Local collector attempts to move 1977 Yamakatsu premium cards by himself, dies.

Yesterday the writer of this blog made the foolish mistake of trying to carry some 1977 Yamakatsu Premium cards unassisted. He is survived by a wife and two young children.

Just kidding, I survived the experience with only a minor back injury as a result of trying to carry these absolutely massive cards around on my own.

The reason I was moving them around is that I picked up a couple of unopened boxes of 1977 Yamakatsu Jumbo cards recently, which I think are quite neat . 

The regular cards in this set, which came one card per pack in 30 pack boxes, are very large themselves, but the premium cards, which came three per box and would be given out to anyone who pulled a winner card from one of the regular packs, have got to be some of the biggest things that could be described as “baseball cards” ever made.

A few years ago Dave gave me a couple of these giant premiums when he visited Nagoya, and I have wanted to complete the set (of 6) ever since. I have now done so! 

I also have 60 packs of regular cards which I haven’t opened yet and am unsure if I should. 46 year old unopened packs don’t grow on trees, so I feel I should leave them in there. But its also a huge temptation and I’m not sure I’ll be able to control myself….

The premiums, which came loose in the box, don’t present that problem. But they do pose a giant (literally) storage problem which I’ll have to work out.

My 1976 Yamakatsu Purchase is Confusing the Hell out of Me

 The above is a box of Pro Yakyu "DX" cards produced by Yamakatsu in 1976.  As the red numbers near the bottom indicate, it contains 20 cards which sold for 50 Yen back in the day.  The cards are pretty big so its not a bad deal.

Open it up and you find a couple of bonuses.  There is an extra card, of Sadaharu Oh no less, pasted to the inside flap, so you've got 21 instead of just 20 cards.  Plus there are two albums.

The albums (they are the same) hold three cards each and are specifially "Oh Albums" for storing your Sadaharu Oh cards in.  As is so often the case with cards from the late 70s, recent HOF inductee Koichi Tabuchi makes a prominent cameo behind the plate in the photo.
Spill it all out and this is what you've got!

Its pretty easy to date the set to 1976 thanks to this card, which shows him celebrating his 715th home run (note Tabuchi again making a cameo appearance), which he hit that year.

 There are some other cool cards of hall of famers in the set, like Sachio Kinugasa:

 And Katsuya Nomura:

I like this set a lot, but I'm very confused about what set it is.  Looking at the Engel guide, I'm pretty sure it is the set he catalogues as JY1.  The checklist matches up nicely with the cards I have, the description matches them perfect and the Oh card Engel uses a picture of as an example is identical to the one glued to the flap of the box.

But Engel gives this set the nickname "Blue Box". Because it came in a blue box.  My box is green.

There is another set, JY1c, which is similar and Engel says it came in a green box.  But the checklist for that one is definitely different from mine (the 715 home run Oh card only appears in the checklist for JY1 for example).

There are a few other Yamakatsu sets listed but none of them match this one either. It has to be JY1, but again - green box!

In writing about the late 70s Yamakatsu issues Engel notes, accurately, that "these sets are among the most confusing issues in history" and also acknowledges that there may be some mistakes in the way they were catalogues owing to limited information.  I think my confusion over these would be resolved by recognizing that the JY1 "Blue Box" set was also released in green boxes.

Anyway, this is a cool set either way!

Yamakatsu DX cards are pretty cool

 I got something new in the mail the other day:  4 of the big sized Yamakatsu DX cards from the 70s.You can read up a bit more about these sets on Dave's post here from a few years ago.  As you can see from the above photo, with some 1979 Yamakatsu cards for reference, they are pretty huge.

 I particularly like the above one of Kintetsu's Shimamoto Kohei.  The fact that his uniform is almost the exact same color as the bleachers, which are almost the exact same color as the sky, gives it a kind of cool look.  I am also a huge fan of cards with pictures that show a lot of the stadium in the background, which this card does well.

This card of Chunichi's Yazawa Kenichi, a member of the 2000 hit club, is also pretty cool.  I note that there are several different Yamakatsu cards of several different Chunichi players spread across several different sets which feature them batting in front of the same green netting.  I'm not sure why but it kind of works as a backdrop.

 The other two cards feature my least favorite aspect of some Yamakatsu cards from the 70s: the background having been cropped out and replaced with a boring blue (or sometimes green) backdrop.  I have no idea why Yamakatsu did this (seems about 1 in 5 or so of their cards from this era feature this) but it give the cards a very boring and generic feeling. It reminds me a bit of the 1958 Topps set which did the same, resulting in a truly boring set.

Otherwise though I think these are pretty cool cards.  Of course they are a double edged sword:  on the one hand they are great display pieces (at least the ones without the boring blue background) given their size.  On the other hand they are a huge pain to store!  I've already dinged the corners on two of them!