Big News For Vintage Calbee Collectors

 

There was some big news in the vintage Calbee collecting world last week: Somebody bought a complete set of the 1975-76 Calbee "monster" on Yahoo Auctions.

This is the same set that I have been working on for years and devoting a lot of posts on here to. At 1472 cards, many of them extremely rare, it is easily one of the most difficult sets of baseball cards in the world to complete.  

As far as I know, only two complete sets exist.  One is in the hands of a long time collector who has been collecting Calbee cards since the 1970s who was featured in an article in the Asahi Shinbun about a decade ago which seems to have disappeared from the internet because I can no longer find it.  The other one was this one, which has been listed on Yahoo Auctions for the past three years ( I wrote about it when it was first listed here).  

The starting bid on it has been set at 880,000 Yen (about $8,500 US) and somebody finally pulled the trigger!

This sale isn't surprising. When it was first listed I thought the price might have been a bit on the high side since the price of cards from the set was still pretty reasonable and I figured I could put the whole thing together for less than that.  In the intervening 3 yeas I have been disabused of that quaint idea.  The price of cards from this set has increased significantly and the cards from the rarer series in particular have become much harder to find (not that they were ever easy).  

It got to the point that for the past year or so I'd gone from thinking it was a bit overpriced to thinking it was one of the best bargains out there and was wondering why nobody was pouncing on it.  Of course my baseball card collecting budget isn't anywhere near big enough for me to be dropping that kind of money on cards, but if I was rich I would have bought this thing ages ago.

Anyway, now it is gone, in the hands of some lucky collector who with the click of a button has accomplished something that I have been slaving away at for 7 years and am still only about 70% of the way to finishing!  Probably the next time the world will see one of these available for sale will be 40 years from now when my kids inherit my estate and start dumping all the crap I collect that they aren't interested in, assuming I live that long and that 40 years is enough time for me to finish this monster!

Yahoo Auctions Japan is a lot Busier Now than it was in 2013

I was browsing through some of my old blog posts the other day when I stumbled onto this one from 2013.  In that post I compared the number of Calbee cards from the 1970s which were available on Yahoo Auctions to how many Topps cards from the 1950s were available on Ebay in an attempt to get a rough idea of the relative abundance of each.

Looking back at the post seven years later what really caught my attention were how few listings there were for 1970s Calbee cards back then compared to now.  I hadn't really sensed any trend towards more Calbee cards being available, but perhaps that is because it happened too gradually to be noticeable.

To compare, I just made this table with the listings I found for Calbee cards from 1973 to 1977 back in 2013, and then how many I could find today (June 1st 2020).  The numbers have gone up a lot.

Calbee Year	Listings in Sept 2013	Listings in June 2020	Percent increase
1973	126	508	403%
1974	171	489	286%
1975	252	1045	415%
1976	264	1994	755%
1977	123	811	659%

I have to mention an important caveat though.  To check the numbers today I just took the shortcut of looking at how many listings there were under the category for that year (which has problems that I've written about before).   Back in 2013 according to what I wrote I manually searched through the whole site using keyword searches. I don't remember why I chose that cumbersome method, its possible they just didn't have the categories back then since I think if they had them I would have used them (I don't remember when they introduced categories for individual card years, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was 2014 since there are no categories from 2015 onward).  Anyway, the different methodology I used creates a problem since my 2013 method might have undercounted  (by missing cards that didn't turn up in my keyword searches) while my current method might overcount (by including cards erroneously categorized), which could mean the changes aren't as drastic as they look in the above table.

That noted, I think its probable that a large part of the change is due to more cards actually being available rather than just the result of methodological error.  And it is quite a bit.  Calbee cards from 1976 and 1977 (which are comprised of more than one set) in particular seem to be way more abundant on Yahoo Auctions now than they were then.

I'm kind of curious about why this is.  Yahoo Auctions wasn't new in 2013, it had been around for years and was well established at that point, so it wasn't like it was a brand new market that had just jumped onto the scene and there were fewer cards simply because people hadn't taken it up yet.

One possibility (which I like) is that collecting vintage Calbee baseball cards has become more popular in Japan over that time and this is a result of that.  I do get the feeling this is the case, while I hadn't noticed the trend towards more cards being listed, I have noticed a trend towards more people bidding on cards (and bidding them higher) than they used to.  The higher prices may also be attracting more people to putting cards up for sale than used to be the case.

Another related possibility is that brick and mortar store dealers are putting more cards up than they used to.  The number of such shops has thinned out a bit (at least here in Nagoya) in recent years, and probably Yahoo Auctions has played a big role in that.

Anyway, whatever the reason its kind of cool to see that there are more vintage Calbee cards available now than there used to be.  If I'm still maintaining this blog in 5 years I'll probably revisit this post to see what the numbers are like then!

The Bed-time Story versus Auction End Time Dilemma

Anybody other dad-collectors have this problem?

I have two little kids who are totally awesome.  They, to be clear, are not the problem.  Being little, they like (demand) their daddy telling them bedtime stories.  Emphasis on the plural, one is never enough.  And I absolutely love indulging them. I have a pretty good repertoire of random stories based on a cast of characters I've built up over the years - Eddie the Excavator, Smoogy Woogy monsters, Captain Redbeard the Pirate, a cat named Nyan Nyan who sings in a high pitched voice and gets outraged when anyone tells her to stop singing,  and all the dinosaurs are regular players.  

So why am I going into this level of detail about bedtime story telling in a blog about baseball cards?  Because of Yahoo Auctions.

I get the majority of my cards on Yahoo auctions, and sellers on there almost always time their auctions to end in the evening, usually at the exact same time I am upstairs telling bedtime stories.  I used to be able to get the kids to bed a bit earlier, but now their falling asleep almost exactly coincides with auctions I have placed bids on having finished about 10 minutes ago.  And I've lost a lot of them!  Recently my evening routine has been:

1) Me telling the stories,
2) Me waiting for kids to fall asleep;
3) Once they fall asleep, me racing downstairs at light speed to get my tablet and check if any of my auctions are still going on;
4) Me cursing when I see they are all finished and that my "items won" page is empty.

The problem is with me really.  My usual strategy is to put in placeholder bids on stuff I'm interested in as I find them during the course of the week. Then I revisit everything that is finishing on a given evening and figure out which stuff I want to go high on and which stuff I will let go.  Sometimes I'll have 7 or 8 things I'm bidding on.  In that case I can't just bid high on all of them because my budget usually only allows me to afford one or two of the things I'm bidding on (unless its a bunch of cheap cards).  So I have to watch the auctions end in real time. If I win the stuff that finishes early, I'll drop out of bidding on the stuff that is finishing later because the early stuff will have exhausted my budget.  Conversely if I miss out on the stuff that finishes early, I'll put higher bids on the stuff that is finishing later because I still have some free funds.

But this strategy doesn't work unless I'm actually watching the auctions end one by one.  So I've been forced to rethink my bidding strategies and basically just toss up big bids on stuff I'm deadly serious about buying and ignore the "I'll take that if the price ends up being right" things I used to buy a lot of.  Its not as effective though and I wish the sellers would move their end times either up or down a bit.

Do American dad-collectors have this same problem with Ebay?

Price Explosion: 1973 Calbee Edition

 I've noticed recently that prices on vintage (pre 1997) Calbee cards, and those from the 1970s in particular, seem to be selling for a bit more than they used to.  While I'm still getting pretty good deals on stuff, it also seems like I'm getting outbid more than I used to on stuff and am having to up my bidding strategies a bit to stay competetive.

Some cards in particular though seem to be going through the roof in price.  Yesterday an auction for 1973 Calbee card 125 provided a good example of this.  The card features Motoi Mitsuo and Higashida Masayoshi who played for the Lions in Fukuoka.  Neither is a hall of famer, though Motoi could be considered a "Hall of Very Good-er".

The card is one of the harder to find ones in the 1973 set as it was regionally issued only in Kyushu that year.  But the price it went for blew my socks off: 311,000 Yen!  That is about $3,000 US.

As I noted in an earlier post, Japanese collectors in general aren't too fussy about condition and this one isn't in the best, its got some stains on the back:

 And rounded corners too.  Basically its a mid grade card that I would love to have in my collection because its a beautiful card to look at, I love those Lions uniforms from the 70s:

The price though is notable since my copy of Sports Card Magazine from 2010 lists this as a 30,000 Yen card, so it sold for more than 10 times what it was listed for 9 years ago.  It isn't even the most valuable card in the set according to that, there are several which list for higher.  Yet here it is getting 94 bids and being driven up to the price of a used car.

I think 1973 Calbee set collectors have been driving the price of these regional issues through the roof like this, there just aren't enough of them out there to satiate demand.  This is one of the main reasons that, despite my love for the 1973 Calbee set, I've kind of written off the idea of ever being able to put it together, the regional issues have become just way too expensive.  Its also a reason why I'm really in a hurry to finish off my 75-76(-77) Calbee set as soon as I can, its got a lot of regional issues in it too but thus far the prices on them havne't exploded like this!

Collecting in a World Where Nobody Cares About Condition

Should one of these be worth more than the other?

Should these cards be worth the same amount?

One of the things that drives me nuts about the American card market is the insane obsession with condition that has gripped it in recent years.  I've become a bit of a regular on Net54 and it seems about half the posts there are people expressing an opinion related to card condition.  Some hate the obsession with it.  Some are wondering if they should try re-slabbing a card to see if they can get a higher grade.  Some are mad that a card they bought was listed as Ex but is more like Vg-Ex.  Some find the distinction between a PSA 8 and a PSA 9 to be completely arbitrary.  Some can't believe that some people can't see the difference between a PSA 8 and a PSA 9.

And don't get them started about them PSA 10s.

Never in human history has so much (digital) ink been spilled discussing an issue of less import to the world in which we live.

Its not that I don't share a concern about card condition: like any collector I like my cards to look nice.  But at the same time I can't really bring myself to care about it that much.  Are microscopic differences in card centering really worth so much of the collecting world's attention?

In the Japanese hobby, refreshingly, these conversations never happen.  Nobody seems to care much about condition.  I'd like to devote this post to exploring this aspect of the Japanese baseball card hobby in a bit more detail.  I'll do this by first demonstrating this fact empirically by looking at the complete absence of grading services like PSA in the Japanese collecting world.  Then I'd like to further that discussion by looking at the complete absence of any comparable sort of grading standard (outside of grading services) in the hobby in general - the terms "vg", "Ex" or "Mt" are unknown here and have no Japanese equivalent.  Finally I'd like to devote a bit of time to considering both the positive and negative consequences of this difference in the Japanese hobby world: put simply, its not as awesome as you would think.

1. Grading card services are non-existent in the Japanese hobby

To demonstrate how much Japanese collectors don't care about grading services like PSA, I'll do a little experiment on Yahoo Auctions (Japan's Ebay) right now as I type this post.  The baseball card category currently has 180,119 listings.  That is a pretty sizeable amount, and includes everything from commons to cards with BIN prices in the 10s of thousands of dollars.

How many of those cards are graded?  Running a search for "PSA" in that category gives us a whopping:

49 results!

So 0.002% of cards available on the biggest Japanese market for cards have been graded by PSA (a search for PSA's rival SCG gets zero hits).

But even this is an exaggeration in terms of measuring how many Japanese cards are graded.  Out of those 49 cards, 26 of them are actually American (mostly Topps, Bowman, Donruss or UD)!

So we have just 23 Japanese cards graded by PSA out of 180,119?

Yes. But if we are going to narrow this down to how many of these are targeted to Japanese collectors even this is an exaggeration of the relevance of PSA.  Of those 23, 16 of them are cards of Ichiro (mostly his Calbee and Tommy ID rookie cards) which, judging from the listings, are being targeted towards American collectors of Ichiro (given away by the fact that they use English in their listings, which is extremely rare on Yahoo Auctions).

So that leaves us with 7 graded cards for the Japanese collector?

No, 5 of those cards are of Shohei Ohtani or Hideo Nomo, also targeted towards Americans for obvious reasons.

So just 2?

Yes, there is a 1967 Kabaya Leaf card of Yoshinobu Yoda and a 1992 BBM card autographed by Sadaharu Oh which could be of interest to Japanese collectors.

Shigeo Nagashima, the most popular player in Japanese history and the #1 guy with Japanese collectors doesn't have a single graded card for sale at this time.  Oh just has the one.  Most other members of the Japanese hall of fame also have zero (in fact....EVERY other member of the Japanese hall of fame has zero).


2. OK, no grading services, but people can still care about condition, right?

Of course, before grading services entered the US market collectors already had a fairly well developed system of grading cards (which PSA just copied) from poor to mint and assigning differential prices based on grades.  Doesn't the Japanese hobby do something like that?

In a word, no.

This can also  be seen in the way cards are listed on Yahoo Auctions.  Basically everything (except those 49) are "raw" cards, which American sellers on Ebay will almost always tell buyers what condition it is in - VG, EX, Nmt, etc (often with a caveat about them not being pro graders, etc).

These terms basically do not exist in the Japanese hobby, nor is there any Japanese equivalent.

Individual card listings on Yahoo Auctions almost never mention condition at all.  The Japanese hobby doesn't have a universally accepted grading system like in the US.

This isn't to say that condition is 100% absent from listings.  Some sellers use a 3 tier grading system which is as complex as it gets here:

美品　(bihin) = "Beautiful item"
並品 (nami hin) = "Average item"
ジャンク品 (janku hin) = "junk item"

A "beautiful item" could probably fall anywhere Ex and up, an "average Item" would be more like mid-grade, and a "junk item" would probably be in the p/f/g range.  But these categories are extremely subjective and not widely recognized as having a specific meaning, only a few sellers use them.

For the majority, at least with vintage cards, the only mention made of condition is a boilerplate disclaimer that you see everywhere which roughly translates as:

"These cards are old, they may have wear and tear on them.  Buyers expecting the item to be like new please refrain from bidding."  

This applies even to high end items.  Here is a 1987 Calbee complete set for sale right now:

This is an extremely rare and valuable item: its asking price is 145,000 Yen (about 1200 US$), which is a bit on the high side but not outrageous.  

 But look at that listing. You've got 3 grainy pictures in which you can't tell anything about the condition.  And the description of the condition, in its entirety is this:

"画像でご確認ください。良い状態のが多いですが、2枚ほどマジックで落書きがあります。折れているカードもあります"

"Please confirm (the condition) by looking at the pictures.  There are many in nice condition, but two have been written on with magic marker. There are also cards with creases."

This description is so vague for all the buyer knows they could be getting a set that is 90% Nrmt with a few lower grade, or one that is almost entirely mid grade with some in poor condition, or even one that is mostly lower grade with a few that are extremely low grade.

This isn't, I hasten to add, a bad seller - ALL listings on Yahoo Auctions look like this.  Japanese buyers collect cards for the cards and not for the condition. This isn't to say that condition is irrelevant to the hobby,  nobody likes cards that are creased and a new one looks nice, but the insane nit-picking of minor stuff differences in grade that dominates the US hobby is completely non existent in Japan.

3. Great!  Of course this is a good thing, right?  Right?

You'd think so, right?  As I said at the start, I absolutely hate the obsession with condition that dominates the American hobby that I grew up with, so shouldn't I be thrilled that I collect cards in a market where nobody cares about that?

The answer to that is that kind of sort of I am a bit.  And the reasons for that are I guess self evident - one of my pet peeves is not here so I am not annoyed by it.  Which is cool....but not as cool as you'd think, hence the equivocation in my answer.  There is a real disadvantage to this lack of insanity which I have also discovered.

That disadvantage lies in one of the beneficial side effects of the American hobby's obsession with condition.  It has created an affordable niche market for the "mid grade" collector.  Since all the big money in the hobby goes to  high end stuff, there are plenty of bargains around for guys like me who don't care about condition and just want to put sets together.  A card that sells for $1,000 in PSA 9 can probably be had for 10-20$ in an attractive mid grade, which means that putting sets from the 60s and 70s (or even earlier) remains an affordable option.

That steep "mid grade discount" doesn't exist in Japan.  If a card is expensive, then its expensive no matter what condition it is in (unless it is absolutely destroyed).  You can't find bargains on the sought after stuff just based on the fact that it is lower grade like you can with American cards.  For example, I've been trying to find a cheap copy of card #1 from the 1973 Calbee set featuring Shigeo Nagashima for the longest time.  Every copy that goes up on Yahoo Auctions however always gets bid up into the hundreds of dollars.  Even if its got a crease in it, or well rounded corners, people here are bidding on the card rather than the condition (again, except for true beaters) and will pay the same money for a copy that would probably grade around vg as they would for one that would grade exmt.  

So the grass is sort of greener on this side of the fence in some respects, but there are a few brown patches as well!

Why is Yahoo Auctions Japan so Lazy?

My first post of the new year and I'm using it to complain about a really minor but extremely irritating point!

The above grainy photo of my computer screen says it all.  This is the category list for all Calbee single cards available on Yahoo Auctions Japan.  I hate it so much because for some reason from 2002 to 2013 they divide the listings year by year, which is great.  Looking for a 2007 Calbee single?  No problem, they have a category for that.

Then for some reason in 2014 I guess they found making a new category each year was getting too tedious - I mean, god they must have to push at least 3 or 4 buttons to do that once every 12 months - and so they decided to just put everything after 2014 in the 2014 category.  They don't just do this with the Calbee cards but also with BBM and others.  It drives me nuts.

This is making a mockery of the whole system.  They average about 1,000 listings or so for each year from 2002 to 2013.  But the accumulation of 5 years worth of stuff has driven the 2014 category to 12, 268 listings which is just way too many to conveniently navigate.  It has become a pain in the neck to me since I have to search through that stupid oversized category every few months when a new Calbee series is released and I want to find lots or complete sets but have to wade through 5 times more stuff than I should need to.

My only consolation is that I am not a BBM collector - the 2014 category for them has bloated to 53,657 listings you'd have to manually go through to find anything issued in the last 5 years.

This is definitely a spoiled first world person problem, but it irritates me because the laziness is just left there for everyone to see.  They could have just hidden this decision to no longer list everything by year by creating a decade category.   But instead they left the old individual year categories up almost as if to remind you that they used to put some effort into organizing their listings but no longer deign to do you that favor, peasant card collectors.

Also, looking at the pre-2002 listings is pretty frustratingly inconsistent too.  For the 1970s and 1990s you can browse listings organized by year too, which is lovely.  They even created individual year categories for the 1970, 1971 and 1972 Calbee sets which don't even exist (yet the actually have some listings!!). But for the 1980s you can't, they just have a single 1980-1989 category for those years.  And for 2000 and 2001?  For reasons that I can't understand, they have a single 2000-2001 category for just those two years.

Anyway, happy new year to everyone except those responsible for organizing the baseball card listings on Yahoo Auctions!

Catching the Calbee Pack Breakers: New Rite of Spring (and mid-late summer too)

Its barely mid April and I have already completed the first series of this year's Calbee regular cards!

Well, at least I have all the cards in the first series,  it might be unfair to claim that I completed it.

In recent years something which I have mixed feelings about has emerged in the Calbee card collecting world: guys who buy Calbee cases in bulk, bust open all the packs and re-sell them on Yahoo Auctions.

These guys are both a godsend and a curse.  They are a godsend for set collectors like me because the regular cards are not central to their business model.  They just put those together in big lots, sometimes as complete sets, and sell them for peanuts - I paid about 700 Yen including shipping for the entire first series, which would have cost me hundreds of dollars if I had tried to do it by buying bags of chips like I used to.  So there are huge economic efficiencies to be realized by sourcing your Calbee cards from guys like this.

I bought mine from a seller called mri_11k13, you can see his listings here.   As you can see from his listings, which are almost entirely 2018 Calbees, the real money they make are from selling the gold signature parallels, which they sell for about 1000-2000 Yen each.  The regular cards are loss leaders which they just want to get rid of and are priced accordingly.  For a base set-collecting guy like me who has zero interest in the inserts and parallels, this is sort of wonderful.

But it also sort of isn't, which is why I say they are also a curse.  Now that I have all the cards, I have no incentive to go out and try to track down bags of chips in convenience stores like I used to.  Putting the set together is really the main fun part of collecting, simply having the set is actually kind of boring.

This is of course exactly the same complaints that I remember hearing as a young collector in the 1980s from older guys who bemoaned the existence of factory sets as spoiling the fun.  They were right.  Another one of the things I love about Calbee is the lack of factory sets!  But now there exists a de facto equivalent thanks to these wonderful, horrible, great, terrible re-sellers.

Ah, first world problems.

Anyway, I started putting my Calbee sets together primarily through buying from guys like this on Yahoo Auctions about 3 years ago simply because the bargains are too good to resist.  In the past I've generally preferred to buy semi-complete lots rather than full sets like this one so that I at least had a bit of actual collecting to do. This one was more of an impulse purchase that I almost regret, maybe I could send ten random cards back to the guy or something so that I can have an excuse to go buy a few bags of chips and then feel happy when I get one of the cards I gave back.

If you are interested in getting Calbee sets on the cheap from these guys it is worth noting that you have to strike while the iron is hot.  They only do this when a new series comes out and when they sell out (of the cheap regular set lots) they basically disappear from Yahoo Auctions altogether.  So if you want a first Series set of 2018 Calbee now is the time to get it.  You can't find such deals on 2017 or 2016 sets anymore (I just checked!) So waiting for these guys to put the Calbee cards in big lots on Yahoo Auctions has become a new rite for me along with spotting the first Calbee cards on store shelves.  When Series 2 comes out I'll be waiting for both.

Oh and the cards this year, as I mentioned in an earlier post, are pretty awesome. I love the kanji on the card fronts!  Flipping through the cards I noticed that three of them picture players holding up signs commemorating career achievements - Nobuhiro Matsuda of the Hawks (nickname is pachi-pachi because he has this eye twitch) for hitting his 200th home run and Shinnosuke Abe and Masahiro Araki for their 2,000th career hits.

Full set of 1975-76 Calbee Cards Available!

There is a really interesting item up for bid over on Yahoo Auctions right now.  A complete set of 1975-76 Calbee cards:

https://page.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/u184349878

I love writing about that set on here because its one of my favorites and also probably one of the most difficult sets in the world to put together owing to its sheer size.  The cards are numbered 1 to 1436, and for #s 289 to 324 there are two version of each (one is a boyhood photos of the stars subset, the other is a Hiroshima Carp subset called the "red helmet" series, which is a bit harder of the two to find), so the master set is 1472 cards.

It is extremely rare for a complete vintage (pre 1990) Calbee set to come up for auction, let alone the biggest.  I have never seen a complete set and while I am passively working away on one myself, I only have about 600 different cards.  Any other set and that would mean I was almost there, but with this monster I'm not even halfway!

I wouldn't necessarily recommend getting your wallets out for this one, the starting bid is 1,280,0000 Yen (about $11,000 US) with a BIN price option at 1,800,000 (about $16,0000 US or so I think). To be honest I have no idea if that is a fair price for it since this is the first time I've ever seen a full set and there just aren't many out there, but at almost $10 per card (for the starting bid price) it feels a bit high.  There are some short printed rare series that were only regionally issued (one of Chunichi in Nagoya, another in Hiroshima) but I don't think they quite add enough to explain the price since most of the commons can be had for 100-300 Yen each in auctions.

Regardless of the price though its a pretty impressive sight!  Bidding ends in 2 days.

On a side note, this is my first post in a few months.  My wife gave birth to a little girl in December so I've been a bit too busy for blogging since then, but will try to update here a bit more often!

Busting Japan Post Smart Letter Packs: Better than Busting Wax

For the past couple of years I have minimized my purchases of bags of Calbee chip bags to just a few per series.  This is partly because of a desire to avoid eating potato chips (screw you, salt) and also because of the impracticality of putting together Calbee sets one bag at a time.  I tried that once in 2011 and ended up with less than half a set and so many bags of chips that I didn`t know what to do with them (and it cost quite a bit too).

So these days I try to put my sets together via the purchase of large lots of singles off of Yahoo Auctions, which seem to be getting easier to find (at least for recent stuff).  I like it because getting one of the lots in the mail in a Japan Post Smart Letter Pack is sort of like getting a huge wax pack to open. I picked up one 72 card lot of 2016 Series 1 cards which arrived in the mail yesterday and just cracked it open:

The seller used part of the cardboard box that the bags originally came in as packing material, which is kind of a neat touch (actually the box is from series 2, so maybe the same seller will have some of those soon....):

And the cards are all nicely stored, the seller even inserted them individually into their own flimsies (not necessary but still a nice touch):

Voila.  72 different cards including some from the base set, Title Holders subset and Star Cards subset.  Best of all: no doubles!

With current Calbee cards I like those featuring Hiroshima, Hanshin, Yakult, Rakuten, Lotte and Yokohama the best.  Photos of the players are almost all (in fact, maybe all) taken at their home stadiums (kudos) and those are the teams that don`t play in domes, so the photos don`t have that ugly flourescent sheen/fake grass backdrop like ones of Dragons, Giants, Hawks and other Dome teams do.

I have to admit to still not understanding how the business models of sellers who put these lots up on Yahoo Auctions works.  I paid only 300 Yen for the lot (not including shipping), which works out to less than 5 Yen per card.  Purchased retail at 98 Yen per bag with 2 cards would work out to more than 10 times that much. 

Obviously if you buy bags wholesale in quantity you would pay a lot less, but it would still work out to way more than 5 Yen per card.  The seller seems to make it up by selling the insert and parrallel cards (gold signature  and Wins Leaders) at a premium, but even those don`t seem to sell for too high (250-600 Yen each on the same seller`s listings).  Given the amount of work that would go into it I can`t imagine it being a particularly profitable venture, but I do thank them for making these things available to me!  I am not quite close to finishing the Series 1 base set this year.

Yahoo Auction Scams: Watch out for "sign1114306"

 

If you have ever looked for Japanese baseball player autographs on Yahoo Auctions you may have run into one prominent seller, sign1114306, who literally has thousands of signed cards up for auction at any given moment.

I`m going to recommend that you don`t buy from him.  At all. Unless you really like fake autographs, in which case bid away.

A lot of his autographed cards are sold in lots of 9 based on team (ie 9 autographed cards of Tigers players in one lot, etc). In the description of each lot he makes clear that he is only the consignor, the cards themselves were collected by an acquaintance who got the signatures from various sources including trips to ballparks and auction purchases.

The lots start with a starting bid of 3000 Yen.  If they don`t sell he relists them at a reduced price and keeps cutting the prices until they get down to ridiculous levels - 300 Yen per 9 card lot seems to be the minimum.

A few years ago when I was new to buying cards off of Yahoo Auctions one of his auctions popped up in a search I did and I was intrigued. It was a bunch of Tigers player autographs, including a signed card of Randy Bass. He has really good feedback on Yahoo Auction, 99.9% positive on (at the time of writing) over 38,000 transactions (only 9 of which were negative and only one of those raised any issue with regard to the authenticity of the autographs).  The price was cheap so I thought "why not?" and bid. And won.

My suspicions were aroused not by the cards themselves (I am not an autograph expert and they looked plausibly genuine) but by the sheer unlikelihood of one person being able to amass so many signatures - literally thousands and thousands of them in a never-ending stream of new listings - and sell them for so little. 

Suspicion turned to certainty when I noticed the impossibility of some of the signatures.  In mid 2013 he put up one lot of Hankyu Braves players that included a 2013 BBM Foreign legends card of Brad "Animal" Lesley.  Animal passed away shortly after that card was released and had been living in a nursing home receiving treatment for the kidney ailment that (sadly) claimed his life for the entire time that card had been in existence. The likelihood of someone in Japan having taken that card, travelled all the way to the US, somehow getting access to the dying Animal Lesley and asking him to sign it, then returning to Japan and throwing into a random lot to be auctioned off for a few hundred yen was about zero.

Looking around the internet at the time, I discovered a massive thread (in Japanese) on 2 Channel devoted specifically to this guy. Its been up there for over 5 years now, has hundreds of replies and the bottom line is that this guy is well known as a faker (and has been for a long time).

The weird thing is, this guy has been running this blatantly obvious scam in the same way under the same account and with everyone being aware of it for years now, but Yahoo Auctions continues to blithely turn a blind eye to it.  After buying my cards and realizing I had been scammed (but only out of a few hundred yen) I just thought "lesson learned" and assumed he would be banned or arrested (the messages on 2 Channel indicate complaints have been raised).  So I was surprised to notice today, a couple of years after the last time I looked him up, that he is still in business with the exact same con running.

Yahoo Auctions is a pretty good place for some cards, but it is also well known to have a much weaker system of fraud prevention, weaker buyer protection, a weaker feedback system and weaker means of weeding out criminal activity than Ebay. So its worth bearing in mind that at least for player autographs it is rip-off city on that platform and buyer beware.

Collecting cards via Yahoo Auctions Japan: a Rough Guide

At the suggestion of Ryan, I thought I would do a little post about how to use Yahoo Auctions as a source of Japanese baseball cards. 

I should preface this with one unfortunate fact about Yahoo Auctions: if you don`t live in Japan it is almost impossible to use it.  Easily 99.9% of sellers don`t ship overseas or accept paypal, so it is more or less an in-Japan only thing unless you use a proxy.  A proxy is somebody in Japan who will bid on stuff for people overseas.  The downside of using them is that you have to pay them a fee and you also have to pay for shipping twice (once to get the goods to them, then again when they send it to you).  I don`t have any experience using them so I can`t offer any recommendations, but there are a lot of them out there if you do a Google search (people who collect video games and anime stuff use them all the time, so some of them have established track records).  A lot of people do use them though so if you find a bargain you might want to contact one of them.  The rest of this post is mostly directed to people who will use Yahoo Auctions in Japan, but there are a lot of tips for people outside who might use a proxy as well.

That out of the way, I can say that I have found Yahoo Auctions to be a great source for Japanese baseball cards and in fact probably 80% of the cards in my collection come from there.  The selection is much much larger than what you can find on Ebay or elsewhere and prices generally tend to be pretty reasonable.  So I thought I would explain some of the basics of using the site to find cards.

The first thing you will need is at least an intermediate level grasp of the Japanese written language. Unfortunately the website is Japanese only and when you are buying stuff there is a lot of key information you will need to check before entering a bid.  Also, once you have won something you will be sent messages by the seller.  These aren`t standard form messages like on Ebay, but are personal messages composed by the seller which often  contain specific instructions that they want you to follow.  You will need to be able to read these and, a bit more difficult, respond to them in Japanese.  You don`t need to be fluent in the language (I`m not), but you do need to be able to at least get by.  On the plus side while the language can be a barrier at first for those out there like me whose Japanese is a bit shaky, once you have gotten used to it and know what to look for it becomes a lot less intimidating.

Once you have accomplished that simple task (smile), membership is the next step.  You have two options.  One of these is free and the other (premium) costs 399 yen per month.  The free one allows you to bid on stuff up to a maximum of 5,000 yen and is pretty easy to set up.  The premium (which I have) allows you to bid on anything and also to sell stuff and will require a Japanese credit card.  Since the vast majority of baseball card stuff sells for under 5,000 yen you can probably get by with the free membership at least to start.  In fact I`ve never bought any baseball card stuff that cost more than that on Yahoo Auctions, but I do use the site for other stuff that sometimes does which is why I went for the premium membership.

Once you`ve gotten that taken care of, going to their baseball card category HERE is probably the best place to start. 

Starting from that page you have a few options if you want to search for something.  At the moment there are 73,000 items in the baseball card category, so you have a lot to choose from.  If you are looking for cards from a specific set you can narrow down the search by maker using the sub-categories on the left of the screen, which allow you to search for cards from Calbee, BBM or Upper Deck sets.  One of the inconvenient things of that route is that it won`t give you a list of actual items for sale until you have gone all the way to the lowest level of sub-category.  So if you click on カルビー　for example it will then take you to a list of Calbee sets for each year.  When you click on a year - say for example 2004 - only then will you finally be given a list of items for sale.

The best deals on Yahoo Auctions are usually for bulk lots of cards rather than singles.  With singles the cost of shipping (usually 80 yen) can eat up a lot unless you are combining several at once, but for larger lots the shipping often works out to almost nothing per card.  The best way to find those lots are to go to the overall baseball card category I linked to above and enter the kanji 枚 which is a counter for flat objects in Japanese and is the equivalent of entering `lot` into an Ebay search.  This will give you several hundred lots to browse through, but it will include a lot of 2-3 card lots.  If you want to look for really large lots another useful search term is 大量　which means `large volume` and will usually turn up 50 or 60 results, most of which will be lots of 100s or 1000s of cards.  A third useful search term is セット　which means `set`, but sometimes sellers will use it to mean a lot of cards rather than an actual complete set.

Once you have found an item you have to be careful to read all the information to make sure you are able to actually bid on it.  Like Ebay some listings are auctions that you bid on (入札はこちら）, while others have Buy it Now options (今すぐ落札)  so be careful to distinguish these.　　

The first thing you will want to check is the blue box on the upper right of the screen which has most of the pertinent information about the seller.  You can see his/her feedback （評価） and, more importantly, what methods of payment they accept (支払について）.  There is no standard method of payment so you`ll want to make sure that you have the ability to actually send them money via whatever method they accept.  In my case I have a postal account (ゆうちょ） which probably 75% of sellers accept payment from.  Postal accounts are quite useful since they don`t charge any fees if you are sending money to another postal account (incidentally that is one of the reasons why Ebay never took off in Japan, nobody wants to use Paypal with its fees when they can just use the postal system for free).  Unfortunately not all sellers accept that though so I always have to double check before I enter a bid.  Another useful piece of information in this blue box is the seller`s prefecture, which may affect what shipping will cost.

If you scroll further down the screen there will be a large picture of the item and under that a message from the seller regarding the sale.  This part is also critical to read since there might be important information in it, but they vary widely depending on the seller.  Some will write almost nothing in there other than `baseball card, thank you for looking` while others will write detailed messages describing the item in detail, setting out conditions of the sale (no claim, no return is a common one) and providing a breakdown of the shipping options and costs.  Unfortunately some sellers refuse to deal with first time users and will usually state if they do here as well.

Once you have actually bought something you will usually receive a message from the seller within about 24 hours of the end of the auction via the site`s messaging system (取引ナビ）.  Typically they will ask for a basic set of information (name, address, phone number, how you will pay, when you will pay, what shipping method you want).  When you send this to them they will usually reply with a total including shipping and their bank account information.  Once you have paid it is customary to send them a further message telling them you have done so.  And with that, your transaction is basically complete.  You can leave feedback for the seller once the item arrives.

That is about it, but I thought I should mention a few important other points when buying cards on Yahoo auctions:

1) Do NOT bid solely based on the picture.  You have to read the listing carefully.  For example, this listing HERE has a picture of what looks like a large lot of 1988 Calbees for a low starting bid, but what you are actually bidding on is the right to buy one card from that photo and not all the cards in it.The key phrase to look out for there is バラ売り　(sold seperately).

2)　Beware of prices that are too good to be true.  There are some shady dealers out there just like Ebay.  For example THIS GUY has a bunch of nice Calbee singles for the incredible Buy it Now price of only 1 yen!  But if you read the fine print this scumbag (and I don`t use that term lightly) has a bunch of hidden fees (a 200 yen packaging fee, plus an inflated 160 yen for shipping and he DOES NOT combine shipping), so that 1 yen card would actually cost you 361 yen.  This is why checking the feedback is important, this guy has a ton of negatives but his auctions always appear at the top of the list if you look for stuff in the cheapest-most expensive order.

3) It is important to heed the above 2 pieces of advice because unlike Ebay, Yahoo Auctions offers absolutely no dispute resolution mechanism or buyer protection.  If you get screwed over by a seller you are basically out of luck (the Yahoo Auctions rules specifically says `its not our problem`).  You are left to either plea with the seller or leave negative feedback and with a dishonest seller neither of these are useful. 

That said, I have completed about 250 purchases on Yahoo Auctions and only had 2 of them go bad.  They were both, however, extremely aggravating experiences.  In one of them the seller sent my card to the wrong address (his fault) and then made me pay his shipping expenses the second time to correct his mistake.  Since it was either that or lose the item completely I had little choice but to comply. The second time was more aggravating as the seller sold me a product that arrived broken (it was a piece of electronics rather than baseball cards that time) and refused to give me a refund.  When I left him negative feedback he retaliated and left me a scathing bad feedback which included a racist anti-foreigner comment.  Whereas Ebay prevents sellers from retaliating like that Yahoo Auctions doesn`t.

4)  A couple of honest sellers that I have had good transactions with are these guys:

suspentionjp
hakimugo-go

There are a lot more out there but those are a couple I have dealt with recently, I might add to that list.

5) On the positive side one thing I really like about Yahoo Auctions is that probably more than 90% of sellers charge you the exact amount that shipping actually costs and not a yen more.  Ebay is well known for the inflated shipping costs many sellers charge, a practice more or less forced on them by the fees they get charged by ebay and paypal.  The fees for sellers to use Yahoo Auctions are much lower and the transfer fees for postal accounts are zero, so the costs of stuff is relatively much lower than similar items on Ebay are.

That is about all I can think of.  I hope this information might be useful to some of you, I can probably answer questions in the comments.