Nippon Ham Sausage Home Run Card Mystery

 

Over the past couple of years I've been slowly adding cards to my 1975-76 Nippon Ham Sausage set.  I like this set a lot, the colorful band along the bottom with the team names and rock/paper/scissors game look really cool.

This is a really tough set to collect though since pretty much every card in it is scarce and even mid grade commons will generally set you back at least 1000 Yen each.  Add to that the fact that the cards aren't numbered and we don't even know how many of them were even made.  The latest version of Engel's guide lists 397 different known cards, which is up from 351 in the 2018 edition, indicating that new ones are still being discovered.  There are multiple cards of star players so way fewer than 397 players appear in it, something Dave noted in his write up about it.

I've got 35 cards, less than 10% of the set, after years of collecting so this is not a realistic set build for me, but I still like to pick them up every once in a while and add them to my miscellaneous 1970s album (which also holds a near complete 1973 Calbee first series set and a complete 1978 Yamakatsu set which I finally found). 

There is one thing about this set which I don't think the Engel guide captures which is the relative scarcity of some of the cards.  Engel rates the set at R2 (fewer than 250 copies of each card exist), which seems about right for the easier to find ones. Having followed prices a lot on Yahoo Auctions though I suspect that some of them are short printed and much harder to find than the others.  

For example, this card of Keiji Osawa, manager of the Fighters, is listed on YJA now for 29,800 Yen.  Osawa is not a Hall of Famer and its hard to figure the rationale for that price.  That dealer knows his stuff, I've bought from him before and he has good prices. If you browse his listings you'll find other cards from the same Nippon Ham Sausage set featuring big name Hall of Famers in similar condition for a fraction of that price.  So its not like its some random guy listing stuff for ridiculous prices or anything.

There are quite a few other examples out there, like this card of Yutaka Enatsu for 100,000 Yen from a dealer who I've also bought from numerous times before (including some of the cards pictured in this post) and has much more reasonable prices on other cards from the set.

The only thing I can think of that would explain these cards being so expensive is that they are known rarities to Japanese collectors.  Engel lists the Osawa as a common, and the Enatsu at what you could call the "medium level star" price, but this doesn't seem to jive with what those and some other cards go for in Japan.

The mystery to me though is how do collectors here know which ones are extremely high value and which ones aren't?  There is no Japanese guide that catalogues these, Engel is the only one out there and his guide doesn't note any difference in rarity or value.  SCM during its day never even tried to tackle this set.  And there is nothing distinctive about the cards themselves either that would indicate they came from a given series or anything (something which the lack of card numbers also complicates).

One possibility that I am toying with is that the cards might have been regionally distributed according to team or possibly league.  If you look at the 35 cards I have you'll notice there is an extreme imbalance.  I have:

32 cards of Central League players

3 cards of Pacific League players (1 Hawks, 2 Orions)

Looking at Engel's checklist guys from teams of the two leagues look roughly evenly represented, yet the number of Pacific League cards in circulation seem to be quite a bit lower than Central League cards.

My collection isn't really big enough to draw any conclusions from of course, but when I look at YJA there is further evidence to support this.  When I do a search for Nippon Ham Sausage cards, then organize the results from highest price to lowest, its really noticable that almost all of the high priced cards from this set (excluding the other Nippon Ham Sausage set from 1977 and the more recent ones) are of players from Pacific League teams (particularly the Fighters and Lions it seems), with only a smattering of Central League players (mostly Sadaharu Oh, whose cards are expensive because hey, he's Sadaharu Oh).  

The Yutaka Enatsu card seems to be the only outlier as it pictures him with the Tigers, but there may be an explanation for that.  Enatsu switched teams to the Hawks while this set was being made and is also featured as a Hawk on other, presumably later, cards in the set, so that card of him with the Tigers was likely short printed.  

I'm not too sure what this means in terms of how the cards were originally distributed (I know they came in paper packs sold with sausages, I have one of the wrappers), but it seems the end result is that most (possibly not all?) cards featuring Pacific League players are harder to find than most (all?) cards of Central League players.  But even that doesn't perfectly explain the evidence, since there are also some cards of Pacfic League players that aren't too expensive out there.  Its still a mystery to me, but something is definitely going on with this set.   

Oh, and OH MY GOD WHAT A GAME!  Yay Ohtani!!

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?

Nippon Ham Sausage Set: Where are the Nippon Ham Fighters at?

The 1975-76 Nippon Ham Sausage set is one of the hardest vintage Japanese sets to track down singles for out there.  In 5 years of collecting them I only have 11 (the nine pictured above and these two here).  You can read some of the basic information on the set over on Dave's site which has an excellent write up here.  Despite having way fewer cards, this set is probably harder to complete than the much larger monster 1975-76 Calbee set that I am also working on (1472 cards in the latter, 351 in the former).

There is a really odd mystery about this set which is unconnected to its scarcity which I thought I'd use this post to draw everyone's attention to.  Its related to the fact that Nippon Ham, in addition to making this set, also owned (and still owns) an NPB team: the Nippon Ham Fighters.

Now look at the cards I have - no Fighters.  This isn't a coincidence, the set doesn't actually seem to have many Fighters cards in it and the few that do exist are much more expensive than the average cards, suggesting they were short printed (this absolutely beautiful card of Toshizo Sakamoto for example has a starting bid of 20,000 Yen right now for a mid grade copy).

I don't have a checklist of the set handy, but do know that when you scroll through auction listings you will find a lot of cards of Giants players, and a fair number of Carp, Dragons and Tigers players.  Players from other teams, including the Fighters, are way less common.

This is not unique to this set, the Calbee sets from the 1970s are also dominated by Giants players and to lesser extents those other Central league teams which were popular at the time (and now).  But Calbee didn't own its own baseball team, Nippon Ham did!

So my question is why Nippon Ham didn't bother to put more emphasis on its own players in the set.  I don't even mean over-representing them, but simply putting as many Fighters cards as they did Giants or Carp cards.  It makes no sense.  This is especially the case since in Japan the whole purpose of owning a baseball team is to promote the parent company, so logically you would think the same thinking would apply to producing a baseball card set.  But it didn't, at least in this case.

This is made all the more puzzling since Nippon Ham in recent years has rekindled its baseball card sets (in collaboration with BBM) and these sets ONLY feature Fighters players!

This remains one of those minor things that irritate my logical brain when I look at them.  I do love this set, I think its quite beautiful.  But I really want to know why they didn't put many players from their own team in it!  Possible explanations are:

1) Division rivalries within the company.  Maybe the guys in charge of the cards didn't like the guys in charge of the team.

2) Utter incompetence.  Maybe the guys in charge of the cards didn't even think to put more cards of the company team in. Or maybe the people in charge of the team didn't even know the company was making a set and thus couldn't suggest the idea of putting more Fighters players in.

3) Closet Giants fans rearing their ugly heads again.  So many people in the business world are Giants fans that its entirely possible this included the Nippon Ham employees in charge of the set who made the deliberate decision to flood it with Giants players despite the obvious conflict of interest at work.

Not sure if there might be other explanations but any of these seems about equally plausible to me!

Nippon Ham Sausage Cards

I picked up a couple of new cards for the collection this week, Nippon Ham Sausage cards of Isao Shibata and Kenji Awaguchi. According to Rob Fitts these were released in 1975 with...well, sausages I guess.

I have been trying to find some cards from this set for the longest time, mainly because I love the design on them, it kind of reminds me of the 1963 Topps set only better.  The color border on the bottom with the team name looks pretty cool, as does the full bleed photos on the top. The backs are pretty mundane but about par for the course for a Japanese set from the 1970s.

One problem in collecting these is that they are extremely difficult to find, even in Japan.  There are only about half a dozen singles available on Yahoo Auctions at the moment (compared to thousands of BBM and Calbee cards).  I`m guessing they almost never turn up on Ebay. I lucked out on these two, one seller had an auction with about 10 of them and I put bids in on most.  I lost some of them by a wide margin but these two for some reason only attracted moderate interest and I was able to score them for only a few bucks each, which is surprising since they are both in really nice shape (exmt-nrmt or so).

 Nippon Ham is, of course, the owner of the Nippon Ham Fighters so this set was actually put out by a company which owns an NPB team, an interesting conflict of interest.  I haven`t seen a checklist so I`m not sure if there are more Fighters cards than those of other teams or if they went the Calbee route and drowned the selection in Giants players (the fact that my randomly acquired cards are both of Giants players suggests this might be the case).  Another interesting question arises from the fact that these cards were released just a couple of years after Nippon Ham purchased the Fighters (previously the Nittaku Flyers).  I wonder if there was some sort of connection there?  Seems logical, perhaps there were some baseball fans on Nippon Ham`s Board of Directors back in the 1970s.

Anyway, I love these cards and will be keeping my eyes peeled for more....