Tatsunori Hara's first Calbee card is a Sadaharu Oh card.

 

I've been AWOL from the blog for the past few weeks.  October is kind of "hell month" for me at work so its been hard to squeeze time in for blogging.

Despite that, the flow of card purchases by me has continued more or less at its normal pace.  One card I picked up this month was the above, #354 from the 1981 Calbee set.  It is basically Sadaharu Oh's regular card.  His name is the one in pink lettering on the lower right of the photo, and the text on the back just gives some general biographical information about him, unconnected to the photo.

This card is really neat though.  From left to right you have Motoshi Fujita, Sadaharu Oh and Tatsunori Hara.  Those three guys have three big things in common:

1) They were all star players for the Giants;

2) They all became managers of the Giants after their playing days (Hara is in fact their current manager)

3) They all ended up in the Hall of Fame.

I'm not sure but I think the photo was probably taken during the 1981 Japan Series, which the Giants won (Fujita was the manager, Oh was assistant manager that year and would take over as regular manager the following season).

A second, and more important, neat thing about it specifically relates to Tatsunori Hara, the guy on the right.  1981 was his first year in pro ball and he was THE hot rookie that year.  He was supposed to be the Giants' next Shigeo Nagashima or Sadaharu Oh. His playing career, which ended in 1995, didn't quite live up to that hype, though he did bang out 382 career home runs and was one of the better players in NPB throughout the 1980s.

The thing is though, Tatsunori Hara doesn't have a card of his own in the 1981 Calbee set.  His first "solo" appearance on a card came in the 1982 Calbee set, which is generally regarded as his rookie (he appears on a few cards in that set, my old Sports Card Magazine designates the first one, card #51, as his true "rookie card").  

His cameo appearance on my 1981 Calbee card though seems to be his first appearance in a Calbee set.  Which leads me to the question: what is this card?  I guess its not a "rookie card" since its not his card, its Sadaharu Oh's. But at the same time, Hara is pretty prominently featured on there so its a bit more than just a card of some other player where he coincidentally appears in the background or something, like Ryne Sandberg's cameo on Reggie Smith's 1983 Topps card:

Also, Sandberg of course had a card of his own in the 1983 Topps set, so the question of whether his appearance on the Smith meant something special didn't really come up.  

So this card falls into a weird limbo in terms of what the hobby might designate it as since I don't think there is a precedent for this.  Its definitely not a true rookie card, but also definitely not nothing either.  "Pre" rookie card?  No, thats not right.  I can't really decide what to call it.  Anyway, its neat.

1993 Calbee Big Size Cards

 I have added another oddball set to my collecting aims: 1993 Calbee Big Size cards.  I won three of them - Hideki Matsui, Tatsunori Hara and Atsuya Furuta,  in an auction last week and they arrived in the mail today!

As the name implies, the set was issued by Calbee, in 1993, and the cards are big size.  Other than that I can't tell you much about them.  I assume they were some sort of mail-in prize that Calbee gave out that year, but can't say that for 100% sure.

There are 27 cards in the set (they are numbered "8/27"etc on the back) but I'm not sure about the entire checklist - Hideo Nomo also has a card in it and a few other big name players seem to as well, though no Ichiro.  The designs of the cards are the same as the regular 1993 Calbee on the front, the backs are slightly different in that they say "1993 Big Size Card"across the top.

The cards are big but not huge.  I wasn't sure what to expect when I ordered them since there was nothing in the photos to provide scale, but they are about twice the size of a regular Calbee card (I put a 2018 Calbee card in the photo for comparison).

From what I can tell, Calbee also did a Big Size Card set in 1990, though unlike these it has a distinct design from the regular set of that year (which itself had two quite different designs).  Those are the only two years for which Google searches for Calbee Big Size Card turns up anything, so I assume they are the only years Calbee did this (edited to note that they made them in 1991 as well according to NPB Guy, and also there was a set in 1992 - there are some pictures of them here!).

The Matsui is probably the key card in the set since it is from his rookie year.  I'm not sure if it counts as a technical "rookie card"since it isn't from the base set, but its pretty cool.  These cards seem to be quite a bit harder to find than the regular 1993 Calbee set, which itself is pretty hard to find.  There are only a few up on Yahoo Auctions and nowhere near enough to put together a list of all 27.  Intriguingly this listing here for a Shigeo Nagashima card from the set comes with a mini plastic  frame that is the right size for the card.  The listing doesn't say so but I wonder if those little frames might have come with the cards as part of the promotion.

Anyway, at 27 cards this seems like a set that shouldn't be too hard to complete even if they aren't easy to find, so I'm putting it on my "to-do"list!

Edit: BONUS CHECKLIST!

Based on the Calbee collector website (in Japanese) who has most of the cards in the set, I've been able to put together a checklist of most of the cards in English below (some only have last names because I can't make out their first names, cards number 8, 22 and 26 I still don't know) for those of you who decide to follow me down this collecting wormhole:

1. Koji Akiyama
2. Kazuhiro Kiyohara
3. Hideo Nomo
4. Daijiro Oishi
5. Hoshino Nobuyuki
6. Takahashi
7. Choji Murata
8.
9. Nishizaki
10. Terushi Nakajima
11. Satoru Komiyama
12. Takeshi Aikou
13. Takahiro Ikeyama
14. Iida
15. Atsuya Furuta
16. Masumi Kuwata
17. Tatsunori Hara
18. Hideki Matsui
19. Shigeo Nagashima
20. Koji Nakata
21. Yutaka Wada
22.
23. Tomonori Maeda
24. Kazuhiro Sasaki
25. Takagi
26.
27. Hiromitsu Ochiai