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!

The Lonely Collector and Takara Game Sets

I took a trip to visit my parents in Canada earlier this year and one of the things I found while going through boxes of my old stuff was the above:  a 1990 Takara Hanshin Tigers game set.

These were actually the first Japanese cards I ever owned, I bought them at a card show in Kingston in 1991, years before I ever set foot in Japan or really had any interest in the country.  There was a dealer who had a huge pile of Takara game sets of various teams in a bin for $1 each.  Nobody, not even the dealer, knew anything about them, they were just novelty items that he had stumbled onto somehow (I'm curious what the back story was there) and was trying to get rid of.

I was 15 and I thought they looked neat, so I chose a Hanshin Tigers one and paid the man his dollar.  I chose the Tigers because I had read somewhere that Cecil Fielder had played for a team called the Tigers in Japan in 1989 and was hoping maybe they had stuck a card of him into the set even though it was from 1990.  They didn't, and I had no idea who the other players were or how to read any of it!

But my interest in the game didn't die there.  I brought it with me to the card shop my dad and I had co-founded and at which my best friend Mike also worked.  It just sat there for a few months.  Then one slow weekend Mike and I were bored and we noticed the game sitting there.  We had no idea how to read anything, but it came with dice and a fold out playing field and we could kind of intuitively figure out how it was meant to be played just by looking everything over.

So we decided to create an MLB version of it. We got regular baseball cards of all the star players in 1992 and, based on their statistics from the previous year, created a pretty complex schematic for awarding hits, home runs, etc to players based on combinations of dice rolls. We then tried playing our new game.  And it sucked at first, but after a few iterations we were able to have it make a bit more sense.  We played it a few times during slow times over the course of the year, but our enthusiasm waned after a while.  Making the game seemed a lot more fun that actually playing it was.

Since we never used the cards, they are still in mint condition.  The dice are lost to the ages, as are the original instructions, though the fold out field was still with it.  The thing I really would have loved to find, but didn't, were our hand written schematics for each player that we had drawn up.

Anyway, fast forward to 2019 and I was strolling through Yahoo Auctions looking for deals and stumbled on a 1997 Takara Yakult Swallows team game which was very cheap and I decided to pull the trigger on it for old time's sake.

It's basically the same stuff as my 1990 Tigers set was: cards, dice, fold out playing field and instructions.

 The playing field is pretty cool and exactly the same as the 1990 one. This brings me back.

 I've never really been into Takara cards as cards since the design is kind of blah, but there are a lot of them.

 The backs of each gives you the schematic for the rolls of the dice for that player (each is unique).

The big difference between 1991 me and 2019 me is that the latter can read Japanese!  So 28 years after buying my first one of these things I've finally gotten around to reading the instructions and figuring out how this thing is played! And it looks pretty fun, very similar to how Mike and I imagined it (Dave put up an English translation of the basics here).

But the problem is that I now live in Japan and Mike now lives in Seattle and I haven't seen him in person in over a decade.  So....shit, I can't play it with him.

(Sad face).

Fortunately though as a father I have in my care two small human beings who I created and who may someday be interested in playing this game with me.  They are a bit too young and a bit too not able to sit still for more than 3 seconds and also a bit too not really knowing how to play baseball to make good opponents right now, but in a few years I think they will be.  When the time is right I'm going to whip this out and make them play it with me!

Its fun to have small things to look forward to.