Warren Cromartie and Bill Gullickson: A Card From Another Era

I have a few international baseball card trading relationships which usually involve Americans sending me American cards (mostly of the Montreal Expos, my favorite team) in exchange for Japanese ones.  Jay, who doesn't have a blog I can link to, is one of them and he sent me an envelope recently that included this 1982 Topps card featuring Warren Cromartie and Bill Gullickson, the Expos' leaders in batting average and ERA in 1981.

This card has a pretty strong Japan connection since both of these guys would be re-united as team mates with the Yomiuri Giants a few years later.  Cromartie played for the Giants from 1984 until 1990, and was joined by Gullickson in two of those years (1988 and 1989).

I had a thought when I saw this card that it was possible that not only were they team mates, but perhaps they both also led the Giants in batting average and ERA together, thus recreating their performance with the 1981 Expos depicted on this card.

Sure enough, Cromartie led the Giants in average (in fact he led the entire league in average with a .378 mark) in 1989.  He probably would have in 1988 too (.333), but injury limited him to just 201 at bats that year.

Gullickson had a really solid year in 1988 and finished 8th in the Central League in ERA, but unfortunately didn't lead the Giants, finishing second to Masumi Kuwata.  In 1989 he fared far worse, with his 3.65 ERA not coming even close.

So while they came really close to re-creating their 1981 team leading combination, they weren't quite able to pull it off.

Despite that unfortunate near-miss, the card is also interesting because both of these guys bucked the stereotypes of American baseball players who made it big in Japan, which usually follow one of two models:

1) Washed up former big leaguer nearing the end of his career who wants to extend his playing days (and paydays) a bit longer.  Guys like Willie Davis, Frank Howard, Reggie Smith and Bill Madlock come to mind.

2) Really promising younger guy who tore it up in Triple A but was never able to break in to a regular spot on an MLB team.  Guys like Randy Bass, Boomer Wells or Tuffy Rhodes.

Neither Cromartie nor Gullickson fit either of these.  They were both established major leaguers who were still in their prime when they came to Japan.

Cromartie had been a solid and consistent starter in Montreal for seven seasons when he signed with Yomiuri and would hit over .300 in a part time role for the Kansas City Royals after leaving the Giants in 1991.

Gullickson had double digit win totals in each of the six seasons preceding his arrival in Japan. In fact, Gullickson was so "in his prime" that his best MLB season came after, rather than before, his time in Japan.  Two years after returning to the US he led  the American League with 20 wins while playing in Detroit alongside fellow returnee Cecil Fielder.

Such was the 80s.  Its easy to forget that  for a short moment back in that decade it looked like Japan might actually catch up to the US in terms of economic power (despite its much smaller population) and this was reflected in the fact that NPB teams were actually able to competitively poach MLB players still in the prime of their careers.

The Japanese economy tanked in the early 1990s and NPB stopped doing that, and the trend reversed itself with MLB starting to poach NPB players in their prime.  Today the salary imbalance between the two leagues makes it all but impossible for Japanese teams to do anything like that, so they've reverted to getting American players more closely resembling the above two stereotypes which, tough stereotypes, are pretty accurate.

But this one card from the 1982 Topps set does hark back to an era when NPB was able to get the best two players of a competitive MLB franchise while still in their prime!

Set Complete! 2012 Georgia Coffee Pro Baseball Foreigner Helpers

 I got the remaining 5 figures I needed to complete my 2012 Georgia Coffee Pro Baseball Foreigner Helpers set!  Ralph Bryant, Orestes Destrade, Randy Bass, Bobby Rose and Alonzo Powell arrived in the mail from a Yahoo Auction seller to finish them up.

I really do like these guys.  They just cheer me up in a way that I need in the middle of a pandemic.

 The player selection is pretty good, all these guys were all stars. Everyone played during the 1980s or 1990s.  Randy Bass and Boomer Wells with their 1983 debuts are the earliest, while Bobby Rose, who played his last season in 2000, is the latest.  Rose was the only guy still playing when I arrived in Japan in 1999 and thus is the only one I remember as an active player here.

Given that these came out in 2012, I'm curious why they didn't have any stars from the 00s in the set.  Tuffy Rhodes would look pretty cool on one of these. 

I got two of the booklets (for Bobby Rose and Orestes Destrade) that came with the figures.  They are pretty cool, featuring a picture of the figure, a player bio and an ad for a Georgia brand battery charger on the front.

 And the back has a checklist of the whole set, along with an illustrated diagram showing how to assemble the figure for those who may have difficulty with whole the "round peg goes in round hole" thing.

This means I still "need" the booklets for the other 6 in order to have the things really complete, but I'm pretty satisfied to go without.  The figures themselves are enough for me.

Cans of Coffee that Come with Baseball Players Attached are Best Cans of Coffee

I made another great discovery at the second hand shop that sells Pokémon figures which I get for my kids.  More baseball figures!

These are from a specific set: the Georgia Pro Yakyu Suketto Gaikokujin set, which translates into the somewhat awkward and maybe a little offensive English title "Georgia Pro Baseball Foreigner Helper Set".

These are one of the things I used to love about living in Japan in the 2000s and early 2010s: free high quality stuff with canned beverages.  These were released in 2012 and came with cans of Georgia coffee.

In Japan, coffee comes in cans, like soft drinks.  People often drink it cold, and you can get them out of vending machines or from fridges in convenience stores.  Tommy Lee Jones is famous here mainly for the surreal ads he used to appear in for canned coffee, like this one:

Back in 2012 if you bought a can of Georgia Coffee you'd get one out of 8 figures of famous foreign ballplayers.  They came in little orange bags attached directly to the cans, you can see a contemporary blog post of what they looked like here.

I was living in Japan in 2012 but wasn't aware of this promotion at the time, probably because I'm not a canned coffee drinker (I am a major coffee drinker, just not from cans).  It used to be really common for drink makers to attach little toys to their products to encourage people to buy them and I used to get really excited about them.  In the early 2000s I remember Pepsi did this quite a bit with various tie ins (Star Wars figures, Gundam figures, model cars, etc - really good stuff considering it was free with a bottle that only cost like 140 Yen).   Since the early 2010s they've become way less common, possibly because they were so expensive to run, which is a shame.

Anyway, I found these figures at the second hand shop for 100 Yen (about 1$ US) each and decided to buy the three they had, featuring Boomer Wells, Warren Cromartie and Brad "Animal" Lesley.

Cromartie is featured just after completing a swing:

Animal is doing his thing:


And Boomer looks like he is about to hit a long ball.


The checklist is pretty good.  The set features:

Boomer Wells
Warren Cromartie
Animal Lesley
Bobby Rose
Randy Bass
Alonzo Powell
Ralph Bryant
Orestes Destrade

In addition to the figure you also got a little full color booklet featuring your player on the cover and an illustrated checklist of the set inside.

That is pretty insane value for the 130 Yen (about $1.20 US) that each of these cans of coffee cost.  And you got coffee with it too.

I was so enamored with these that I went on Yahoo Auctions last night and tracked down the other five that I needed for the set and bought them.  So when they arrive in the mail I'll have the whole thing.

I'm not a huge fan of figurines in general, but these little ones featuring charicatures of the players (rather than attempts at more realistic depictions of them) have really caught my fancy.  They are just so....so....."cute"  I guess is the word I am looking for.  Which isn't a feature I normally weight highly in making baseball collectible purchase decisions but with these (and my earlier Hanshin Tigers purchase) I think that is exactly what attracts me to them (as well as my being a fan of the players themselves of course).  Their small size also helps since they don't take up much space.

Georgia also released another similar set of baseball figures in 2006 featuring stars of the 1980s (not limited to foreigners) which I think I'm also going to go after.  If I get it, I'll do a post about them too!

1990 Calbee Warren Cromartie

As I mentioned a few months ago, the first series of 1990 Calbee cards are the first (and thus far only) of the vintage Calbee series that I have completed.  Though its still a bit hard to track down singles, the 1990 first series is the easiest of the Calbee mini-era sets to complete owing to the extremely small number of cards in it (55, though if you are going for the entire 1990 set there are actually 217 cards, but from #56 up they are bigger dimension cards and thus not technically part of the mini-era). It also helps that there aren`t any super rare single prints to track down.  Most singles can be had for $1-$3 each (depending on condition), so its also pretty affordable.

One of the more interesting cards in the set is #37, Warren Cromartie`s last Japanese baseball card.  He was coming off one of his best seasons, having hit .378 and won the Central League MVP in 1989,   but his production tapered off considerably in 1990 and it turned out to be his last in NPB.

His career is kind of an interesting reverse example of the "washed up MLB players go over to Japan" stereotype.  When he came over to the Giants in 1985 he was still in the prime of his career and had been a pretty decent starter for the strong Expos teams of the late 70s and early 80s.  Then, when his career in Japan was in decline, he actually went back to the majors and had a really good year with the Royals, albeit in  a part time role, hitting .313 in 1991 before retiring.

Cromartie has a lot of really great cards from the late 1980s Calbee sets, many of which have him in interesting poses.  This is the only one of him that has a design other than the sort of standard full-bleed photo Calbee design of the 1980s, which makes it kind of unique.  The border on the lower part of the card, with his player number in the big circle, looks pretty cool.

Cromartie is also the only one of the big name foreign players from the 1980s who appears in this set.  Randy Bass had already left NPB by that point and Boomer Wells, though he was still playing in NPB, isn`t in this series (though I think he appears later in the larger sized Calbee upper number series from this year).  The only other foreign players with a card in this one are Ralph Bryant of the Kintetsu Buffaloes (#43) and Matt Keogh of the Hanshin Tigers (#41).

Anyway, its kind of a cool last card of a cool player. 

1990 Calbee First Series: Complete!

 As I mentioned in my previous post, I thought I would try to do some updates on collecting goals I reached in 2015.  Probably the biggest is that I finally completed one of the 1980s mini-sized Calbee sets.  Sort of.

The first series of the 1990 Calbee set is kind of an oddball one since it is the last series of Calbee cards to have that mini size, but it isn`t technically a set, since there were more seriest produced that year which were of a completely different design and size (basically identical to the 1991 Calbee set).  I don`t have the full 1990 set including those upper series cards, but I did complete the first series of 55 cards, which are the last Calbees in the mini size era.  I am going to refer to it as a set from here on however just to keep it simple.

Owing to only containing 55 cards, the 1990 1st series is definitely the easiest of the mini card Calbee sets to put together, so it sort of represents the lowest hanging fruit for mini card era collectors.

I`m quite pleased with it. Though there aren`t many in the set they are still a bit hard to find, Yahoo Auctions only has a few singles listed most of the time.  Its got some notable cards, like Warren Cromartie`s last card from his NPB playing days (though not his last card period, since he returned to play for the KC Royals after leaving Japan and had some MLB cards in the 1991 and 1992 sets if my memory is correct).

It also had one card of one player who was still active as of last season (though he has now retired), Dragon`s catcher/manager Motonobu Tanishige;

There is a certain sense of satisfaction one gets from completing a vintage set, even a small one like this.  My 1987 Calbees are probably next on the radar for completion in 2016, I am about 80% of the way to finishing that one (but at almost 400 cards that is still more of a challenge than these ones were)!

Why I like Calbee more than BBM

My Japanese baseball card collection is mainly made up of Calbees.  I like Calbee a lot.  BBM is the only other maker I`ve ever tried collecting, but I have pretty much given up on them.  I just can`t bring myself to actually collecting BBM cards. .

I think my preference for Calbee over BBM simply boils down to the fact that Calbee keeps things simple (good) while BBM makes everything ridiculously complicated (bad).  There are a few different ways in which Calbee`s simplicity trumps BBM`s complexity, here are a few off the top of my head:

1. Card design

Calbee cards have almost always followed the simple equation of a full-bleed photo of the player with a minimal amount of information (name and team) inconspicuously printed in the lower corner.  With a few exceptions (the 1975, 1990 and 1995 sets come to mind) they`ve stuck to that formula and it works great. I mean how could anybody beat the pure awesomeness of a card like this 1987 Calbee Warren Cromartie?

BBM on the other hand has rarely been able to prevent itself from mucking up their card fronts with unnecessary stuff that just distracts from the photo.  Some of the BBM sets aren`t too bad in this regard (like this year`s) but others (like both series of the 2002 regular set) just add some cheap looking graphics to the front that do nothing but detract from the card`s appearance.

And that is just the regular cards, BBM leads the world in producing massively ugly sets covered in foil crap, which leads me to point 2:

2. Production of way too many sets

Calbee in recent years has been pretty consistent in just producing one set a year released in 3 series. There are always a few subsets that go along with the main set, but my only real complaint with these is that they number them seperatly rather than as part of the main set.  Usually one or two of these is a harder to find series of star cards which are almost always distinguishable because they have a bunch of glittery crap on them.  I don`t like those sets but I at least appreciate the fact that they keep it to just one per year.

BBM on the other hand seems to churn out new sets almost everyday.  There are just way more than there can possibly be demand for, with each team getting its own seperately issued set now and a ton of useless and ugly premium sets.  Most of these have atrocious designs like the premium BBM Touch the Game set which just looks awful:

3. Number of cards in the Sets

I guess this is also related to the previous two, but the fact that BBM produces, for a league which only has 12 teams, more regular cards than Topps usually produces for the 30 teams in major league baseball just rubs me the wrong way.  My first abortive attempt to get back into cards actually happened back in 2002 when I tried to put a set of BBM together.  Between the two series I think there were about 800 cards in the regular set alone, which just made me completely lose interest in them.  It is just really obnoxious to put that many cards in a set for a league with so few players.  Calbee sets have varied a lot in size over the years but recently they`ve been in the 300 or so range with about 100-200 more in the subsets, which is way more reasonable.

4. Cablee isn`t actually a baseball card company

This is an admittedly odd reason, but I like the fact that Calbee cards are basically just promotional items intended to boost chip sales. It is just so....innocent.  It harkens back to a day when cards in North America were basically the same - things to encourage people to buy tobacco or gum.

This also makes them popular items among one demographic which BBM seems to ignore: kids.  One of the things that makes collecting a set of Calbee cards in near mint condition so difficult is the fact that so many of them, even today, are collected by kids who put them in their pockets, throw them around and do general kid-like things with them.  While I don`t like getting dinged up cards in the lots I buy, I do really like that fact.

In that sense, Calbee cards have way more in common with American cards from the 60s than today.  They are something that kids buy at the corner store in the summer and play with. And at 90 yen or so per bag they are something kids can easily afford.

BBM cards on the other hand are very clearly marketed at an adult market.  They are sold in packs at high prices and they don`t come with anything else.  Any time you by a lot of BBM cards on Yahoo Auctions they will be in pack-fresh mint condition.  While I like getting cards in nice condition, I also find this fact a bit depressing.  It means no kid has ever played with or loved these cards like they do with the Calbee ones.  They were bought by an adult collector (like me, sigh) and are basically just meant to sit in a box existing in mint condition for the rest of time.  Its just not a very uplifting thought.  Where Calbee cards bring to mind classic American cards like the 1957 Topps set, BBM evokes the dreggs of the 90s like 1992 Donruss or 1995 Score.

Anyway, those are just a few reasons I way prefer Calbee over BBM.  I do have some BBM cards kicking around, but those are basically just ones I bought out of curiousity because they were cheap and not because I wanted to collect them specifically. The ramblings of a thirty something who misses the old days....