price is probably attributable to fewer collectors trying to piece this set together.

The second (which came out in 1975) runs from card #792 to 827 and basically has the same player selection.  These seem to be a bit less rare than the lower numbered series since there are more than a dozen singles from it available right now.  The price range is about the same, $10 to $20 each or so.

This is one of the things that makes the 1974-75 Calbee set a bit more do-able than the 1973 one, the regional issues haven't been priced into the stratosphere.

I have a couple of the higher number Tokai series in my collection, but I'm not actively adding them to my collection right now.

1975-76-77 Calbee

The "monster" set has one series from #37 to 72 which was released only in the Tokai region.  This is the only Tokai regional series that I have actually tried to collect since I'm working on the set, and I've written about it here before (here and here). At the moment I am just 14 cards short of finishing it up, and I have 2 of the 3 cards of Senischi Hoshino, which are the most valuable.

The cards from this series are about the same as the ones from 1974-75 in terms of rarity and price.  Actually the price may have gone up a bit as a direct result of me buying them.  When I started I was able to buy them in the $10 each range, but these days its hard to find them for under $20 and I think that is because of me.  When there are only a handful of cards available, one guy buying them up can have an outsized impact on the price.  Maybe when I'm finished the prices will go back down again!

1977 Calbee

In 1977 Calbee released a stand alone set (as opposed to a series within a larger set). This seems to have been released only in Nagoya city itself as opposed to the Tokai region as a whole as each card has the "Na" from "Nagoya" on it.  It is a 36 card set (Engel lists it as JC 5d) and unlike other Tokai area releases it features players from other teams as well as the Dragons.

This set is very rare and very expensive.  Prices on commons start at about $50 and there is a Willie Davis card which is going to set you back a lot (one is available on Yahoo Auctions right now for 30,000 Yen, about $300 US).

I don't have any of these cards and don't think I'll ever make a pass at that set!

1984 Calbee

After 1977 Calbee took a bit of a breather and didn't release another Tokai series until 1984.  That year cards numbered 641 to 690 in its main set were only released in the Tokai area and all feature Dragons players.

These cards are also pretty rare and expensive, there are a few available on Yahoo Auctions right now and the cheapest starting bid of any of them is 4,000 Yen (about $40).

The existence of this series and a significant number of other very expensive short printed series were a major factor in me putting aside my 1984 Calbee project.  I like the set with its distinctive look and I have about 200 cards from it, but there are about 200 or so short printed ones (of which the Tokai regionals represent about 1/4) which would set me back 50-100$ each for and there is no way I'm willing (or able) to spend that kind of money on it.  So I'm kind of debating whether to give it up completely or just go for the non-short printed ones, which are way more affordable.


Anyway, that concludes my summary of the Tokai regional issues.  Basically the ones from the 1974-75 and 1975-76-77 sets remain affordable (despite seeming to be about equally rare) while the ones from the other sets are all insanely expensive.

The Patient Collector: My 1975-76 Calbee Set Proceeds at a Snail's Pace, but it Does Proceed

I am still plugging away at the 1975-76 Calbee monster set.  A dealer put four cards from the rare series that was only issued in Nagoya  (which runs from card #37 to #72 in the set) up for auction last week.  I put bids on three of them which I needed but only walked away with one, card #43 featuring Dragons slugger Tatsuhiko Kimata.  Kimata isn't a Hall of Famer but is a pretty decent Hall of Very Gooder, in a 19 year career, all with the Dragons, he made eight all star teams and finished up just 124 hits shy of the 2,000 mark.

The addition of Kimata gives me 22 cards from the Nagoya series, which is more than half of them, so I am making progress.  It was a bit disappointing to lose the auction for the other two though as the cards from this series (and the other two rare Hiroshima only regional issues in the set) are getting harder to find and almost never seem to pop up in auctions anymore.

Its also challenging to be working on a 1472 card set in which every card remaining on my checklist is one I have to devote a lot of time and effort to tracking down. The 1987 Calbee set, which has about 1/3 as many cards and is less scarce took me seven years of solid effort to finish.  I think the most realistic timeline for me to finish this one, barring some miracle, is about 15 more years.  Which is not a timescale most set collectors are willing to contemplate.  But this is Japan, where perseverance is a trait valued above all others.  So onward I go with this! A snail's pace is still a pace.

Some more 1976 Pepsi Round Menko

My 1976 Pepsi Round Menko collection took a pretty good step forward the other day with the addition of these babies.

I really do love the mid-70s Pepsi sets since they are quite colorful and just look pretty cool.  The cards are kind of hard to find (Engel rates them R2 on his rarity scale) and, being menko, most of them that still exist are in pretty rough shape (though this lot is in decent condition).

I'm really curious about these cards and how they were distributed back in the 1970s.  Pepsi issued several sets in the mid-1970s that all had one thing in common: the Chunichi Dragons.  For some reason all of their sets seem to have only been issued in Nagoya (home of the Dragons, and me!) since, with the exception of a few Sadaharu Oh cards.

This is kind of weird for a big corporation like Pepsi that does business nationwide.  Nagoya and the surrounding suburbs (the Chubu Metropolitan area) has about 9 million people and is Japan's third largest urban centre, so its not a rural backwater.  But at the same time, back in the 70s and even today it paled in comparison to Japan's two baseball centres in the Kanto (Tokyo) and Kansai (Osaka/Kobe/Kyoto) regions which combined had about 2/3 of all the team in Japan (less today but still considerable).

So its kind of a mystery, why lavish Nagoya baseball fans with these awesome sets but not Tokyo or Osaka, which would have been more logical choices?  My main guess is simple convenience: the Dragons might have been way more willing partners in business and might have sold the rights to produce the cards to Pepsi cheaply (free?) while the more popular Giants and Tigers in Tokyo and Osaka might not have been interested.

Its also probably a by product of the weakness of NPB as an organization back in the 70s (and today) - card makers would negotiate with teams rather than NPB for licenses, which would have made creating a team set like these ones a lot easier and cheaper than making a league wide one (though oddly there aren't a lot of team sets from the 70s, at least relative to other types of sets).

Of course the downside though is that you create a big promotion that is only going to be used in one city, so I'm not sure if this actually spurred sales of Pepsi (and Mirinda and Patio, two other drinks sold by Pepsi which were also in the promotion).

Another thing I remain curious about is how these things were distributed.  I've never seen any sort of ephemera related to them - no packs or boxes or advertising signs or anything.  Which leads me to suspect that they were simply distributed to Nagoya area stores that sold Pepsi and cashiers would hand them out to customers.  But did they give them out on a one bottle/one menko basis?  Or were these prizes that only some bottle purchasers got?

So much we don't know about these, I hope to one day solve some of these riddles but in the meantime I'm satisfied to just add these to my collection!

The Most Insanely Colorful Set of All Time: 1975 Pepsi Dragons Menko

 Today I present some cards from the 1975 Pepsi Dragons set (JCM 71).  It is the most colorful set of cards....or anything for that matter...that I have ever seen.  I feel I should probably have put a disclaimer at the top of the post warning that these cards may induce photosensitive epileptic seizures in some readers.  They are that insanely colorful.  They make the 1972 and 1975 Topps sets look like 1948 Bowmans.

I fell in love with this set a couple of years ago when I saw the first images of it online, but I hadn't been able to get any actual cards from it until recently.  Its a fairly rare set (Engel rates it R2) and was probably only issued in the Nagoya area (it only features Chunichi Dragons players).  Every once in a while a beat up little pile of them would show up on Yahoo Auctions with a high BIN price, but never anything enticing enough for me to buy one.  I waited so long I was getting tempted to splurge on one of the beat up ones just to have a single from the set though.

Then it happened.  An antique dealer (love em!) put a huge pile of them up for auction last week with a low starting bid and I scooped up an amazing find of these.  72 of them, almost all in minty condition!  What a haul!

 When I received them, most of them were wrapped in bundles of 8 like this:

Its pretty flimsy but I suspect this is how they were originally distributed.  These were given out in selected stores one by one to the purchasers of Pepsi and other drinks put out by Pepsi Co like Mirinda (a Spanish drink that used to be sold in Japan but no longer is).  I assume they had stacks of these by the cash register and just handed them out. That must have been a pretty cool site.  I'm curious if they had any similarily colorful promotional ads for this campaign (posters, etc), as those would be neat.

I mentioned that "almost all" of the cards I got were minty.  One of these bundles had obviously been dropped by somebody as all the cards had the same dinged lower left corner, but otherwise the cards all looked like they had come straight from the factory.

The backs of the cards aren't quite as colorful as the fronts, but then nothing is:

Ah....colors!

 One of the things that surprised me (in addition to the colors of course) about the cards was how big they are.  Looking at them in photos omline I had assumed they were the same size as the tobacco sized menko, but these are actually much bigger, the dimensions are close to those of standard modern baseball cards (just slightly narrower).  And they are on insanely thick cardboard, even for menko, which makes them kind of neat to hold.

 The complete set has 20 cards and guess what? I was able to put together an entire set from the lot!  Here they are:

Its got a few Hall of Famers, the most notable being Wally Yonamine (manager) Morimichi Takagi (who would also later manager the Dragons), Senichi Hoshino and Kenichi Yazawa.  It also has two American players: Ron Woods and Gene Martin.

One enticing thing that eludes me though is that while I have a "complete set" I do not have a "complete master set".

There are quite a few major variations in the 20 cards in the set, basically the same card comes in multiple color schemes.  For example, here are two of the Wally Yonamine cards, same picture but radically different background color schemes (also one has silver embossing while the other doesn't):

According to Engel there are up to four different versions of each card, though it doesn't seem to actualy be known how many variations exist in total.  There could  be as many as 80 cards in the "master set" if each card comes in four different color variations.

Unfortunately my lot wasn't big enough to figure that out, but putting together a master set would definitely be a challenging goal to pursue and one that probably nobody has accomplished to date.  I also have to keep looking for cards from the 1976 Pepsi Menko set which I haven't been fortunate enough to find a major pile of yet.  I'll have to find another big lot to do that.

Just writing this post has made me want to drink a Pepsi, so I can say that they are a pretty effective marketing tool.  For some reason in recent years it has become difficult to find Pepsi in Japan though.  Pepsi Co still sells tons of drinks in Japan, but for some reason they don't seem to sell just regular Pepsi anymore (just crappy versions of it like Pepsi Next or whatever.....)  Its kind of unfortunate as Pepsi put out a lot of really cool baseball promotional items in Japan over the years, the most recent that I recall being in 2001 when they put little Ichiro figures onto bottles of Pepsi.  I have a set of those somewhere that I actually put together in 2001, I'll have to dig them out for another post!

Some 1976 Pepsi Dragons

Another day another Yahoo Auctions pick up.

I got these four from the 1976 Pepsi Chunichi Dragons Round Menko set (JRM 13 in Engel).  I had picked up seven others from the set earlier this year, so these give me 11 in total.  I really love this set, the bold colors and gold foil give them a really striking appearance.

I'd like to complete this as a set, but I'm a bit unsure of how many there are.   Engel says there are "60 +" cards in the set, implying there may be some not in the catalogue.  He also only lists 29 players and two team logo cards, but most were issued with different colored ink on the back, either in pink, brown or violet, which I think gets you to 60 cards with those variations.  The four cards I got in this lot were all brown ink backed, though the ones in my earlier acquisition came in a variety of colors.

Fortunately these new additions contained the card of Hall of Famer Wally Yonamine, who managed the Dragons from 1972 to 1977.  He is of course also famous for being the first American inducted into the Japanese Hall of Fame.  I only had one old bromide of him, so I'm glad to add a menko featuring him to my collection. According to Engel his card is the most valuable in the set.

I also got Morimichi Takagi, another Hall of Famer (and recent Dragons manager) in the lot too, which is kind of cool.  Takagi's card is the only one that doesn't say "Pepsi" or "Pepsi-Cola" on it, but instead "Patio" which I assume was another soft drink that Pepsi sold in the 70s (doesn't exist today!)

These were a pretty huge steal, just 500 Yen (about 5$ US) for the lot! The Yonamine alone books for 35$ in Engel, so this is another one of those "Japanese under appreciating their old cards as reflected in how cheap they sell for" things.  The Yonamine does have a small crease in it but otherwise they are in pretty nice shape.

Score! (Book)

This is a neat little thing I picked up a while ago, a Chunichi Dragons Scorebook with Satoru Sugiyama on the cover.

Sugiyama could be described as a "Hall of Very Gooder".  In a career lasting from 1948 to 1960 he was a 3 time all star, led the league in home runs in 1952 and had a few solid seasons in the 1950s where he was in the top ten in a number of offensive categories.  He spent most of his career with the Dragons here in Nagoya and was born and died here in Aichi prefecture - the prototypical home town player.

I love this scorebook - the colorful artwork on the cover is just amazing.  It looks like the same sort of art you see used on menko from the early 50s and I wondered if this might have been "borrowed" from one, but so far haven't found one that used this (though I haven't looked too hard).

Its not too big, its like a pocket sized booklet with dimensions a bit smaller than a postcard.  It has seven pages in it, each with a very simple scorecard printed on it.  The back looks like this:

It was published by the "King Company" according to the text on the bottom left.  Otherwise I guess its self explanatory.

Sugiyama's career with Chunichi lasted from 1948 to 1958, with his best years coming in the first half of his tenure so this was likely published in the early 50s.

Picking over the remains of a dying card shop gets: 1976 Pepsi Cola Chunichi Dragons Cards

 One of the big stores in Nagoya, Caps, is closing up shop and recently I've been taking advantage of their online liquidation sale to pick up some neat oddball items.  The best so far are these Pepsi Cola Chunichi Dragons circular menko which I am completely in love with.

I've seen various Pepsi Cola Dragons issues like these over the years, it seems they had some sort of promo deal with the team in the late 1970s.  Not all of them are circular, some were rectangular like these ones.

The lot of seven I bought has a pretty decent player selection - Yukitsura Matsumoto, T. Martin, Kenichi Yazawa, Hisato Aoyama, Hiroaki Inoue, Yasushi Tao and a gold embossed Dragons team logo one.  The colors are quite striking (especially Matsumoto's) and the gold embossing is quite cool for cards of this era.

The backs are cool, featuring the player's name, number and position, a trivia question about the rules of baseball and a rock-scissors-paper (janken) symbol.

Usefully they also tell us the player's age, which allows me to date them to 1976 since it says Yasushi Tao was a mere 22 years old when this came out!

I'm not sure what the checklist for these is (buying a copy of Engle is still on my to do list) but I might add them to my list of things I'm collecting.

I have a few more things I have picked up from Caps recently which I'll highlight in future posts. I have mixed feelings about their liquidation.  On the one hand I love getting bargains on neat stuff.  On the other seeing a card shop go out of business brings back memories of me and my dad's store closing down way back in 1993 and all the sad memories that accompany that!  So much effort into making a shop work that it kind of hurts to see it all getting broken apart, even if it isn't your store.

Don Newcombe the Dragon

Don Newcombe passed away yesterday at 92.  The baseball blogosphere is full of tributes, and I thought I'd just do one here that focuses on a claim to fame that he has which nobody is talking about: he was the first MLB player to play in Japan.

In 1962 he came to Nagoya, the very city I am writing this post in, to play for our Chunichi Dragons.
He wasn't the only former Major Leaguer to come over that season, Hall of Famer Larry Doby also played for the Dragons that year.  But Newcombe made his debut on June 23rd while Doby made his on June 30th, so Newcombe beat him by a week to claim the honor.

On a side note, that really makes Doby the perennial second man.  He was the second African American to play in MLB, the second to manage a team, and also the second MLBer to play in NPB.  The guy always had someone just a bit ahead of him (and Newcombe is the only one of those guys who wasn't named Robinson)!

There is a pretty cool picture of Newcombe with the Dragons here.

Another odd tidbit about Newcombe's time with the Dragons is that he was mainly a position player (splitting time between the outfield and first base) rather than a pitcher like he had been with the Dodgers.  He only appeared in one game as a pitcher during his Japan days and 82 as a position player.  He put up decent numbers for a pitcher, hitting .262 with 12 home runs.  For any other pitcher this would be a really weird way of ending their career, but Newcombe had been one of the best hitting pitchers of his generation.

Anyway, he'll be missed here in Nagoya too!

Beautiful Cards: 1975 Calbee Takagi versus Kouno

I picked up a few more cards from the 1975-76 Calbee set the other day, mostly from the Dagekisen Series (Slugger Series might be the best translation) subset.

As I have mentioned before, I absolutely love Calbee cards from this set.  It comes about as close to a perfect set as they go - full bleed photo with fantastic photography throughout (all the more impressive when you consider there are almost 1500 cards in total).  The kanji on the front of the card add to the appeal, while not being overly obtrusive on the image.  The set also has the advantage of probably being one of the most difficult in the world to collect owing to its size and the scarcity of some cards in it (in fact all the cards in it are, while not necessarily rare, also not particularly easy to find either).  I guess that last thing might be a questionable benefit, but the point is that as a collecting challenge it can keep you going for years on end (without necessarily breaking the bank if you are in Japan, until you get to the point where the expensive ones are all you have left on your want list).

This one card above is number 774, it pictures　Kazumasa Kouno of the Giants sliding safely back into first base under the tag of the Dragon`s Morimichi Takagi.  According to the card back the next batter (Horiuchi) grounded into a 6-4-3 double play, eliminating him from the basepaths.  I like that kind of detail.

Its a pretty great photo, taken at the the Nagoya Baseball Stadium which was the Dragon`s home until their move to the horrendous Nagoya Dome in 1997.  That same stadium was the location where most of the baseball scenes in the Tom Selleck movie Mr. Baseball were filmed, which did a really good job of capturing the feel of an old style Japanese baseball stadium (I`ve attended games at Koshien, which is similar, and the Nagoya Dome that replaced this one.  The former is amazing, the latter is lifeless).

Five things I like about the photo on this card:

1) The all dirt infield that extends as far as the eye can see;
2) Old school umpire uniform that made them look like they were wearing a business suit;
3) Old school Chunichi uniforms with the dash of red that was removed in the 1980s when they switched to a blue/white color scheme.
4) Big ad for insurance printed on the wall in the background.  Pretty mundane product but the bold lettering provides a cool backdrop
5) Everything has a yellow-greenish tint.  Most of the cards in this set featuring photos taken during night games have that effect. I guess it was the nature of the lighting they used back then.  I like the look a lot better than what you get from the flourescent white lighting in modern Domes.