Fake Ichiros and Weird Bidders

 
There is a seller on Yahoo Auctions who I've been watching for a few years now.  A few years ago I bought one of the rare 1994 Calbee Ichiro cards off of him.  This was relatively early in my Japanese baseball card collecting days and I wasn't aware of how prevalent fakes of those cards (there are three of them) were.  Of course mine turned out to be a fake as I discovered later.  Fortunately I only paid about 25$ so it wasn't a huge write-off.

If you click on the guy's Yahoo Auctions page you'll see a huge list of naked lady cards (very NSFW, proceed with caution).  Those are his specialty.  But about once every month or so he'll put out a few baseball cards for sale.  And almost every time he does so, he has one copy of each of the three 1994 Calbee Ichiros.

Over the years I've been watching his auctions (er...just his baseball card auctions) he's probably put up dozens of those Ichiro cards.  Bear in mind that those cards are so rare that there are probably only a few dozen legit copies of them in existence in the first place.  So this should be a huge red flag screaming "FAKE" to anyone out there paying attention.

Yet every time he puts them out, people bid on them and buy them.  This post was inspired by me watching three more end last night, all getting multiple bids (the one in the picture at the top got 14 bids and sold for 4501 Yen, about $40).  

It really doesn't make much sense.  They always sell, but they also usually sell in that 30-50$ price range, which is about 1/10th of what a legit copy would probably be worth.  

Its kind of hard to figure out what is going on with the bidders.  If they think the things are real, they should be bidding them up to much higher prices than that.  If on the other hand they think the things are fake, they shouldn't be bidding at all.  Yet everytime they manage to bid it up to a price that is way too high for a fake and way too cheap for a real one.  What do these bidders think these cards are?

In my case when I bid I thought it was real and I put in a higher bid than what I ended up winning it for with that expectation in mind.  Other bidders pushed it up to about the 25$ level, then jumped ship.  Perhaps there are shill bidders, but looking at the one I linked to above it got bids from 4 separate bidders, two of whom have a ton of feedback and are likely legit bidders, and two of whom have less than 100 feedback and might be shill bidders.  It was won by one of the two with high feedback, and one of the two with low feedback placed the second highest bid, consistent with what you would expect if shill bidding was going on.  But at the same time the other "real" bidder came close to winning it and the "shill" bid only bumped it up a couple hundred Yen.  So even if the two suspect accounts hadn't bid, the card would have sold for almost the same price and therefore shill bidding alone can't account for this irrational pricing.

So I kind of wonder if these real bidders are just suckers like me being taken in?  You'd think they would have caught on by now though, this guy has been at it for years now (though he does have near perfect feedback).  On the other hand, maybe they know and don't care - perhaps they are planning to flip these fakes themselves? 

I don't know exactly what is going on but it sure does stink anyway you look at it.  

The 1997 Calbee Set

 I made a pretty great score on Yahoo Auctions the other day, a 300 card lot of cards from the 1997 Calbee set.

The 1997 Calbee set is an important one.  It is the grandfather of all Calbee sets that have been issued in the 23 years since it came out.  For the 1997 set they went with a simple design - full bleed photo with the player name, number and team name and logo being the only design elements on the front.  Pretty much every Calbee set since 1997 has followed that look with only minor variations.

Likewise, the 1997 set was the first to have a full color back with a player photo,  another design element that every set since has emulated. 

Its got a lot of big stars of the 90s like Ichiro and Hideki Matsui.  It also has one of the first Japanese cards of Tuffy Rhodes, a young Kenji Johjima and a very old Hiormitsu Ochiai.

This 300 card lot was a major score for me because the 1997s are pretty hard to find.  I only had a couple dozen cards from this set before getting these.

In terms of scarcity there is a huge difference between 1997 and 1998 onwards.  You can see this in Yahoo Auctions listings, the below table shows how many cards from each Calbee set from 1990 to 1999 are currently available.  As you can see, from 1990 to 1997 its pretty consistently in the 100 to 300 listings range.  Then in 1998 it jumps to 873 and in 1999 it absolutely explodes to 1916.  Though not in the table, its pretty much remained high like that ever since (with 2002 being one exception, it has only 358 listings which is more in line with pre 1997 numbers)..

This is of course also reflected in the price.  Pre 1997 cards sell for significantly more than what post 1998, and especially post 1999, cards go for.

I've often kind of wondered about that - why did Calbee card production take off in 1998?  Maybe baseball got more popular that year?  Or they just decided to market and distribute their chips more aggressively?  I've never seen anyone answer this question.

Anyway, this scarcity explains why I pounced all over this lot.  Its not uncommon to see post 1998 Calbee cards in big lots like that, but you almost never find 1997 Calbees or anything earlier than that in lots that size.  In fact, I've never seen a 1997 Calbee lot with more than a few dozen cards before.  And since I didn't have many cards in it, this presented the perfect opportunity to get to work on that set.

The set, I should mention, contains 237 cards.  It was issued in four series and the last one (cards 217 to 237) just has 20 cards but was a short printed series in a set that was already fairly scarce so they are almost impossible to find.  I couldn't tell from the listing how many I would get, obviously there would be doubles, but I decided to take a chance.

The cards when they arrived were all pack fresh in the near mint to mint range, which was a nice surprise since a lot of Calbee cards even from the 90s often come with a lot of wear (its usually more like buying a lot of 60s or 70s cards in the US, from a time before people seriously collected).

I was kind of shocked  though that the seller had just thrown them into an envelope with no bubble wrap or anything to protect them, with the cards divided into stacks held together with rubber bands.

So I was a bit like:

But then I was able to take the rubber bands off and found that the cards were all OK, so then I was like:

Its all good.

On the plus side, I was able to put together about 80% of the first three series (1 to 216) including the Ichiro and other star cards (update September 28, 2020: picked some more up, am now over 90% of the way there).  On the downside, the lot didn't contain any of the short prints from 217 to 237, so I'll probably have to shell out serious money for those at some point.

I'm pretty happy with these though and can now add 1997 Calbee to the list of sets I'm getting close to finishing!  The cards I still need are:

 51,  89,  217-221, 223-237.

PSA's Japan Problem

If you've been following certain baseball card forums like Net54 recently, you'll be familiar with the current round of PSA related scandals.   Some of these revolve around sloppiness, like grading reprints as the real deal, while others involve inadvertently  grading high value trimmed cards as though they were unaltered.  The latter in particular is a serious problem as the apparent flaws in PSA's grading process that let trimmed cards skate through created the perfect environment for a cottage industry of fraudsters to spring up. The result is that lots of people have spent money on trimmed cards, particularly through PWCC auctions, which are only worth a fraction of what they paid for them.

This has obviously strained the trustworthiness of the PSA brand with some collectors.  And from a Japanese perspective these scandals probably couldn't come at a worse time since just last November they opened an office in Tokyo and started to offer their services in Japanese.  This expansion makes sense from PSA's perspective as Japan is probably the world's #2 market for sports cards and, as I've talked about before, PSA and other graders until now have had almost no presence in this country, where the hobby is significantly less obsessed with minor differences in condition compared to the US. So the Japanese market represented a pretty sizeable piece of unpicked fruit for PSA and its not surprising they've come ashore here to try to convince the Japanese collecting world of the value of a PSA holder.

The scandals themselves are probably not going to dent PSA's expansion into Japan since almost nobody here  follows Net54 or other US forums.  But they do bring up something which might be way more problematic for PSA, which is that the quality control issues which the current scandals have raised in the US also apply to their grading of Japanese cards.  And one of these might be too big for the Japanese hobby to ignore.

The problem is that even though PSA only recently opened an office here in Japan, they've been grading Japanese cards for years.  And while I'm sure they made the best use of the expertise on Japanese cards available in the US while they did so, that expertise wasn't always deep enough to get stuff right.  And the mistakes they made are in some ways more embarrassing than the ones that have landed them in hot water among American collectors recently.

A prominent example of this is the 1929 Shonen Kurabu Babe Ruth.  This is a well known card among Babe Ruth collectors since its actually one of the more affordable cards issued during his playing days out there.  Its probably more famous outside of Japan than it is in.

PSA used to grade that card as a "1928 Shonen Kulubu."  They got just about everything about that card wrong. I did a post about it 3 years ago and made a list of the things PSA screwed up on it:

"Year: PSA says 1928, actual year is 1929;
Name: PSA says Shonen Kulubu, actual is either Shonen Club or Shonen Kurabu;
Set: PSA says it was a "multi-sport premium", actual set was not sport specific and contained a variety of other subjects.
Photo: PSA says without qualification that it is Babe Ruth hitting his first home run of the 1926 season, Old Cardboard notes that while this is what it is commonly described as it has not been confirmed.  Not sure which is correct but given how error-riddled the PSA entry is and how accurate everything else in the Old Cardboard one is I give greater weight to the latter until evidence confirming it surfaces.
Organization: PSA seems to imply that this was the magazine of an organization called "Youth Club".  "Youth Club" is an accurate English translation of "Shonen Kurabu", but as far as I can tell that is just the title of a magazine and not necessarily the name of an actual club."

While they now get the information correct, there are still copies of this card floating around in older PSA holders with all of these basic mistakes - wrong year, wrong name of set - right on the holder like this:

That mis-step could probably be overlooked though, since that card is very much on the perhiphery of the Japanese collecting world's radar.  Also, as I mentioned in my earlier post on it, even here many collectors aren't certain about the details like the year it was printed  (though the incorrect name is immediately recognizable).

The much more serious miscue for PSA is that they stepped on a huge landmine with the 1994 Calbee Ichiros.  In 1994 Calbee issued their first ever cards of Ichiro - three of them in (#37 to 39) in a rare set only distributed in the Hokkaido, Kyushu and Sanyo regions.  While all the cards from that set are hard to come by, the Ichiros are even harder, they seem to have been added to the set late in its print run and are short printed cards in a set that was rare to begin with. There probably aren't more than a few dozen, maybe a hundred,  of each of them out there.

These three cards are among the most famous and sought after in the Japanese hobby.  Technically they aren't his rookie card (BBM issued a card of him the previous year) but they are his earliest and rarest Calbee cards of (arguably) the most famous player in Japanese history.  Its hard to come up with an analogous card from the US hobby that would evoke the same recognition, but imagine a cross between a 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr (recognizable iconic card of superstar from same generation) and a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle (most coveted and valuable "modern" card).  Now imagine if only a hundred copies of that card existed.  That is roughly where the 1994 Ichiros exist in the Japanese hobby:  cards that are instantly recognizable to all serious collectors.

Unfortunately for PSA, back in the 1990s a forger flooded the market with fake 1994 Ichiros.  The fakes are really convincing, I even got suckered on one myself a while back.  And so did PSA.  There are a huge number of fake 1994 Ichiro Calbees in PSA holders out there available for sale.  As with the Ruth, PSA has learned from that mistake.  They no longer slab fake Ichiros, so one in a recent holder is likely the real deal.  But the damage is already done.  Go on Yahoo Auctions, the Japanese equivalent of Ebay, and you'll find several copies of these cards in PSA 9 or 10 slabs.  All fake (identifiable from the coloration on the backs, see this guide here) .  This is a fake in a PSA 10 slab available right now.

This is a huge issue for PSA since the existence of these slabbed fake Ichiros is hard to ignore.  It'd be like if in their early days in the US they had slabbed a bunch of fake 1952 Topps Mickey Mantles which were still floating around on Ebay, easily identifiable as fakes by anyone who knew what to look for.  How would any serious collector trust a grader that could make such a basic mistake on such a key card?  This is super serious in an industry like grading, where consumer trust in the brand is absolutely paramount.

I should note that these two examples are not alone, PSA has improved a lot in their knowledge of Japanese cards in recent years but there are other examples of older PSA slabs containing incorrect information on Japanese cards (though I should also note that as far as I know the Ichiros are the only examples of outright fakes finding their way into PSA holders).

I'm not sure if this is necessarily fatal to PSA's success in Japan, but it means that they are going to be swimming upstream against a legacy of grading Japanese cards based on less than perfect information which might significantly complicate their efforts to gain acceptance here.

Neat Ichiro Find, I think.

 After writing my last post about the fake 1994 Calbee Hokkaido/Kyushu/Sanyo Ichiros I flipped through my pile of "vintage" Calbee Ichiros from the mid-90s.  I had some paranoid thoughts running through my head about whether they might be fake too, though I've never heard of any of his other Calbees being counterfeited.

In that frame of mind I had a bit of a collector heart attack when I noticed something amiss with my 1995 Calbee Choco Snack Ichiros.  As I mentioned in a post in February, I bought that entire set complete in their original transparent packs.  I love that set. It has two Ichiro cards, numbered C-4 and C-32.

As I also mentioned in that post, purchasing the entire set gave me a double of one card, one of the Ichiros which I had purchased individually about a year ago (highlighted in this post here).

I put the Ichiros I have doubles of in the above photo.  Exactly the same, right?  But this is what the backs of those two cards look like:

Somebody in this picture doesn't belong here!!!  The one on the left (which is the one I purchased as a single last year) is number C-32, while the one on the right (that came with the set) is number C-4!  But they are the same card on the front.

The one on the left is the odd man out here, C-32 has a different picture.  This is what it looks like here, the card on the right, which is a totally different picture (these are the two Ichiros I got in the complete set):

At first I thought this might be an extraordinarily unlikely wrong back, but the likelihood of a wrong back which coincidentally had the same player on it was way too low to be realistic.  I also considered the possibility that it might be a fake, but also discounted that: if someone was going to go to the trouble of making a perfect fake that looks identical to the real one and even somehow get it into an identical sealed pack, they'd probably not have made such an obvious mistake as putting the wrong back on the card!  Also this is the black letter version which isn't really valuable enough to make it worth a counterfeiter's while like the 94 Calbees are.

Finally after frantically scouring the internet I hit upon what seems to be the correct explanation for the discrepancy.  According to the Collecitng Ichiro website, there was a Chiba Lotte Marines Stadium promotional giveaway in 1995 in which a specially made Ichiro card featuring the front design and photo of C-4 from the regular set, and the back design (and number) of C-32 on the back was used.  

So the card that I bought as a single last year would seem to have been from that promotion and not from the regular set, even though except for the switched photo it looks exactly like a regular 1995 Calbee Choco Snack card.  

Looking around the Japanese internet and auction listings the variation seems to be a lot harder to find than the regular card, which I guess makes sense.  Kind of a neat find, I had no idea this existed even though I've owned one for a year now, it can be fun to discover random things in your collection like this you never knew existed.

(Also, excuse the lousy photo quality.  My scanner (which ironically I placed these on top of to photograph) no longer works and I lost my camera during my trip to Canada last month so for the time being all my pics are with a semi-functional old iPad that I have!)

Fake 1994 Calbee Ichiro Cards really are Everywhere

A board member over on Net54 just drew my attention to the latest Prestige Collectibles Auction which has a really useful listing that I think is worth drawing everyone's attention to.  They have a 1994 Calbee Ichiro, card C-37 which is one of three Ichiros in the set, all of which are his first Calbee cards and all of which were regionally issued and are quite rare.

The reason I wanted to draw the listing to everyone's attention is that it includes by far the best explanation of the differences between real and fake 1994 Ichiros that I've seen anywhere on the internet.

Fakes of these three cards are everywhere, I even have one (the one pictured at the top of this post, C-39 from the set).  They are extremely hard to distinguish from legit copies because they are almost perfect, made on the same cardboard and particularly on the front they are identical.  The only way to distinguish them is to look on the backs, the color of ink used by the fakes is not a perfect match and Ichiro's face has a bit of a purplish hue to it on the fakes (and the orange boxes with his biographical details are a bit darker).  Go to the Prestige auction to see what I'm talking about because me just explaining it in words doesn't help much, they have side by side photos that lay it out so its super easy to spot, something which didn't exist on the internet until they put it up (at least as far as I'm aware).

Another intriguing detail mentioned in the auction description was that the grading companies weren't aware of the fakes and graded a bunch of them, meaning that even a PSA holder isn't a guarantee that they are legit.  I was curious how much of a problem that was here in Japan so I looked up the Yahoo Auctions listings since I remembered these are one of the few cards out there that routinely appear in PSA slabs here.  Sure enough, looking through the auctions I couldn't find a single legit one among all the ones which had photos of the backs.  Like this one here, a PSA 10 for 30,000 Yen but which has all the telltale signs of being a fake on it.  And here is an ungraded fake with a starting bid of just 1,000 Yen that will be interesting to see how much it goes for.

The Prestige auction says that 99.9% of the 1994 Ichiros out there are fakes and that it would be virtually impossible for anyone to assemble all three.  I would quibble with both of those assertions - I don't disagree that a majority of the Ichiros out there seem to be fakes but I doubt its 99.9% (just doing the math if we estimate there are just 100 copies of each Ichiro, there would have to be 300,000 fakes to account for 99.9% of the total, and I don't think there are anywhere near that many).  Also while difficult I have no doubt that there are collectors out there who have put together all three of the legit ones (sadly, not including me).  But those are minor points of disagreement as the main point they make is absolutely correct: fakes of these cards are everywhere and its buyer beware.

Actually I might add another minor point of contention.  They and everyone else calls these the "Hokkaido" Calbee set, but it wasn't just issued in Hokkaido, it was also issued in the Kyushu and Sanyo (around Hiroshima) regions as well. Its pretty rare nonetheless!

Why Graded Cards are Stupid: 1995 Calbee Ichiro Edition

I picked up my first graded Japanese card this week.  Its a 1995 Calbee/ Choco Snack, card C-32 in the set.

I actually picked up this entire set just two months ago so I already have this Ichiro, but not THIS version of it.  This is the harder to find gold parrallel version, which has his name written in gold rather than black letters.  These generally sell for about double what the black letter regular versions of each card go for.

I feel bad for the guy I bought this card from because I got an insane deal.  The cheapest BIN prices or starting auction prices on this card (and the gold version of the other Ichiro from the same set) is 9,000 Yen right now, which is about normal.  This one popped up with a starting bid of just 1700 Yen which I put in and won the card without anyone else bidding. It was an insane bargain.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, graded cards are pretty rare in Japan, the hobby just isn't anywhere near as obsessed with condition as the American one is. All the other copies of this Ichiro card I've seen are raw rather than graded.  I didn't buy this card because it was graded, but rather in spite of the fact that it was graded.  Its cool to see that its in nm/mt+ condition but I could see that from the photos anyway.  Its an almost perfect card - the front is flawless and the only thing that I can see which may have prevented it from getting a "Mint" grade is some microscopic flecks of white on a bit of the edge on the back.

But the cost of having it graded by the seller must have cost almost, or maybe even more than, the amount I paid for it.  It just makes so little sense that I can only imagine the guy is kicking himself for having gone to the expense.

In the US I guess getting cards like this graded is kind of like playing the lottery that you'll get a Gem Mint grade and hit the big bucks.  So you might take the hit on stuff you got with lower grades.  But in Japan I don't think it works like that. It makes no sense that I got this card in this condition - its basically perfect - for this price.  I don't know if Japanese buyers were avoiding it because it was graded and they just don't know what that is or how to value it, or if I just lucked out.  Or is it like the US, where once it is established that a card has an insanely minor flaw and won't get a Gem Mint grade, the bottom falls out of the market for it.  I find the latter really doubtful given the way the market works here.

Anyway, I'm happy with this card in my collection.  I don't think I'll go for the entire gold parallel version of the set because...why would I?  But its cool to have a sample of one and that sample being an Ichiro!

Oh God, What Have I Done?

 Behold!  The entire 1995 Choco Snack/Calbee set!  Complete in all its glory!  Its mine!

Until a couple of days ago I only had one card in this set.  Now I have all of them.

I'm not sure what happened.  With my vintage Calbee sets (with Calbee, 1995 counts as vintage, these are hard to find) I've been pretty much putting them all together the old fashioned way, one card at a time.  This is made easier by the fact that full sets of pre-1998 Calbee sets almost never come up for sale (and when they do the prices are out of my range).

Then I found myself browsing Yahoo Auctions looking for 1995 Tokyo Snack/Calbee singles - the "other" Calbee set from that year - since I'm getting really close to finishing up the first series of that one.

And I noticed at the top of the listings this beauty - the entire 72 card Choco Snack set.  The starting bid was 9800 Yen, which works out to just over 1$ per card.  It has two Ichiros in it which alone are worth about that much.  And, only having one card so far, it was tempting.  So I put a bid in not really expecting to win - the set lists for twice that much in SCM and is pretty hard to find.

Then, as you can probably imagine, I won!  Nobody else put a bid on it!

Finishing this set wasn't even on my radar until I saw this, its a great set that I wanted to work on but was sort of on the backburner while I worked on others.  Now it has leapfrogged to "complete" status, it is the oldest Calbee set that I have complete (though the 1987 is bound to overtake it quite soon, I am only 8 cards short of finishing that one).

 I had some misgivings as I always do when I win something that I thought I had put a bid way too low to win on.  Why didn't anyone else bid on it?  Is something wrong with it?  Do all the Japanese bidders have some kind of radar that allows them to detect red flags that foreigners like myself are oblivious to?

I nervously waited for the package to come in the mail and discovered....everything was OK!  In fact, better than OK, this set is amazing!

The most impressive thing about the set is that every card came still sealed in its original pack.  Unlike other Calbee sets, the cards in this one came packed in transparent packs so you can see the card perfectly without opening them.  Its the only major Calbee set that I know of which was distributed like that.   A fair number of the listings I've seen for cards from this set are for singles still in their original package, which usually command a premium over ones being sold loose.  So finding an entire set still in its packages, while not something I would have necessarily set out to collect in itself, is just a kind of cool bonus.

 The set is crammed with stars.  Hideki Irabu before his tragic American odyssey:

 Shane Mack after his non-tragic one:

 Ichiro in just his second Calbee year (appearing on two cards, both of which are among his best Calbee cards):

 Atsuya Furuta:

 Hideki Matsui (also appearing on two cards):

 And a ton of other hall of famers or stars.

I'm totally ga-ga over this set.

As a bonus the set also included an Atari card, also still in its pack. Send in 8 of these and they'd send you a soccer ball (not so unusual as it sounds for a baseball prize since the Atari marks distributed with Calbee soccer cards that year were interchangeable with these).  Send in 3 and you'd get a card album.  Send in 2 and you'd get a baseball or soccer magazine of your choice.

This set is pretty hard to find, slightly more so that the other Calbee set, Tokyo Snack, of that year.  That is because this was one of the regional issues, only sold in Tokyo and Saitama that year.  Since Tokyo is a pretty big market its probably easier to find that some other 1990s regional issues like the 1994 Hokkaido one which was sold in a much smaller (population wise) region.  Still though, its pretty tough to find, Yahoo Auctcions currently has only 283 listings for all 1995 Calbee products and most of those are for the Tokyo Snack set which, despite its name, was released nationwide and is a bit easier to find.

The final thing worth mentioning about this set is the color of the player names on the front of the cards.  I have what could be called the "base set" since all the player names are written in black.  Calbee issued a parallel set which is identical except the player names are in gold.  The gold ones are said to be a bit harder to find and thus command a premium, usually selling for about double what the black letter versions sell for (a gold letter Ichiro is currently for sale for 10,000 Yen on Yahoo Auctions, not in its original pack.  The black letter version in contrast can be found for 3,000 to 5,000 Yen).  If this had been a gold set I probably would have been outbid by a wide margin on it.  Not being a parallel collector though I don't really care!

Still I'm of mixed feelings about this mainly because between this and my recent 1975-76 Calbee pick ups, I have already blown my entire 2019 budget for cards and we're barely halfway through February now.  Its hard to resist deals when they come around, but buying big ticket items like this radically throws off the pace of my collecting which I generally like to keep a bit more down to Earth.  So I'm left with a "Wow this set is a great pick up" feeling on the one hand and a "Oh god, what have I done" feeling on the other.

1995 Calbee Choco Snack Ichiro Suzuki

 I mentioned in an earlier post that I have been collecting 1995 Tokyo Snack which is kind of Calbee's flagship set of that year.  The other set that Calbee released was its Choco Snack set (which as the name implies, came with a product called Choco Snack).  The Choco Snack set was only released in Tokyo and Saitama, though despite being a limited regional issue they seem to be only slightly rarer than the Tokyo Snack (though it is worth mentioning that Tokyo Snack is pretty hard to find).

My Tokyo Snack set is coming along nicely but I only have one card from the Choco Snack set; Ichiro Suzuki (C-32).

Ichiro appears on two cards in the set (this one and C-4).  The cards have two versions, one with the player name on the front in black lettering and another in gold, which is the more valuable of the two (as you can see, my Ichiro is the black lettered version).

Also as you can see my Ichiro card is still in the original baggie it came in.  This is something that sets the Choco Snack set a bit apart, it is probably the only Calbee set to have been issued in clear packs so you could see who you got.  I'm guessing these were distributed inside the packages of Choco Snacks so as to prevent cherry picking back in 1995, though I'm not certain of that.  Anyway, due to this its actually not uncommon to find cards from this set on Yahoo Auctions still in their packs - I guess people figured they might as well keep them in there!

Anyway, with Ichiro retiring I've decided its high time I started tracking down some of his harder to find Calbee cards from the 1990s and this is one of them (the 1994s will cost me way more).  I like seeing the awkward looking young Ichiro in his Blue Wave uniform, it really brings me back to my first year in Japan when I lived just outside of Kobe and went to see him play at Green Stadium.  

Opinion: What Hank Aaron and Sadaharu Oh tell us about the Ichiro vs. Pete Rose Debate

Here is an interesting piece of baseball trivia.  In 1977 Sadaharu Oh hit his 756^th career home run in NPB, surpassing Hank Aaron`s recently set MLB record of 755.  Aaron was gracious enough to send this message to Oh to mark the occasion:

I would have loved to have been there tonight to put a crown on top of his head because he is quite a gentleman and the people of Japan have a lot to be proud of...I want to wish (Oh) the best luck in the world. I know he's capable of hitting a lot more home runs." (source)

Oh and Aaron became friends after that and together have played a pretty big, and positive, role in promoting baseball ties between their respective countries.

This week, in contrast, Ichiro Suzuki surpassed Pete Rose`s career MLB hit total with his 4257<sup>th</sup> career hit across both MLB and NPB combined. Rose`s gracious message to Ichiro to mark the occasion (sent indirectly through the media):

“I’m not trying to take anything away from Ichiro, he’s had a Hall of Fame career, but the next thing you know, they’ll be counting his high-school hits.  I don’t think you’re going to find anybody with credibility say that Japanese baseball is equivalent to major-league baseball. There are too many guys that fail here, and then become household names there, like Tuffy Rhodes. How can he not do anything here, and hit 55 home runs (in 2001) over there? It has something to do with the caliber of personnel.”

Despite having done nothing wrong, Rose`s lack of diplomacy has forced Ichiro into adopting an almost apologetic tone when discussing his accomplishment.  Instead of being allowed to celebrate he is evidently being made to felt shame for his mark. 

Rose`s response is unfortunate for two reasons.  First and foremost it displays a shocking lack of class and dignity.  He even manages to denigrate poor old Tuffy Rhodes, who has absolutely nothing to do with Ichiro`s record.  What did Tuffy ever do to Rose to deserve that?  Regardless of what he really thinks, it would have cost nothing to Rose to have simply wished Ichiro the best and then shut up about it.  But Rose being Rose, he had to dump all over what should have been Ichiro`s day in the sun.

More importantly though, judging from what I am reading across the internet Rose`s comments have unfortunately framed the debate on how Ichiro`s accomplishment should be viewed.  This is unfortunate not only because it was rude, but because he frames the debate in a way that deliberately prevents any sort of rational discussion about what Ichiro has done and instead focuses it on largely irrelevant observations which have nothing to do with Ichiro.

Before I get into discussing the substance of what Pete Rose, and a lot of writers, are saying, I`d like to return to the Hank Aaron and Sadaharu Oh story because it offers some interesting insights on what a comparative debate about records achieved in NPB and MLB should look like.  To start with the basic facts, Oh hit 868 home runs to Aaron`s 755 (and Bonds` 762, I focus on Aaron because most of the debate played out when he was the home run champ still and not as an intentional slight to Bonds).  People in the Oh camp who think he should be considered the `king` (ironically, that is what Oh means in Japanese) point to the simple math (868 is more than 755), to the fact that Oh played in shorter seasons than Aaron, and that relative to his nearest NPB rival (Katsuya Nomura who is over 200 home runs behind) Oh`s record is a unique accomplishment.  Aaron supporters on the other hand can point to the fact that playing in NPB gave Oh some advantages that he wouldn`t have had in MLB – playing in stadiums with smaller configurations and using a compressed bat – which strongly suggest that if he had played in MLB like Aaron he would not have hit so many home runs.

Off the bat it is important to note that these arguments are generally made by supporters of Oh and Aaron rather than by the principals themselves – to my knowledge unlike Pete Rose neither one has ever publicly said anything disparaging about the other`s accomplishments. So good for them on that.  More importantly though, the talking points in that debate all focus logically on the individual accomplishments achieved by each.  While they implicitly involve a comparison of NPB and MLB, the points of comparison are connected to what each actually did (such as the fact that NPB`s smaller stadiums meant that some balls Oh hit for home runs there likely would have just been long outs in more spacious MLB parks).

In other words there is a pretty logical framework in that debate which actually seeks to give the accomplishments of each player (particularly Oh since he is effectively viewed as the `challenger` to the previously crowned king) a due hearing.  The debate on Ichiro in the US, on the other hand, has made any similar inquiry largely impossible because of the way Rose has framed it.

Rose raises two points to disparage Ichiro`s mark.  The first is that because NPB is of lower caliber to MLB, his hits there simply shouldn`t count.  I call this the Tuffy Rhodes defence, his argument basically being that any league in which Tuffy (and others like him) can become a star in must not be worth even considering based solely on the fact that Tuffy didn`t put up impressive numbers in his MLB career.

First off, to my knowledge nobody seriously uses the same line of reasoning when advocating Aaron`s case against Oh.  They cite specific reasons why some of Oh`s home runs wouldn`t have happened in the US and maybe suggest he could have hit 500 if he played in the US but nowhere near 868 (or 755).  What they don`t say is that his career home run total should be considered zero, which is essentially the stance Rose is taking with Ichiro.  More problematic though is the fact that Ichiro has a much stronger case than Oh based on all the evidence we have of his career.  In Oh`s case the assumption is that he would have hit fewer home runs in MLB, which is probably true.  In Ichiro`s case though the evidence we have suggests the opposite – he would probably have had more career hits had he played his NPB years in the US instead.  In all his years in NPB he only had more than 200 hits once.  In the first ten seasons of his career after coming to the US, he never had less than 200 hits.  This is attributable to the shorter season in NPB rather than any weakness in Ichiro as a player when he was in Japan.   

Moreover, nobody has suggested a specific way in which NPB`s lower quality to MLB would have given his hit totals an unfair boost.  Smaller ballparks wouldn`t help Ichiro the way they help a power hitter like Rhodes or Oh, and he didn`t use compressed bats either.  A slightly lower quality of pitching he would have faced is about the only possible theory you might come up with, but if that had been relevant we would have seen his performance decline when he switched to facing higher caliber pitching in the US, which didn`t happen.  My view is that the pitching in NPB at the time (before most of the stars had jumped ship to MLB) was probably only slightly lower than MLB and not different enough to have given Ichiro`s performance an unnatural boost in terms of accumulating hits (at least not enough to overcome the handicap of playing fewer games).

The second argument Rose uses is that his minor league totals should be counted too, which means Ichiro still has a way to go.  This is just arbitrary goal post moving on Rose`s part, but if we take it as valid then there are two responses.  The first is that Rose`s time in the minor leagues was time he spent being considered not good enough to play in the majors.  Ichiro`s time in NPB on the other hand was time he spent at the highest level of professional baseball he was able to play in under the rules in force at the time.  So the two are qualitatively different (not to mention the fact that Rose`s hits came at A level or less, which is commonly agreed to be much inferior to the level of NPB).  The second response is that Ichiro`s NPB totals don`t include his own time in the Japanese minor leagues with Orix` 2 Gun team, where he spent most of his first two seasons. So if you are going to add Rose`s minor league totals it is only fair to add Ichiro`s.  Doing so he still comes up a bit short of Rose`s minor/major league total, but within reach.  If he does cross that line, expect Rose to quietly drop reference to his minor league hit totals and revert to the Tuffy Rhodes defence, which for reasons I`ve outlined above is without merit.

Conclusion

To my mind, its fair to say that Pete Rose still has the MLB record while Ichiro has a new, previously unrecognized record of combined MLB and NPB hits.  People can have legitimate debates about which accomplishment they view as more significant, but to accept Rose`s argument that we can just dismiss Ichiro`s record out of hand simply because NPB is of lower quality to MLB is grossly unfair and, more importantly, probably leads to the wrong conclusion. 

Part of the reason Rose has been able to control the debate is the sheer lack of knowledge on the part of American sportswriters about the Japanese game.  The argument that it’s a lower league and therefore shouldn`t be counted provides an easy out for them that avoids the need to actually sort through the evidence and try to figure out how to evaluate it.  Its telling that experts on Japanese baseball aren`t part of roundtable discussions like this one, which essentially involves a bunch of people who are only familiar with MLB deciding that only MLB hits should count.  Surprise surprise.  I`m not entirely certain myself which record is more impressive, but I am convinced that the way the debate is unfolding is extremely biased against Ichiro in ways that have no rational backing but which overwhelmingly give Pete Rose the benefit of the doubt.  What a long way debate has come from the days of comparing Aaron and Oh…..

Looking Back: 2000 BBM

 I moved to Japan for the first time in December of 1999 (15 years next month, how time flies).  That meant that my first encounter with Japanese baseball came in the 2000 season and, along with it, my first encounter with Japanese baseball cards in the form of the 2000 BBM regular set.

I spent that first year working as an English teacher in Akashi, a small city just outside of Kobe.  I knew absolutely nothing about Japanese baseball  - or Japan come to think of it - when I arrived.  But I was quickly schooled about two things: the Hanshin Tigers and Ichiro.

Ichiro was just enterering what would be his last year in NPB, playing for the Blue Wave at Green Stadium in Kobe.  Everyone in Akashi knew who he was, though it seemed nobody was an actual Blue Wave fan, everyone in Kansai cheering for the Tigers instead.  I got to take in a couple of Tigers games at Koshien that summer and one game at Green Stadium between the Blue Wave and Seibu Lions in what is likely to prove to be the only time in my life I will have seen Ichiro play in person (he went 1 for 4 in the game, I don`t remember who won though).

Having collected baseball cards in the late 1980s and early 1990s back home, I had a vaguely formed interest in Japanese baseball cards but knew nothing about them until one day I was wandering around near Sannomiya station in Kobe.  Back when the Blue Wave still existed they had a team-goods store in Sannomiya which I stumbled across by chance.  I wasn`t really interested in Blue Wave goods (like everyone else I had chosen to identify as a Tigers fan) but they did have a box of 2000 BBM packs for sale.  I picked one up for 200 yen and that was the beginning of my Japanese baseball card collection.  I vaguely remember having gotten a Bobby Rose league leader card and thinking that was pretty cool since he had a monster year in 1999, but other than that I don`t remember  the contents of that 10 card pack.


I provide this relatively lengthy piece of autobiographical reflection mainly just to establish that the 2000 BBM set has a special place in my heart since it was my first.  It was a fairly brief affair at the time as that one pack would turn out to be the only one I would buy that year.  Nonetheless, that set with its admittedly boring design holds a special place in my collection.  Which is why, last week, I splurged on Yahoo Auctions and bought a partial 2000 BBM set (480 cards, but some of them from the preview) in a nice binder with pages.

I normally don`t go for BBM sets, being a Calbee collector, but I made an exception in this case.  In retrospect its actually kind of annoying for me that I didn`t buy a bag of Calbee chips back in 2000 as my first baseball card purchase. At the time however it wouldn`t even have occurred to me to look for baseball cards in the chips section of my convenience store and the internet wasn`t exactly overflowing with useful information like that back then (and even if it had been, I didn`t own a computer). 

Anyway, the 2000 BBM set is pretty cool.  It has one of Ichiro`s last regular cards in it which is rather colorful:

And Leo Gomez, who I remembered from his days as a prospect for the Orioles in the early 1990s:

As a Canadian I was surprised to discover that year that former Toronto Blue Jay all star Tony Fernandez (who was my best friend`s favorite player back in high school) playing for Seibu in the same game that I saw Ichiro play in.  His 2000 BBM card is pretty boss:

And being BBM they  of course have to load the set up with a bunch of insert sets of varying levels of interest:

Included among which is the New Face set, where you can see which teams the Giants raided for their star players in a given year.  It is basically the same idea as a Traded or Update set, which makes me wonder why they thought it was worth turning into an insert set, but anyway....

In conclusion I now have a slightly over half-complete set of 2000 BBM which I have decided to add to my list of  "sets I am working on."  It is the only BBM set on that list, though I might add the 2002 set that I worked on but never finished back in the day.  The fruits of that endeavour are in a storage bin in my parent`s garage in Canada at the moment, I`ll have to retrieve them someday....