Stop Motion Assembly Model Cards

 

I find myself in the baseball card collector January doldrums.  My collecting activity always takes a nose-dive once the season ends and January is pretty much the worst of it - the holidays are over, its cold, the days are short and the regular season is still more than two months away.  This, along with work keeping me busy, explains my lack of recent posts.

I did however pick up one interesting thing recently.  "Stop Motion Assembly Model" baseball cards of Shigeru Kobayashi and Masayuki Kakefu.

I'd never heard of these before and didn't even know that I should be looking for them.  They were in a big "junk" lot of random 70s cards I bought on Yahoo Auctions a few days ago.  I didn't even notice what they were in the lot pictures and it only became apparent when I had them in my hands. 

These are basically die cut wood figures that are meant to resemble the players on the card as you can see when you flip them over.

These are still sealed in their original packaging so I haven't opened them up, but you can see from the image on Kakefu's what they are supposed to look like when assembled.  Not impressive by today's standards when we are used to very life-like plastic figures, but not bad for the 1970s.

These were produced by a company called Mitsubishi Pencil which confusingly has the same name (Mitsubishi) and logo as the more famous Mitsubishi industrial conglomerate but isn't actually a member of it.  

Given the appearance of Kobayashi as a Giant and Kakefu as a Tiger, these would have been produced sometime between 1974 and 1978.  They had a retail price of 250 Yen (on the upper left corner of the package).  

I'm not sure what, if anything is on the back of the cards (which are roughly postcard sized) since I haven't taken them out of the package.  

These seem to be pretty rare.  Engel doesn't mention them at all, I've never seen them on Yahoo Auctions before and my Google search for them turned up a grand total of one relevant result.  That result was kind of intriguing, it was an image (on pinterest) of this ad here for them:

This is not actually an ad from Mitsubishi Pencil, the producer of them, but rather by Morinaga Caramel which produces a well known caramel candy (pictured in the bottom right of the ad) which is still sold in most convenience stores today.  I can't quite read all the small text in the image, but it seems like these were given out as presents to those who bought a certain number of Morinaga Caramels and sent in the proofs of purchases.  Given that Morinaga Caramels only cost 50 Yen each and the retail price of these figures was 250 Yen, I'm guessing these didn't sell well initially and they ended up giving the leftover stock to Morinaga to dispose of through this promotion, though I'm not sure.

Interestingly the ad gives us some indication of who else is in the set.  In addition to Kakefu it also mentions Hanshin Tigers catcher Koichi Tabuchi.  You can see there are four different posable figures - one batter (which is Kakefu), two pitchers (one of which is Kobayashi, not sure about the other one) and one catcher (Tabuchi).  There are also three cards visible, one of which is my Kakefu, another is Tabuchi and a third one which looks like Isao Harimoto (though I'm not sure about that).  There might be other players who aren't featured in the ad of course so I'm still not sure how many there are, but its a good start!

These are a fortune. Literally.

 I made a neat new "discovery purchase" the other day: Baseball pull fortunes (Yakyu Hikuji)..

I got a big pile of them, display backing and all!

This are a type of product that doesn't exist in North America but has a long history in Japan. Each of these packs contains ten strips of thin paper which stick out at the bottom (in the above photo the black and white player head shots at the bottom are the parts of the paper that sticks out).  Each strip has a fortune written on it, like you would find in a fortune cookie.  The best one you can get is "Daikichi" which is really good luck.  The worst is "Hazure" which means you are a loser.  And there are a few in between.  So each kid would get one of these packs, then with their friends they would each pull one of the strips out and see who would get good luck and who would get bad.

 If you ever visit a shinto shrine in Japan you'll probably come across something very similar as they sell similar fortunes there. The ones sold at shrines are called "Omikuji" and come in folded pieces of paper rather than being pulled off of tabs like these baseball ones are.

These are a couple that my wife and I got at the Hakozaki shrine in Fukuoka many years ago (the chocolate banana was also purchased there, it was a festival day).


My baseball ones feature colorful wrappers with six different players on them: Senichi Hoshino, Sadaharu Oh, Masahiro Doi (I think), Shigeo Nagashima, Koichi Tabuchi and Koji Yamamoto.   The players whose head shots are featured on the ten strips peaking out at the bottom don't necessarily match the player on the wrapper (The one with Senichi Hoshino for example has a picture of Isao Harimoto on the strips.  Though most of the others do match).

 The backs of the wrappers have some cool color images of various players.

Judging from the fact that Isao Harimoto is featured as a Giant and Masahiro Doi is featured in a Taiheiyo uniform I would date these to 1976.

 I decided to try my luck and pull one of them.  Instead of tearing them off as they were designed I decided to just unwind the wire at the top holding the bundle together so I could put it back without damaging it.  This is what I got:

"Losing pitcher with a 5-10 record, so sad!"  "HAZURE"

Oh no, I got the loser one!

Back in the day these sold for 10 Yen each.  Looking around the internet it seems these "pull fortunes" were pretty popular back in the 1970s as there were similar bundles with various anime characters also sold from around that time.  These seem to have been the only baseball ones made and they are pretty hard to find.  Or at least I think they are, these were the first I've ever seen though I hadn't even known they were something I should be looking for in the first place until I found them!

Kind of a neat thing to add to my collection, they have a strong "Showa retro" look to them which I find appealing!

Sets that are frustrating to collect: 1977-79 Nippon Ham version

 Welcome to another "Look at this card!" post.

Nippon Ham released a couple of sets in the late 1970s.  Between 1975 and 1976 they issued one with a very distinctive border along the bottom.  I have about a dozen cards from that set (out of over 350).  Its a tough set to collect in part becaue of rarity but also demand: lots of Japanese collectors seem to be chasing it down too.

Their second set they issued between 1977 and 1979.  Unlike the first one it has a design that is almost identical to Calbee cards from the same era: full bleed photo with a bit of identifying text on the bottom.  The dimensions of the cards are a bit different from Calbee so they are easy to spot despite this similarity.  You can read a bit more about the differences between the two Nippon Ham sets in Dave's post about them here.

I picked up this Koichi Tabuchi card from the 77-79 set recently, its the only card I have from that set and likely will stay that way.

Even though I'm a set collector I just can't get myself excited about the prospect of trying to complete a 1977-79 Nippon Ham set.  Partly there is a bit (no, a lot) of frustration with the fact that the set is not numbered (the "22" on the back of my Tabuchi is his uniform number, not the card number), so its insanely hard to keep track of them.

Another daunting prospect is that the exact number of cards which exist remains unknown.  Engel has the most comprehensive checklist at 285 cards, but also acknowledges this may not be complete.  Its hard to commit to a task (like collecting a set) without a clear sense of how big the task is.

Finally there is the fact that these cards are so hard to find, and expensive when you do, but look basically the same as Calbee sets from the same era which are a bit easier to find and more affordable.  At any given time there are probably only a handful of singles from this set for sale on Yahoo Auctions and at high prices, so even starting a set is almost impossible (no starter lots or anything like that ever become available).  With the more distinctive looking 75-76 Nippon Ham set, which has the same problem, I'm more willing to overlook that fault since the set is so different.  With the 77-79 set though I just think "Calbee cards, but way harder to find and way more expensive, no thanks".

So my Tabuchi is basically a type card for my collection.  And its a nice type card, so I'm happy with it.

Any other set collectors have similar sets you won't tough due to the "frustration" factor?

Holy Rocket Robots!

 I am just two cards shy of completing the "Rocket Robots" set, which is undoubtedly one of the best named sets of baseball cards ever produced.

Its an 8 card menko set released in 1975 (JCM 165 in Engel).  The cards are quite small, a bit smaller than a tobacco card from the T206 set.

Engel seems to have named the set owing to the fact that the backs of most feature pictures of robots (or possibly aliens or Kamen Rider characters?) and the names of various types of rockets printed at the top (though not all, only 3 of the ones I have do, the others say things like "Captain", "M4 Tank" and "Red Cross", which is a bit eclectic).

Interestingly 3 of the 8 cards feature members of the Chunichi Dragons (Senichi Hoshino, Morimichi Takagi and Takamasa Suzuki), which sort of continues an odd theme of the Dragons being over-represented in menko sets of the mid to late 70s (contrasted with the Giants being way over represented in the conventional card sets like Calbee of the same era).

The Sadaharu Oh card from this set is one of his most striking (and that is saying something, he is on a LOT of cards from the 70s).  The background artwork makes it look like he has a halo.  Saint Oh, guardian angel of the long ball or something like that.  The others are a bit more subdued but still cool.  Koichi Tabuchi shares his card with Isao Harimoto in the background.

Its kind of a neat set and one thing I love about 8 card sets is that you can fit them almost perfectly into a single binder page (a 9 card set would, of course, fit absolutely perfectly but they are a bit harder to come by).  So I've got two pockets waiting for the two I need (Takagi and a Koji Yamamoto/Sadaharu Oh combo card)!

The "Other Guy" Finally Gets his Due

 As Dave just reported, the 2020 Japan Hall of Fame class consists of one guy: former Tigers and Lions catcher Koichi Tabuchi.

Tabuchi was one of Japan's biggest stars in the 1970s and for a few years I had just assumed he was already in the Hall of Fame until I looked it up and was surprised to find that he wasn't.  So I'm happy that he is in.  He clobbered 474 career home runs, which (I think) would have put him in the top 5 all time at the time he retired in 1984.  His home run rate (ratio of home runs to at bats) is second all time to Sadaharu Oh.

Since his career peaked in the  mid to late 70s (his best season was 1975 when he led the Central League in home runs, the first time in a over decade that Oh didn't win the title) he appears on a lot of Calbee cards from the classic sets of the 70s, including one of my favorites of all time.

What is really interesting about him from a 1970s Calbee collector perspective though is that he appears on a massive number of cards in which he is not the featured player.  The sets from the 1970s were heavily weighted with players from the Central League in which Tabuchi played, and specifically with the Giants, the most popular team by far.  Tabuchi didn't play for the Giants but rather for their main rivals the Hanshin Tigers.  The Calbee photographers seem to have taken a lot of their photos of Giants players in games they were playing against the Tigers and as the Tigers catcher this meant that Tabuchi features prominently on a huge number of cards of Giants batters in photos taken during their at bats.

So if you collect cards of Sadaharu Oh from the 70s, chances are that a lot of your cards have Koichi Tabuchi on them too, like these ones I've put in this post. There are a ton more out there, not just Oh cards but with other Giants cards and the odd one here or there of players from other Central League teams.  Its super noticeable when you are flipping through a stack of cards from the monster 75-76-77 set that Tabuchi probably features on more cards than any other player in the set (except maybe Oh) but with the caveat that on most of them he is just the "other guy" on the card and not its main focus. When I'm finally finished collecting that set, I'm going to go through it and count how many cards there are of Tabuchi in the background, I'm positive that he holds the world record for most appearances in a card set of someone appearing as an "other guy" in the background.

Anyway, I'm glad this other guy finally got into the Hall!

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.

Most Beautiful Card?

I picked up another card I had been hunting for a while last week.  Its not one I need for a set I'm working on, but rather one that I have wanted because it just looks so damn good.

Its from the 1978 Calbee set, the Pennant Race series, and features Koichi Tabuchi taking a big swing against a Giants pitcher.  I ran across it in Yahoo Auction a few months ago and ended up losing that one.  But I couldn't get it out of my mind, its such an amazing photo - there is so much going on in it. You get the back of the umpire dead center in the image, which is odd but somehow works as he adds to the action between Tabuchi's swing and the pitcher coming off his throw.  The billboard in the stands and the mass of spectators is the perfect backdrop.  Its one of those cards that define everything I love about 1970s Calbee cards.  

Unfortunately the 1978s are kind of hard to find and it took a few months for another one to show up at auction.  I put a higher bid in this time and won it for 2100 Yen, which is a bit on the high side for me (especially for a card that isn't in a set I'm working on) but it was so worth it.  

I now have to decide if this displaces my previous "most beautiful 1970s Calbee card" at the top of the list: this Oh/Nagashima card from the 1974 set:

I can't really make up my mind on this one.  They are both so good....