Some random 1981 Calbees

 

I picked up a small lot of about 25 cards from the 1981 Calbee set the other day.  I hadn't noticed when I was bidding on them on Yahoo Auctions but they were all Giants players (ugh), but since I don't have many cards from that set yet I am happy with them. 

Flipping through this little pile really makes me wish Calbee would go back to using a more varied and interesting mix of images on their cards like they used to.  The closely cropped "Batters batting, pitchers pitching" photos they always use on their current sets, including this year's,  are just so boring.

Hey Calbee, how about showing us some guys sliding into base?  Like on Kazumasa Kono's card (#309)?

Or a close play at the plate, complete with the catcher holding up the ball and the umpire calling the runner out?  Like on this card of....oh, also Kazumasa Kono (#335):

Or how about a guy getting some high fives as he returns to the dugout?  Like this card of Roy White (#327)?  We can't even see his face but its a way more interesting card of him than that of any player card they've made in the past decade.

And if you are going to insist on showing us batters batting, why not make it a bit more interesting by using a horizontal layout and showing us a bit more of the background instead of rigidly cropping every photo so the player is all we can see?  Worked pretty well on this card of Koji Yamamoto (#311) I think.

Just some random musings that rattled around in my mind as I flipped through a small stack of 1981 Calbee cards.  

Calbee Series 2: Let the Complaints Begin (strikes gong)!

 

Calbee Series 2 has arrived!  Or actually, wait, no it hasn't.  Its weird.  According to Calbee itself the set isn't supposed to appear in stores until June 28th.  And I can confirm that the local stores here still don't have them.

Yet as I sit here typing this I do so with the full 88 card regular set right in front of me, so obviously some of them have escaped from the Calbee factory early.  

This allows me to present the second 2021 installment of my thrice annual tradition I like to call "Complaining 'bout Calbee Photography".  So (cracks knuckles), let's begin.

First things first.  I bought this set off one of the re-sellers on Yahoo Auctions who buy up cases of Calbee chips to open them, hunt down the chase cards and sell them for major Yen.  They then offload everything else - the cards that are supposedly the main product -  for almost nothing.  So as a collector of just the regular cards when the new Series comes out its always a good time for me to pounce like a scavenger scoring the scraps leftover by an apex predator who feels his leftover scraps have no market value.    

I was a bit apprehensive about this purchase because the guy I bought it from has the most insanely bad feedback rating I have ever seen on Yahoo Auctions - 75.8% positive (out of 171 total so its not like he's new to this and one or two bad ones brought him down).   The average feedback scores on Yahoo Auctions are about the same as they are on Ebay, basically if anyone has less than a 99.5% positive rating its enough to make you look through their transactions to see if they are on the up and up.  Less than 99.0% is a huge red flag.  75.8% is just off the charts insane.  This guy is an absolute legend among low feedback Yahoo Auctions dudes, nobody can touch him.

I pulled the trigger anyway because the price for the entire set was just 300 Yen (plus 210 Yen shipping), meaning I could get the whole thing in hand for under 5$ US, which seemed worth the risk.

Much to my surprise, the cards were sent promptly after I paid for them and arrived within two days!  All of them.

I could kind of see where that 75.8% feedback was coming from though, the cards were literally just tossed loose into an envelope.  No wrapping or anything, and it wasn't even a bubble mailer.  But they survived the journey without damage so I'm not complaining and he can expect a positive feedback from me shortly (which might push him up into 76% range or so).

So let me talk about the cards themselves.  Usually when I do a post like this Dave has already done one on the set so I don't talk about the basics, but since I got these early I can beat him to it this time!

The regular set contains 72 cards (#73 to 144, continuing on from Series 1).  I got all of those.  There is also a four card checklist set and a 12 card Opening Pitcher set, which I also received (meaning my 300 Yen purchase netted me 88 cards).  Together these would constitute the "base" cards.

In addition there is a 24 card "Star Card" set, which I don' t have but assume its covered in shiny glittery stuff like usual, and a 12 card special box limited set which features the top hitter from each team, which I'm not sure how it is distributed but also likely has a bunch of shiny glittery stuff on it.  There is also a 24 card parrallel set of the Star Cards featuring embossed signatures of the player.  These can only be obtained by sending in "Lucky Cards" which are randomly inserted in packs and are the real money makers for the re-sellers like the guy I bought mine from.  

Anyway, now lets get on with what we've all been waiting for!  Me complaining about Calbee's photos!

Yup, they suck again this time around.  For those unfamiliar, I did a post a few years back highlighting the monotonous nature of Calbee photography which you can refer to.  The rules are that all position players except catchers are shown batting, all pitchers are shown hitting and catchers are the only position players sometimes shown actually in the field.  The photos are always framed the same way and are usually taken from the exact same vantage point in the team's home stadium.  Individually none of the cards have bad pictures on them, but collectively it makes for boring and repetitive looking sets.  

2021 Calbee sticks to precedent pretty strictly.  I could only find 4 cards in the regular set which deviated from those rules, these ones here:

None of these are particularly exciting and the close up framing perpetuates the monotony even with these. So once again we've got a thoroughly mediocre Calbee set which makes me value my vintage Calbee cards with their lovely and varied photography all the more!

Anyway, if you enjoyed reading me complain about Calbee photography (and who doesn't enjoy that?) be sure to tune in to the blog in September when I'll undoubtedly be devoting a post to complaining about Series 3!

2020 Calbee Series 2 Complete! And Boring!

This is Taisei Makino's card from Series 2 of the 2020 Calbee set.  I just picked up the complete base set of 87 cards off of Yahoo Auctions.  Dave did a great write up of the set's details which you can read here so I won't repeat what he's already written there about it.

But I wanted to bring the Makino card to everyone's attention since its the only one (save the manager checklist cards) which deviates from the dreaded Three Rules of Contemporary Calbee Card Photos.  With every other card in the set, including the average leaders subset, every photo features a player either at bat (all position players except catchers), in his catchers gear (catchers) or on the mound (pitchers).  

The Makino card is the only one which shows a player doing something else, in this case fielding.  

This is a huge step back from Series 1, which featured a much better selection of photographs than usual.  I guess that was just an exception rather than the start of something new.

As I've complained about many times (and since Calbee is still doing it, I'll complain again) none of the photos on their own are bad, but when you've got the whole set in your hands the standardized photography gets extremely boring.  

This is made worse by the fact that the photos are almost all taken in the player's home stadium and from the exact same angle.  So for example here are all of the cards featuring Hiroshima Carp pitchers:

You really get nothing in the photos other than the same grass and dirt background because of the stupid angle.  Hiroshima has a really great stadium, I'd like to see more of it on the background of these cards!  Again, none of these cards looks bad on its own, but when you've got the whole set looking at you the monotonous repetition gets really boring.  With Hiroshima at least they are playing outdoors under natural sunlight which make the photos a bit brighter.  The cards of teams that play in domes, like the Nippon Ham Fighters, Yomiuri Giants and Orix Buffaloes look way darker and the players don't really stand out very well.  Its just awful all around.

The only kind of "interesting" thing that I have noticed is that the set contains some of the first cards of the Pandemic.  Years from now collectors will probably be able to tell the 2020 cards (and with the way things are going  I fear maybe also the 2021 cards) by the empty stands in the backgrounds of a lot of cards:

At the same time this of course also contributes to the general misery of looking at this set, so while interesting it isn't helpful!

On the plus side, the whole thing only cost me 900 Yen (about $9) with shipping.  Which is a kind of stupid thing to say I suppose after devoting the whole post to describing how much I dislike this thing.  But yeah, its way better to spend 900 Yen to discover I dislike it than to spend 10-20 times that much on bags of chips which I also don't like trying to put the thing together by hand.  And as a collector its not like I could just NOT buy it, right?  Its what we do after all. 

PS: This was my 300th post on this blog!

Hideji Kato's Weird half-head Card

One of the cards from my 75-76-77 Calbee set that I've always been struck by is card 646 featuring Hankyu Braves first baseman (and 1975 MVP award winner) Hideji Kato.

Its another one of the 1970s Calbee cards which display photo centering decisions which are very hard to justify. Why is the top half of his head not on this card?  This isn't a miscut or even off centred card, I have 4 copies of this one and his head is cut in half on all of them (also note that the text on the bottom of the card is correctly positioned).

The Calbee sets from the 1970s have photography that blows anything Topps was doing back then away, but there are a few cards like this one where you wonder what was going on at Calbee.  Why didn't they just slide the photo down a bit so they could get all of his head in?  Was it that important to include his feet?  Or was this like an unusually egregious Billy Ripken 1989 Fleer type of deal in which Kato for some reason had an obscenity written on his batting helmet which nobody noticed until they were getting ready to make the cards and they panicked since this was the only photo they had of him and they just made do with what they had?

I don't know, but I do know that I feel very awkward whenever I see this card.

Mystery wrapped in a riddle: How is this card supposed to have been centred?

Another week, another 1970s Calbee pickup, in this case card #17 from the 1977 set (famous scenes series).  It features members of the Yomiuri Giants taken on October 16 at Korakuen Stadium singing a "song of victory" after going from worst to first under Shigeo Nagashima`s management.

The card carries a huge mystery to it which I am having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around. It seems to have been miscut on both the top and bottom, yet on both sides the nature of the miscut precludes the possibility of the other side`s miscut.

Look at the top of the card.  The heads of Sadaharu Oh and Isao Harimoto are cut off from above the eyebrows.  It seems the card should end a bit higher than that, so at least you get the entire faces of the two main players in the centre, right?

But then look at the bottom of the card. The lower, smaller bottom line of text says "巨人Ｖ１” but it has clearly been cut in half, with the lower part of the text completely off the card.

The miscut on the top suggests the card was cut too low, while the miscut on the bottom suggests it was cut too high.  Under the laws of physics currently in force in the known universe it is not possible for these to both be simultaneously correct, yet they both exist.  What gives?

In case you are wondering, the card has not been trimmed at all, it is identical in size to a standard card from that set.  I can`t make heads or tails of this.  The only explanation I can come up with is that the image on the card itself was somehow accidentally printed at 1.1 or 1.2 times magnification, making it too big to fit on the card.  But I`ve never seen a card with that before.

Kind of a mystery, I almost feel like I am looking at an MC Escher painting or something.  Anyone else come across similarly weird card cuts?

UPDATE:

Raz in the comments made a pretty good find, locating the above image which seems to show how the card was intended to look when correctly centred.

This just really opens up a whole new can of "what?" worms.  Calbee actually intended this card to have Sadaharu Oh and Isao Harimoto`s faces cut clean out of the photo?  In order to provide more room on the bottom for that lovely image of....the backs of photographers?

I`m guessing there were a few quality control issues related to how images were centred on printing plates with Calbee cards in the 70s, there are a couple of other cards I have with questionably centred images.  On most it isn`t noticeable since moving the centre of the image a bit only crops out a bit of random background, but on cards where some key element (like say the faces of the NPB all time home run king and hit king) is close to the edge, errors like this become really hard to miss.

More TV screen grabs on Calbee Cards

 

NPB Card Guy and I have been trading posts recently about 80s Calbee cards that used pictures of TV broadcasts on them.  Originally he noted that the Japanese Wikipedia article about Calbee had stated that the 1988 set had used them, but as he mentioned in his most recent post (linked above), the 1987 Calbee set seems to have some too.

On looking through my 1987s I found some that looked like contenders too.  The gold bordered cards featuring nice plays (like the one pictured at the top of this post) seem to have a lot of them.  This regular card of Nippon Ham`s Tsuno also seems a bit fishy (its pretty blurry)

I find this laziness a bit of an odd anomily in Calbee history.  Even the early sets from the 1970s generally had great in action photography that put most contemporary American cards from the Topps sets to shame.  Even the 1987 and 1988 sets have a lot of great photography, like my favorite ever Warren Cromartie card (from the 87 set), and yet somehow these horrible looking pictures managed to find their way in. Go figure.  At least it makes for an interesting piece of card history!

Extreme Close Up: 1987 Calbee Komatsu

In the past few months I have come to really appreciate how bizarre and awful (but in kind of an interesting way) the photography on Calbee cards from the 80s are.  I was flipping through my 1987 nearing-complete set the other day and noticed this card of Komatsu, who played for the Dragons.  This card must hold the record for the closest close-up photo of a player on a baseball card.

I mean, this takes it to ridiculous levels - they even cropped his entire chin out of the photo!  Most of his ears and hat are gone too.

I wonder why they chose this photo.  My guess is it was the only even remotely usable photo they had of him, but there may have been something they needed to crop out of the photo (maybe some 1989 Fleer Billy Ripken type shenanigans, if I dare speculate?).  But for some reason in cropping it they found the only way to get the offending material completely out was to also take almost all of him out of the photo with it.

It actually looks kind a modern day selfie taken with a cell phone camera. And there are good reasons why we don`t use selfies on baseball cards, as I`m sure we all know.