How Did You Get Here? American Cards in Japanese Markets.

 

I don't post much about my collection of MLB cards on here (though I do have one).  I made an editorial decision a few years back to just stick to talking about Japanese cards.  But I'm going to make an exception with these.

Every once in a while I'll stumble across something on Yahoo Auctions and wonder to myself "How on Earth did you end up here?"  This was one of those things.  It is a complete set of 1967 Topps pin ups.  These were distributed in regular wax packs in 1967 and feature a boat load of big name Hall of Famers - Mantle, Clemente, Aaron, Mays, and so on.

Its really rare to find vintage American cards over here.  There is a significant segment of the Japanese hobby that is devoted to collecting American cards, but they are overwhelmingly only interested in modern cards.  Basically its just since Nomo and Ichiro went over to the US that Japanese collectors became aware of American cards, and they don't have much interest in stuff that came out before those guys went over.  There is a very niche market specifically for cards of American players who came to Japan so there are a few dealers that will stock pre 1990s US cards of  guys like Warren Cromartie or Willie Davis.  And occasionally a PSA graded card of some star from the 60s might pop up.  But its rare.  Nobody sells singles or lots from older sets.  And nobody sells complete sets.  

So I was really surprised to find this complete set from 1967 up for sale.  The guy selling it had no idea what it was.  The title just said "1960s Major league Bromides?  Cards?  32 of them."  The description further made clear that the guy had no idea what they were, stating (incorrectly) that he had heard they were given out with candy in the US back in the 60s.  No mention of Topps, or of the names of any of the players.

This wasn't surprising since the guy selling them isn't a card dealer.  About 80% of his listings are women's clothing (mainly kimonos), with a smattering of toys and used electronics.  No cards.  He just found these in a box that he had acquired and threw them up.

This turned out to be good for me, since he started them at 3,000 Yen and I ended up winning them for just 3,100 Yen (about $25 US) after outbidding the first bidder, who immediately lost interest and didn't contest me for them.  These aren't super valuable, but that is still way less than what they go for in the US.

I do wonder how these things in their 53 years of existence managed to cross the Pacific Ocean and wind up in a box in the hands of a kimono dealer  in Hiroshima who had no idea what they were.  Obviously at some point somebody put the set together.  Was it an American serviceman back in the 60s who was stationed here?  Or a Japanese person who lived in the US, collected them, and brought them back home?  Or someone more recent, an American English teacher who collected cards?  A Japanese collector who bought them off Ebay but then lost interest?  

There are a lot of ways these might have found their way here, but now they are in my hands and will likely stay there for quite some time!

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.

Calbee's Awesome 1985 Art Contest for Kids

 

Here is a little pile of 1985 Calbees that I recently picked up.  I have about 200 cards from the 1985 Calbee set which puts me almost halfway to the 465 it has in total, but I'm not seriously chasing it since the vast majority of the remainder are from hyper rare series that are way out of my budget.  

One good thing about the 1985 set though is that there is a pretty big series in it, which also happens to be one of the easier (and thus more affordable) series, that has awesome artwork on the back.  

Calbee had a contest that year in which kids would send in pictures they had drawn of baseball players.  If they won, their picture (along with their name and home prefecture) would go on the back of the player's card.  These are the backs of the 16 cards featured above:

I think there are about 100 cards in the set which have this artwork, these are just a few examples.  

Boomer Wells is looking cheerful:

Kiyoshi Nakahata looks like he is trapped in a Picasso:

Jose Cruz looks like he is grinding his teeth:

Akinobu Mayumi is daringly rendered in profile without any features:

The late Nobuyuki Kagawa's legendary chubbiness is very well captured:

An interesting thing is that at the bottom of all these cards there is a comment from someone called "Yoshimura Sensei" about the artwork.  On Kagawa's for example he/she says "Kagawa is cute. This is a very pleasant picture."

I'm kind of curious about who Yoshimura Sensei was - probably an art teacher of some sort.

These cards are another aspect I like about older Japanese baseball cards in general -  I don't remember Topps or any other US maker having contests like this in 1985.  It must have been so thrilling for these kids to see their pictures on actual baseball cards.

Ron Woods: Who is this Guy?

 

I picked up card #71 from the monster 1975-76-77 Calbee set this week.  This is from the rare series that was only issued in the Tokai area and is thus a key addition to my set.  

This gives me 23 out of 36 cards in that series, more than halfway there!

The card depicts Ron Woods. He is kind of an intriguing player about which we know very little.  He played parts of several MLB seasons between 1969 and 1974, getting the most playing time with the Montreal Expos between 1971 and 1974.  He then went to Japan for two years with the Chunichi Dragons in 1975 and 1976.

Beyond the numbers: silence.  Nobody has bothered to write a biography of him on his Wikipedia page, or on his Baseball Reference Page, or on his SABR page.  

This is frustrating because there are two intriguing facts about the Ron Woods story that I've been able to glean just from 1) this card, and 2) Googling him, that suggest stories of human interest at work.

The first is from the back of this card.

Japanese baseball likes players who sacrifice everything for the game and their team.  A lot of these Calbee cards from the 70s have write ups on the back which extoll this virtue.  This card, titled "Big league Pride" tells us that Ron Woods is a player who forgets everything else in the world when playing.  To illustrate, it states that he recently got tragic news from his family back in America. While he made a short visit back to the US as a result, he was so serious about the game that (on getting the news) he considered waiting until the off season to go back.

So this tells us that Woods experienced a serious personal tragedy during his stay in Japan and faced a difficult decision about whether to go back home to deal with it or not.  This is a recurring theme that shows up in the stories of many American players here - Randy Bass was famously criticized for returning to the US during the season to be with his son who was having major surgery.  So Woods had one of those too, but we don't know anything about it.

The other interesting thing I learned from a Google search is that in September of 1975, probably shortly after this card was made, Woods was among four members of the Dragons who were injured in Hiroshima after being attacked by fans.  This was mentioned in a very brief article in the New York Times at the time, but I haven't been able to find any more info on what happened.

So anyway, it seems like Woods' two year stay in Japan featured some drama, yet we know very little about him.  

Some more 1997 Calbees

 

I picked up 15 singles from the 1997 Calbee set this week.  Nobody particularly exciting, the whole  lot only cost me about 4$, but they were all cards I needed for the set.  

These get me to 202 out of 237, just 35 to go.  Unfortunately 19 of those are from the rare high number series, but I'm very close to finished with the low numbers.  

Thus far my Calbee collection has been mainly focused on cards from the 70s and 80s, as well as the obligatory purchase of contemporary sets as they come out each year. This has left the 90s as the decade with the biggest holes in my collection.  I am pretty close to finished with the 1999 Calbee set, which is by far the easiest to complete.  I also have a decent start on the 1998 set, which is also fairly easy to do.  And the 1995 Choco Snack set I  was lucky enough to pick up as a set a year and a half ago ( in retrospect that was an incredible deal, prices on those have gone up a lot since then and there is no way I could replicate that find today).

But most of the other sets from that decade (particularly the 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 and 1996 sets) I only have a smattering of cards each for.  Except for 1991 those are really hard sets to find cards for.  The  1994 and 1996 sets in particular have fewer than 100 listings each on Yahoo Auctions right now, indicating how rare they are.  Once I've finished the 1997s I might move on to one of them, but for now those years don't really exist in "set" form in my collection yet.  

Dogs Wearing Caps

 

This is one of the new key pieces of my collection.  Its an uncut sheet from the 1948 set Engel catalogues as JBR 118.  The set was issued in sheets like this, each featuring 10 cards from a team.  Mine features members of the Yomiuri Giants and has a few Hall of Famers like Tetsuharu Kawakami, Shigeru Chiba, Noburo Aota and manager Osamu Mihara.

Engel only lists the sheets for four teams (Braves, Flyers, Hawks and Giants) in the guide and states that only one copy of each is known to exist.  So my Giants sheet is either that one known copy, or it is a newly discovered second copy.  I'm leaning towards the second as being more likely, given that I bought it from an antique dealer located in Kobe who probably dug it up locally.  Either way, these are pretty hard cards to find.  

The backs of the cards have pictures of dogs wearing baseball caps in red.  Hence Engel gave this set the nickname "Dog Wearing Baseball Cap".  Which is pretty cool.  

I've Waited Years To Find This Card

 

My 1975-76 Calbee set made a massive jump towards completion yesterday with the addition of The Most Valuable Card In The Set (TMVCITS)!

This is card #630 featuring Hiroshima's Municipal Stadium during a night game from the 1976 season.  As I wrote in a post last year about a different card I got (#157 which coincidentally also features Hiroshima's Municipal Stadium)  this is basically the key card in the entire set.  It comes from the extremely rare "Red Helmet" series  which runs from card #609 to 644.  It was only released in limited numbers in the Hiroshima area and is very rare today.  I'm not sure exactly why, but of all the cards in that series, the one featuring the stadium has long been recognized as the most valuable by Japanese collectors.

I have been waiting for one of these to come up at auction for a long time and when this showed up (alongside two other cards from the same series that I need) I pounced.  I ended up winning it for 7500 Yen (about $70 US) which is more than I usually pay for a card (and way more than my 1000 Yen per card limit that I tried to impose on myself earlier this year but have failed miserably at adhering to).  But its the key card in the set, and this basically means that I now know that I won't have to pay more than that for any other card in the set.  The downside of the bidding getting that high was that I had to let the other two cards from the series up in the same auction go, and they sold for about half what this one did.

This is actually a really nice copy of the card, probably in ExMt condition or so with a tiny speck of fluff on two of the corners being the only blemish.  And that makes me happy since I had figured for this card I would have to accept a lower grade copy since higher grade ones would be way too hard to find.  But nope, the marquee card in my set is a looker!  Yee haw!

I'm still not close to finishing the whole set, I'm about 400 cards short right now (out of 1472 total), but this is another milestone crossed!