Hideki Matsui Home Run Cards

 

I picked up a pile of cards from a set I've found kind of intriguing: the NTV Hideki Matsui Home Run set.

The set features one card for every home run Matsui hit in his career.  The photos aren't generic, but rather are photos from the actual home run that they record.  

Also interesting is that these weren't released as some sort of retrospective set after his career wrapped up.  Rather they were issued throughout his career as he hit more home runs.  I'm not sure how they were distributed, it seems they came out as sets each year rather than being sold one by one as he hit each homer (though I'm not sure on this point).  There are a lot of commemorative card binders floating around out there designed to hold cards from various years of this set, but I'm not super into special binders.

We should acknowledge how much of a gutsy move proposing this set must have been way back at the beginning of Matsui's career. For all anyone knew then he could have suffered a career ending injury or something early on and we'd have been left with this weird set of cards honoring a guy that only hit 64 career home runs that nobody remembers.  Fortunately that didn't happen and he actually hit 507 home runs between NPB and MLB combined.  When he moved to the Yankees the cards continued, only they had to be produced by Upper Deck which had the necessary licenses.  

The cards I have all feature home runs from his 2000 and 2001 seasons, in which he hit career home runs #205 to #271.  The set also commemorates post season home runs, so I've got some cards featuring his home runs in the 2000 Nippon Series as well (this also means the full set is bigger than 507 cards).  

As I was flipping through them it occurred to me that the photo selection in this set is really good.  Unlike the awful photo selection in contemporary sets hey don't just continuously throw pictures of Matsui swinging at the plate and connecting for the home run.  Rather you get a good assortment of interesting shots.  Some of him taking a swing.  Some of him rounding the bases.  Some of him high fiving his team mates. All of them taken from different angles, some quite interesting.  

It ironically means that a set which features only pictures of the exact same player is actually more engaging and less repetitive to flip through than any recent Calbee set featuring hundreds of different players.

I might try to track down a few more of these even though I'm neither a Matsui nor a Giants fan.  For  much older write ups (as in so old that Matsui was still hitting home runs at the time they were composed) on these cards you can see Dave's post here or Jason's post here. 

1993 Calbee Big Size Cards

 I have added another oddball set to my collecting aims: 1993 Calbee Big Size cards.  I won three of them - Hideki Matsui, Tatsunori Hara and Atsuya Furuta,  in an auction last week and they arrived in the mail today!

As the name implies, the set was issued by Calbee, in 1993, and the cards are big size.  Other than that I can't tell you much about them.  I assume they were some sort of mail-in prize that Calbee gave out that year, but can't say that for 100% sure.

There are 27 cards in the set (they are numbered "8/27"etc on the back) but I'm not sure about the entire checklist - Hideo Nomo also has a card in it and a few other big name players seem to as well, though no Ichiro.  The designs of the cards are the same as the regular 1993 Calbee on the front, the backs are slightly different in that they say "1993 Big Size Card"across the top.

The cards are big but not huge.  I wasn't sure what to expect when I ordered them since there was nothing in the photos to provide scale, but they are about twice the size of a regular Calbee card (I put a 2018 Calbee card in the photo for comparison).

From what I can tell, Calbee also did a Big Size Card set in 1990, though unlike these it has a distinct design from the regular set of that year (which itself had two quite different designs).  Those are the only two years for which Google searches for Calbee Big Size Card turns up anything, so I assume they are the only years Calbee did this (edited to note that they made them in 1991 as well according to NPB Guy, and also there was a set in 1992 - there are some pictures of them here!).

The Matsui is probably the key card in the set since it is from his rookie year.  I'm not sure if it counts as a technical "rookie card"since it isn't from the base set, but its pretty cool.  These cards seem to be quite a bit harder to find than the regular 1993 Calbee set, which itself is pretty hard to find.  There are only a few up on Yahoo Auctions and nowhere near enough to put together a list of all 27.  Intriguingly this listing here for a Shigeo Nagashima card from the set comes with a mini plastic  frame that is the right size for the card.  The listing doesn't say so but I wonder if those little frames might have come with the cards as part of the promotion.

Anyway, at 27 cards this seems like a set that shouldn't be too hard to complete even if they aren't easy to find, so I'm putting it on my "to-do"list!

Edit: BONUS CHECKLIST!

Based on the Calbee collector website (in Japanese) who has most of the cards in the set, I've been able to put together a checklist of most of the cards in English below (some only have last names because I can't make out their first names, cards number 8, 22 and 26 I still don't know) for those of you who decide to follow me down this collecting wormhole:

1. Koji Akiyama
2. Kazuhiro Kiyohara
3. Hideo Nomo
4. Daijiro Oishi
5. Hoshino Nobuyuki
6. Takahashi
7. Choji Murata
8.
9. Nishizaki
10. Terushi Nakajima
11. Satoru Komiyama
12. Takeshi Aikou
13. Takahiro Ikeyama
14. Iida
15. Atsuya Furuta
16. Masumi Kuwata
17. Tatsunori Hara
18. Hideki Matsui
19. Shigeo Nagashima
20. Koji Nakata
21. Yutaka Wada
22.
23. Tomonori Maeda
24. Kazuhiro Sasaki
25. Takagi
26.
27. Hiromitsu Ochiai

1994 Calbee Hideki Matsui

I`ve been doing a lot of posts about 1970s era cards recently, but I`ve also added a few beauties to my early 1990s Calbee collection, including a 1994 Calbee Hideki Matsui.

The 1994 Calbee set is, along with most pre-1998 Calbee cards - kind of a hard one to collect since there isn`t a huge supply of them out there.  Yahoo Auctions only has 115 listings for 1994 Calbees at the moment, and these actually come from two different sets.  The main set, which this one is part of, has the player and team names written in diagonal stripes on the lower left and upper right corners of the card.  A second set, which I think was only sold regionally and is thus even harder to find, lacks these stripes, has colored backs (the main set has a black and white back) and each number begins with c. 

This Matsui card (#47) isn`t his rookie card since he appeared in both BBM`s 1993 set and also on a 1993 Calbee card (which has a similar design to this one), and he also has a couple of more cards in the 1994 set.  This makes it a reasonably affordable buy, they seem to go for around 500-1000 Yen each when they show up in auctions (which is how I go this one).  Not sure how much they go for on Ebay.

Anyway, its a cool card - showing Matsui when he was barely out of high school - and is the earliest calbee card I have of him so I`m glad to add it to the collection!