1973 Calbee Fierce Fight Series is Awesome

 There is a really neat series of cards from the 1973 Calbee set that I've long been fascinated by.  Its from the "Nessen" (fierce fight or maybe "tight game") series and it depicts scenes from a game played on October 20, 1973 between the Chunichi Dragons and the Hanshin Tigers.  I'm not sure how big that series is but it comes towards the end of the set in cards numbered in the 300s.  The cards depicting that game in particular seem to run from 328 to 335.

They fortunately aren't from the hyper rare thousand dollar a pop short printed series, but these cards are still pretty hard to find and usually run about 20$ each when they show up.  I was able to win two of them - card 330 and 332 - in an auction the other day for about 8$ each which was a really good deal.

 Card 332, pictured at the top of this post, features Dragons star Kenichi Yazawa in the foreground. With runners on second and third, he has just connected off of Tigers pitcher Yutaka Enatsu for a base hit to right field which drove both runners in and put the Tigers in the lead (in the 3rd inning).

The other card (330) pictured below also shows Yazawa, only this time in the first inning.  He was a runner on first base when Jimmy Williams got a base hit to center field.  Yazawa tried to make third on the play and as you can see, he didn't quite beat the tag!

The Dragons nonetheless went on to win the game 4-2.

I love the way these cards let you follow the play by play action.  The card sandwiched between these two (331) I unfortunately don't have, but I looked it up and found that it features Tigers pitcher Yutaka Enatsu  conferring with catcher Koichiro Tabuchi after getting Yazawa out at third.

I really want to get the rest of the cards from this specific 8 card run, its very neat to be able to follow a game in progress on baseball cards, another way in which these 1970s Calbee sets were light years ahead of their time.  This would have been a very important game too, the Dragons, Tigers and Giants were caught in a very fierce pennant race and this was (I think) the last game between the Tigers and Dragons.  In the end the Giants won the pennant with a razor thin 0.5 game lead over the Tigers and 1.5 game lead over the Dragons!

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!

1977 Path to Stardom: Featuring Stars Then and Slightly Before Then

 I haven't really been working on the 1977 Calbee set like I am with its predecessor, the 1975-76-77 Monster.  The 77 set is way more confusing since it is really several different sets, each of which they start the numbering again from "1" with.  The first of these (numbered to 216) really threw me off when I started seriously organizing my 75-76-77 set since the design of the cards, front and back, is identical and it took me a while to figure out that some of the cards which I though were part of my monster set were actually part of the 1977 set, which wreaked havoc on my checklist!

But since I've hit a wall with my monster acquisitions, I've also been picking up the odd card or two from the 1977 set.  One series from it which I thought was interesting is this one "Path to stardom" (numbers 73 to 109 in the confusing first set with the same design as the 75-76-77 set that cause me so many problems).

I have a couple of cards from it, featuring Dragons star and Meikyukai member Kenichi Yazawa (above) and Tigers star catcher Koichi Tabuchi below.  As you can see, the cards have two photos, a "now" one in color and a "then" one in black and white.

There is a similar series in the 75-76-77 set which has the same "Path to Stardom" name and also features the dual photo look.  That one is more like the "Boyhood photos of the stars" series that Topps put out in the 70s, featuring a picture of the player as a kid.

These 1977 ones though the "then" picture is one from their rookie year in NPB.  Its kind of odd, since neither of these players were exactly grizzled veterans when these came out: Yazawa had debuted 7 years earlier and Tabuchi 8.  The black and white pictures thus aren't ancient history, but just a few seasons old and for all anyone knew could have been contemporary with the set (except some uniform updates).

Its kind of a cool set though, these are a nice break from the full bleed photos of 1970s Calbee sets.

Yamakatsu DX cards are pretty cool

 I got something new in the mail the other day:  4 of the big sized Yamakatsu DX cards from the 70s.You can read up a bit more about these sets on Dave's post here from a few years ago.  As you can see from the above photo, with some 1979 Yamakatsu cards for reference, they are pretty huge.

 I particularly like the above one of Kintetsu's Shimamoto Kohei.  The fact that his uniform is almost the exact same color as the bleachers, which are almost the exact same color as the sky, gives it a kind of cool look.  I am also a huge fan of cards with pictures that show a lot of the stadium in the background, which this card does well.

This card of Chunichi's Yazawa Kenichi, a member of the 2000 hit club, is also pretty cool.  I note that there are several different Yamakatsu cards of several different Chunichi players spread across several different sets which feature them batting in front of the same green netting.  I'm not sure why but it kind of works as a backdrop.

 The other two cards feature my least favorite aspect of some Yamakatsu cards from the 70s: the background having been cropped out and replaced with a boring blue (or sometimes green) backdrop.  I have no idea why Yamakatsu did this (seems about 1 in 5 or so of their cards from this era feature this) but it give the cards a very boring and generic feeling. It reminds me a bit of the 1958 Topps set which did the same, resulting in a truly boring set.

Otherwise though I think these are pretty cool cards.  Of course they are a double edged sword:  on the one hand they are great display pieces (at least the ones without the boring blue background) given their size.  On the other hand they are a huge pain to store!  I've already dinged the corners on two of them!