Putting some Worthless 90s Baseball Cards to a Useful Purpose

 The billions of baseball cards made in the late 1980s and 1990s are an odd, if not particularly pressing, problem facing society.  These things exist.  There are too many of them.  Nobody wants them.  We`re getting kind of sick of seeing them around, some of us to the point of actually trying to organize mass burnings of them. 

It is a problem we`ve faced for a while.  Even in the early 90s when these things were still being belched out of printing presses millions at a time we knew it was a problem.  We tried giving them to hospitals for sick kids to play with.  Turned out sick kids in the hospital didn`t want stacks of 1991 Donruss commons anymore than we did.

I can`t say that I`ve found a solution to this problem, but I have resolved to do my part - starting with a stack of 1997 Score cards that fell into my hands.  I have never really liked Score sets much. They were a bit innovative with their first set in 1988, being one of the first to put color photos on the back of their cards, but that was about it.  Bland designs were their forte.  Even during the worst Fleer and Donruss years (1988-1991) you could always count on Score to make a set that somehow looked worse (except maybe the 1990 one).

The 1997 set seems to have continued this tradition - massive white borders with the player and team name written in tiny, hard to read letters on the top and bottom.  I had drifted away from baseball cards in 1997 so I don`t remember this set from the year of its original release, but even if I had still been in the hobby that year I probably would have forgotten all about this set.  It is just so bland and generic and awful that its almost impossible to remember.

Anyway, enough about how bad Score cards are.  I need to divert the narrative of this post slightly in order to introduce a piece of minor biographical information about myself.  In addition to collecting baseball cards one of my other hobbies is model railroads.  I have been working on an N-scale layout of a Japanese city for a few years now, this is what it looks like:

The centrepiece of the layout (in name only, its actually on the left side rather than the centre) is a baseball stadium that I am slowly constructing entirely from scratch. If you have never built a 1:150 scale baseball stadium from scratch be forewarned: it is something you will likely need at least a year`s worth of weekends to make happen.  It doesn`t look like much, but this is what I have so far:

The stands on the third base side are the only part that is actually in a recognizable shape so far:

I have four main sources of building material for this project:

1) Matchsticks (for the bleacher seats)
2) Balsa wood (for the outfield and infield walls and some other bits)
3) Random leftover bits from other plastic model kits
4) 1997 Score baseball cards

This is a 1997 Score Jose Rosado that will be an external wall on the stadium.  1997 Score cards are pretty good at being walls, the gloss on them is lightly applied and takes a layer of model paint like a champ.

 This is what it looks like from the other side, which will be the external part.  Its got a little garage door on it, another thing that it turns out 1997 Score cards can have applied to them with relative ease.

 The roof over my third base bleachers is also made of parts of two 1997 Score cards.  one of them was Danny Tartabull, I forget who the other one was.  They work pretty well.  I think a Kevin Brown and Aaron Sele were used for the external wall on this section.

  Anyway, I am taking a fair amount of pleasure from this construction project, time consuming though it is.  Partly its because having a baseball stadium in my layout will put me in good stead with the Japanese model railroading crowd, but also because I know that in my own small way this project has contributed to a tiny thinning out of the rampant 1997 Score population in a productive way.

The Odd Market for Tobacco Cards

 One of my side collections is pre-war tobacco cards.  I have quite a few sets, none of them baseball cards though.  I love the variety of subjects - ships, trains, historical figures, movie stars, airplanes and so on.  There are a ton of themes that appeal to me and the artwork on a lot of them is really impressive.

The other thing I like about them is how cheap they are.  For example, I just picked up a set issued by Wills called Historic Events off of Ebay.  It has 50 cards (mine in about vg-ex condition) featuring some epically beautiful scenes, like the capture of Gibraltar (pictured above) or Napoleon on the Bellerephon (the ship that carried him to captivity after Waterloo). 

 The rest are pretty cool too.  The set is over 100 years old, having been issued in 1913 (the last historic event it records was the funeral of Edward VII, 3 years earlier).

 

 The complete set, including shipping, cost me a grand total of $15 off of Ebay.

That is pretty crazy cheap and explains why I don`t collect baseball tobacco cards: they are ridiculously overpriced.  15$ won`t even get you a poor condition common from the T-206 set, which was issued about the same time and is equally common.

This is one of those odd things about baseball tobacco cards.  They straddle two hobbies with completely different markets.  Tobacco card collecting hasn`t gone through anywhere near the type of bubble that baseball cards have, so all of them except the ones featuring baseball players are incredibly cheap.  Even the cool ones featuring movie stars:

Or Merchant ships from the 1920s (also by Wills.  It is my personal favorite set from my collection, every single one of them looks majestic, a word I normally avoid using like the plague):

You can pretty much get the entire set for less than what a single common baseball player card goes for.

It is kind of an odd thing, given that as cultural icons baseball players don`t have much more command over our imaginations than most of the other subject featured on other tobacco card sets (with a few exceptions like the set entitled `garden hints`).  It can only be explained by the fact that baseball card collecting took off after the war while merchant ship card collecting didn`t.  So old baseball tobacco cards follow the baseball card market rules while everything else follows the much more sensible, and accessible, tobacco card market rules.  I much prefer the latter, despite being a massive baseball fan.

Mystery Wally Yonamine Card

 I picked up this Wally Yonamine card off of Yahoo Auctions the other day and I`m a bit confused about what it is. 

Its the only Yonamine card I have.  As you can tell from the photo it is about the size of a 1980s Calbee mini card, with a black and white photo on the front.  The back is blank except for "Kyojin 3" and a blue kanji that I`m not sure how to read.

It is printed on pretty thin cardboard and other than that I have no idea what it is.  Anybody know?

New Project: 1990 Calbee

 I decided to take a leap into a new set last week and picked up a lot of 15 cards from the 1990 Calbee set on Yahoo Auction.  I have decided that, in addition to my ongoing 1987 Calbee set project, which is now about 3/4 complete, the 1990 Calbee set is going to be my next collecting goal.

I already had a handful of them that I had picked up individually at varying points, so I have 20 cards towards the set (plus, unfortunately, a few doubles already). That doesn`t sound like a lot, but considering that the set only has 55 cards in total (correction - 217 cards in total, of which the first series of mini cards has only 55 cards, thanks NPB Guy!), I am already more than 1/3 of the way there.

The 1990 set has sort of been in my crosshairs for a while.  The extremely small number of cards in the set - coupled with the lack of single prints - make it by far the easiest set of the mini sized card era to put together.

There are also a few interesting things that make it a unique set.  Except for some of the cards from the 1984 set its the only one from the 1981-1990 mini card era to actually have some design elements on it, with the boldly colored strip with the player and team name running along the bottom.  Whereas with most Calbees from the 1980s you have to check the backs to determine which year a card is from (and sometimes even then you won`t be sure), the 1990 set just screams out `1990!`

The fact that there are so few cards is also a bit of an intriguing mystery.  The 1989 Calbee set seems to be harder to find than most sets from the 1980s, which makes me think that sales were down that year.  Possibly Calbee decided as a result of that to cut down production for the 1990 set, which resulted in a much smaller set than usual.  Though there aren`t any short printed series in the 1990 set, singles are actually pretty hard to find, at any given time there are only a few available on Yahoo Auctions, usually for a high price.

Its kind of ironic, given that 1989 and 1990 were years in which overproduction of American cards was reaching its peak.  Also ironic given that 1991 would mark the introduciton of BBM and with it American style card sets. I wonder what made Calbee cards so unpopular in the 89-90 time frame.  Maybe the Giants weren`t doing well? 

Anyway, I`m now in full 1990 Calbee collecting mode and hope to add some more cards to it soon - it might turn into a race between the 1990 and 1987 sets to see which one I can complete first.  As usual with vintage cards I`m not going for it in mint condition, most of the cards would be in vg-ex shape, with only a few in the exmt/nrmt range.

All Star game Luna-cy

The all star game weekend is here.  Yay.  I watched 8 innings of the Central league beating the tar out of the Pacific League last night.  Then I was surprised to discover that even for the All Star Game the Metere TV network sticks to its rigid requirement that all baseball games games must end at exactly 8:53PM in order to make way for the putrid garbage that they have scheduled to begin at 9PM (with a lovely 7 minute commercial break in between the two), which mostly consists of a random gaggle of talentos eating food provided by various sponsors and saying `oishiii` a lot.


If you think American TV is bad, Japanese TV is a million times worse.

Anyway, I have another gripe to make in this post.  In the photo at the top of this post are the 2014 Calbee cards of two players.  These are two extremely different players.

One of them is the Central league`s top batter, hitting .339, and is also among the top ten in home runs and RBIs.  Not sure what his WAR is but its probably pretty high.  He could concievably end up with a triple-crown type season.  He is far and away the best player on the Dragons and arguably the most feared batter in the Central League.

The other player is hitting a paltry .170 and, by any reasonable interpretation, has no business playing as a starter on even a minor league team.  His low batting average is not compensated by home runs as he hasn`t hit a single one all season.  He strikes out a lot and having him play is a bit like having pitchers taking up two spots in the lineup.  He is coming off a season in which he hit .216 and should have retired as a player a couple of years ago.

One of these guys is playing in the All Star game while the other is not.  Guess which?

If you chose the latter, Motonobu Tanishige, then you are correct.  Hector Luna, the league`s leading hitter, is taking the weekend off.

This just makes me mad.  I appreciate that the two play different positions (third base and catcher) so it isn`t that Tanishige was chosen over Luna.  I also appreciate that All Star ballotting is often about sentimental choices rather than actual performance (clearly the case here) but still, this is ridiculous. 

Robert Whiting in his book You Gotta Have Wa has a bit devoted to legendarily unjust cases of foreign players getting snubbed from the All Star game and I think Hector Luna is another name that needs to get added to that list.  Living in Nagoya I`ve been watching the Dragons play almost everyday and the one consistent thing that can be said is that Luna has been their best player (although Oshima, Wada and Morino are also having good seasons) while Tanishige has just been by far the worst player on the team.  And yet it is the latter who is representing the Dragons in the All Star game.  This just makes me mad.  And, having a blog, I thought I should draw some attention to that fact. 

Hector Luna: you deserve to be on this All Star team!

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!

2014 Calbee Series 2 Spotted in the Wild!

 This week shops across Nagoya finally started to stock series 2 bags of Calbee yakyu chips.  They were released officially last month but most stores seem to prefer to burn through their stock of series 1 bags before they put series 2 out (and some still don`t stock them at all).  I found my first bag at a convenience store on Thursday and yesterday I picked up the above bag, my second, at a Max Value grocery store.

I got two regular cards, Tanaka of the Swallows and Ohtani of the Fighters.  Not the most exciting pulls but they both have the advantage of being cards that I need!

 I like the green colored bags they are using for series 2, the white bags they used in series 1 weren`t quite as appealing (and I think it might have been the first time they had done that, Calbee bags are almost always either green, red or orange for some reason). 

They have the same lucky card promotion in Series 2.  I opened a ton of packs of series 1 and did not pull a single lucky card so they seem to be pretty hard to find, I`m hoping that I have better luck with series 2.  If you send one in they will send you a card holder (yawn) and two special cards (want).  According to the bag the special cards are some sort of hologram that changes as you alter the angle at which you are looking at it.  This is another thing I like about Calbee - this is the sort of thing that would have been really neat back in about 1990 when hologram cards were a novelty that needed detailed explanation that takes up half the cover of your product, but in 2014 it just seems kind of quaint.

According to the back of the bag, the series 2 Special cards are of Sho Nakata of Nippon Ham and Shinnosuke Abe from Kyoujin.  Neither are players that I particularly like but I do hope I get one of these lucky cards this series!