Some random 1981 Calbees

 

I picked up a small lot of about 25 cards from the 1981 Calbee set the other day.  I hadn't noticed when I was bidding on them on Yahoo Auctions but they were all Giants players (ugh), but since I don't have many cards from that set yet I am happy with them. 

Flipping through this little pile really makes me wish Calbee would go back to using a more varied and interesting mix of images on their cards like they used to.  The closely cropped "Batters batting, pitchers pitching" photos they always use on their current sets, including this year's,  are just so boring.

Hey Calbee, how about showing us some guys sliding into base?  Like on Kazumasa Kono's card (#309)?

Or a close play at the plate, complete with the catcher holding up the ball and the umpire calling the runner out?  Like on this card of....oh, also Kazumasa Kono (#335):

Or how about a guy getting some high fives as he returns to the dugout?  Like this card of Roy White (#327)?  We can't even see his face but its a way more interesting card of him than that of any player card they've made in the past decade.

And if you are going to insist on showing us batters batting, why not make it a bit more interesting by using a horizontal layout and showing us a bit more of the background instead of rigidly cropping every photo so the player is all we can see?  Worked pretty well on this card of Koji Yamamoto (#311) I think.

Just some random musings that rattled around in my mind as I flipped through a small stack of 1981 Calbee cards.  

Best Card Collecting Week Ever

 

Being the father of two young kids has meant that most of my collecting since they were born has been done at night after they go to bed.  A little over a week ago I was going through my 1975-76-77 Calbee monster set one night in the living room after getting the kids to bed when my son came down to get a drink of water.  He came over and seemed really interested in my cards, asking me a lot of questions about them.  We have watched a couple of games on TV together and played catch at the park a few times so he is starting to get interested in baseball for the first time this year.  I asked him if he wanted to start a baseball card collection and he got very excited.  I gave him his drink of water, sent him back to bed, then started planning how to make that work.  

I decided that the best way to go about it was to get some bags of this year`s Calbee baseball chips, even though I had just posted on here less than two weeks ago that I was giving them up.  So I stopped at the grocery store on the way home from work the next day and picked up three bags (one for my son, one for his little sister and one for me).  

I arrived home, asked `Who wants to start a baseball card collection?` and got an extremely enthusiastic response from both kids.  We sat down on the carpet, opened the three bags up and two new collectors were initiated into the world of baseball cards.  

Its a lot of fun getting your kids into baseball cards.  They liked them so much that every day for the past week they`ve asked me to get more and every day I`ve been happy to oblige. They have built up a nice little pile, so I got them an album to put them in and printed out a checklist from Calbee`s website which they eagerly check each time they open a new pack. 

We`ve been eating a lot of chips this week.  Since I had a pile of 1991 OPC Premier that I wasn`t doing much with I also gave those to them.  My son and I sat down and marked the checklist card with each one we had (all but 3 to complete the set) which was fun too, but the Calbees are getting a lot more traction since we can see the players on them on TV while we watch games.

Its really fun collecting with kids. I imagine in a while they`ll move on to other interests, as kids always do, but I`m going to enjoy it while it lasts. Hopefully we`ll be able to put the set together bag by bag as the season progresses, something I haven`t ever been able to do.  The old fashioned way is the best way.  

I found Tom Selleck's Apartment from Mr. Baseball Yesterday

 

I like the movie Mr. Baseball.  Its not a particularly great movie, but when you've got a very niche hobby (like following Japanese baseball) then you almost by default end up liking any movie that is related to it.

The main thing I like about the film - other than the baseball stuff - is that they filmed it all on location in Japan, and specifically in Nagoya, the city I live in.  A lot of Hollywood movies that purport to be set in contemporary Japan are mostly filmed on sets in the US and this is irritatingly obvious to people who live in Japan because they always make it look like "what people who have never been to Japan think Japan looks like" rather than "what Japan actually looks like".  Mr. Baseball is one of the few where the filmmakers actually went to the trouble of coming to Japan and filming everything (save for a few scenes set in the US) on the ground here and it makes it a much better movie for that reason.  The most obvious scenes where this pays off are the ones showing in game action shot in the actual stadium where the team depicted - our local Chunichi Dragons - played at the time.  But its also evident in the off-the-field scenes where Tom Selleck is doing his "new gaijin having trouble fitting in" routine at various places around town. I love it for that reason. 

I hadn't watched it in a few years but noticed it was on Amazon Prime a few days ago so I put it on.  One scene that I had never paid much attention to really caught my eye while I was doing so.  Its where Tom Selleck is in his apartment talking to his agent on the phone in the US.  Its a pretty boring scene, but at one point he walks in front of the balcony window of his apartment and you get a pretty good look outside.  I hit the pause button and said to myself, "Hey, I know where that is!"

There are three easily identifiable landmarks that you can see in the window, which I've labelled on the below image.  On the far left you can see the Higashiyama Sky Tower, which is a major landmark located in the Zoo.  I was kind of surprised to see that in there since I didn't think it was old enough to have been around 30 years ago when this movie was made, but on looking it up I discovered it was built in 1989, so would have been relatively new back then.  

To the right of Tom Selleck you can see a distinctively shaped building poking up from the wooded hillside, which is the Showa Jukudo, a historic landmark that used to be a school building.  And on the far right you can see a radio tower that to my knowledge has no name but is located in Yagoto. 

As I sat on the sofa I grabbed my iPad and pulled up Google maps to see if I could triangulate the position of Tom based on where one would have to be located in order for those landmarks to be visible like that.  I figured he had to be somewhere in the Kakuozan neighborhood which, coincidentally, is quite close to where I work.  The scene had two further clues that let me narrow the search down even more.  The first was that whatever building he was in had white railings on its balconies.  The second was that there was a somewhat distinctive looking building in the foreground which was across a busy street from it, which you can see on the far right.  This one:

It was pretty easy from there to just use Google Street view to try to locate it, and I did.  So yesterday on my way to work I took a slight detour to visit Tom Selleck's Apartment from Mr. Baseball, which is in a complex called the Tsukimigaoka Mansion. 

The apartment is unfortunately not directly on the street but rather on a small hill located behind a drug store with a multi level parking lot on top of it so I couldn't get any good close up pictures of it, but this is what you can see of it from the street.  

I could confirm this was it by simply looking at the buildings which are visible in the scene.  The one visible on the right of the scene which I mentioned earlier still exists and is across the street and a few doors down:

The old Showa Jukudo is also not far away;

I could get a slightly closer shot  of the building from this angle, which unfortunately shows you the back of the building (the balconies are on the other side).  

Behind the trees in the foreground of the above picture is the driveway that leads to the front entrance.  That is featured in one scene from the movie where Aya Takanashi drops Tom Selleck off.

So there you go - Tom Selleck's apartment from Mr. Baseball is near my work!  I realized after going to all that trouble that someone else has already located the apartment which reminds me of the importance of always Googling stuff like that BEFORE you do a bunch of unnecessary detective work but still, I had fun tracking it down.

Incidentally, Tom Selleck's apartment building is NOT the actual apartment building that the Dragons would use to house their foreign players back then.  I am told that it was actually an apartment complex not far from there called Yagumo Mansion, which looks like this:

I have a couple of friends who used to live in there which are the source of that info.  The Dragons don't put players there anymore, the complex is more than 40 years old and way too shabby for high flying ball players, but back in the 80s its the place they used (if my sources are accurate at least).  Having personally visited the inside of an apartment in it a few times I can say that the one in the movie is a reasonably accurate approximation of the kind of apartment foreign players for the Dragons used to live in.  Not bad by middle class Japanese standards but not the kind of thing a guy sitting on a huge pile of Magnum P.I. money would likely be impressed by.

I'm Giving Up on New Calbee Sets

 

I'm a bit late with this annual traditional post, but bags of 2022 Calbee chips are now in stores and I bought my first bag a couple of weeks ago.  I scored regular cards of Tomoya Mori and Ryouga Tomiyama, pictured here.

Since buying that bag I've had these two cards sitting on my desk next to my computer.  They've been staring at me for a while now and each time I look at them I feel a distinct lack of motivation to get any more.

For the past few years I've been in the habit of buying complete sets of the regular Calbee cards by series from resellers on Yahoo Auctions (see for example these posts from 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021). Its just way cheaper that way compared to trying to piece the sets together bag by bag.

The repetitive nature of the card design though has finally driven me to give up on that habit and I've decided I won't be doing the same thing this year.  The sets are just too boring to bother with anymore.

I've complained a lot about the predictable and boring photography on Calbee sets in recent years, but its really the card design that is making me quit.  The fronts of Calbee cards haven't really changed much in 25 years (starting with the 1997 set), with only minor fiddling on the margins (such as switching from Roman letters to kanji to write player names from year to year).  I don't really mind that too much, since its a clean and simple design which I like (bland photography notwithstanding), but what I find more irritating is that they stopped changing the design on the backs of the regular cards as well.  

This is a more recent development but has been going on for a while too.  The current back design has been in use since 2010 with only very slight changes from year to year.  Prior to that between 1997 (when they first started using color backs with player photos) and 2009 the back designs went through a few different iterations which, while none were really fantastic it at least allowed you to distinguish the sets by year simply by looking at the backs (though the 2007-2009 sets all have similar back designs which make this a bit difficult).

But since then?  If you pick up any Calbee regular card printed in the last 12 years its almost impossible to tell which year it is from just by looking at the design of the card itself, front or back.  So you've got a 12 year print run of more or less identical cards. This is laziness on a scale without historical precedent I think.  

This also makes it very hard to develop any sort of attachment to these cards.  I've been collecting long enough that there are some card designs which stir memories in me just by looking at them.  Like if I see a 1990 Donruss card it immediately takes me back to ripping open packs of those as a 14 year old back in 1990.  Or the backs of the 2004 Calbee set remind me of going to the supermarket near our old apartment to buy bags of those as I tried to put the set together.  And so on and so forth.

When you lose those distinguishing features that allow you to put a set design to a year, and thus a time in your own life that you might think back fondly of, you lose a lot of what gives those cards some of their emotional appeal.  

So instead of adding another generic block of uninspired cards to the unending pile of monotonous crap that Calbee has been producing since 2010 I've decided to give it a miss this year. And next year.  And all the years until Calbee puts out a set worth collecting again.

In the meantime I'll be focusing my efforts mainly on older Calbee sets which I'm still quite fond of.  

Turning the blog on again

 

I've been away from the blog for a few months.  Things have just been too busy for hobbies!

In addition to that though, the sky-high prices on cards have also kind of dampened my enthusiasm for collecting over the past year or so since I am finding myself being priced out of more and more of the sort of stuff that I used to really like to collect.  Menko?  Nope, too expensive?  Vintage Calbee?  Well, I can still afford some of that but nowhere near as much as I used to.  

So my collecting goals for this season are a bit more modest than they used to be.  1970s and 1980s Calbees are probably going to get the lion's share of my attention, menko and stuff like that not so much.

That said, I did manage to recently pick up a cool menko card that I'm quite fond of and, since every post needs a baseball card to go with it, here it is.  A 1961 Maruya (JCM 57a) card of Hanshin Tigers HOFer Minoru Murayama.  This was in a lot of 10 menko on Yahoo Auctions that kind of flew under everyone's radar a couple of weeks ago and I was able to snag it cheaply.  I really love the colorful background on this card, its one of the more attractive ones out there.  

Anyway, hopefully I'll be able to get back into baseball cards again (particularly in light of the title of this blog) and post some more!

Worst Wax Box Break Ever: Japanese Humidity Edition

The above image I think nicely illustrates the reason why sports card makers in Japan never distributed cards in wax packs with gum.

My recently revived interest in opening junk wax when I can find it led me to another purchase on Yahoo Auctions, a full box of 1991-1992 O-Pee-Chee Hockey.

I'm mainly a baseball card guy, but as a Canadian hockey is my number 2 and seeing this selling cheaply (1,000 Yen, about 10$) I couldn't resist.

When it finally arrived in the mail I was super eager to open it up and look for Gretzkys and Roys and Yzermans.  But the second I opened the box up I realized the seller had failed to disclose a significant flaw.

Oh dear.  Every single one of the 36 packs in it looked like this:

For those who have never been to Japan, let me explain a little bit about the climate here. Its humid.  like REALLY humid.  The summers here are brutally hot and the air is so thick with moisture you could cut it with a knife.  My home country has no equivalent. 

Coming from a non-humid country living in a hyper-humid one means that I've had to get used to a lot of things that I'm not used to - mold growing on everything, having to be way more careful about how you deal with food, etc.  

But until receiving these cards it had never occurred to me that yeah, that same humidity will wreak havoc on a piece of 30 year old gum.  In Canada old OPC gum just gets hard over time so you don't have to worry much about it.  

In Japan it melts.  

So anyway, I started opening packs hoping that the melted gum would only have stained the top card on each pack.  No such luck!

AAARGH!!!  These packs have 7 cards each in them and on average the melted gum had seeped through the top 4-5 cards, leaving only 2-3 undamaged ones per pack.  In some all seven cards were stained!  

I was a bit critical of the experience of opening my 1991 OPC Premier baseball card box a couple weeks ago on the grounds that towards the end I was getting a bit tired of getting more Kirk Dressendorfer doubles. But OPC Premier had the  (at the time) underappreciated benefit of not having been distributed with gum in the packs.  

Now I think I have discovered the absolute  worst junk wax box opening experience out there.  When at the end of opening the box you are left with a massive pile of crap, including most of the cards in the box, lying in a huge gum stained mess on the sofa next to you....

Yeah, this sucked.  Right up there with spending 3.5 million dollars on a case of rare Pokemon cards that turns out to be full of G.I. Joe cards. albeit without the loss of 3.5 million dollars.  All that I could do was throw almost everything right into the garbage, which is....not nice.  

The Other Time Topps Made a Japanese Set

 

I had about a 6 month stretch in the latter half of 2021 where I stepped back from the hobby since work was so busy (I mentioned the reason for this in a post last summer, if anyone is interested everything worked out well for me in the career department in the end).

When I came back a few weeks ago, I had a hell of a time trying to catch up on what was going on.  Topps was releasing a Japanese set?  Oh, then Topps lost the MLB license and might not produce baseball cards anymore?  Then Topps got bought by some company called Fanatics which had scuppered Topps' licensing deal and now they are going to use Topps to keep making cards?  

That certainly escalated, and then sort of de-escalated, quickly.

Anyway, about Topps' NPB set I've taken a look at the reviews, particularly Dave's, and have decided to give it a pass.  "Meh, boring" seems to be the critical consensus that has formed about the set, and I have to say that I agree.  I say this while hoping that Topps will continue making NPB cards (much as I hope they continue to make MLB cards) but its just.....not THESE kind of cards.  Its a bit awkward to ask, especially with all the shenanigans you've been dealing with recently but please, Topps, make better NPB cards.

Anyway, while I haven't picked up any of the new Topps Japanese cards, I did coincidentally recently pick up some old Topps Japanese cards.  In 2003 Topps teamed up with Japanese company Kanebo (which had previously issued NPB sets in 1993 and 1994) to produce and sell a Topps set in Japan.  

The 2003 Topps/Kanebo set featured MLB players rather than NPB ones, though it has a lot of Japanese MLB players featured in it.  I found a near complete set of the first series on Yahoo Auctions (53 out of 55 cards) and decided to snag it. 

The set uses the design of the 2002 American Topps set on the front, but with Japanese text on the card backs.  They issued a larger second set of 110 cards that was based on the 2003 Topps design and looks completely different.

The near-set I bought also included a wrapper that the cards came in (above).  This brought back some nice memories for me.  My wife and I got married in 2003 when this set came out and I remember one day that summer popping into a Family Mart convenience store near our apartment (we were living in Himeji at the time, very close to its famous castle) and I saw packs of these on the shelf.  I had one of those "What are you doing in Japan?" moments which I get when I unexpectedly come across something familiar from back home (like a pack of Topps baseball cards) in a setting where I wouldn't normally expect to find it.  I always like those moments, so the memory stuck with me. 

I bought one pack, took it home and I remember getting an Albert Pujols out of it which I thought was pretty cool. There were only 3 cards in the pack though, which seemed kind of stingy to me so I didn't buy anymore and I think they disappeared from stores within a few weeks so even if I had wanted to get more I couldn't have.  

At some point in the past 19 years, those three cards I pulled got lost in all my stuff (I probably still have them in a box somewhere but who knows) and I had forgotten completely about them.  Then when I saw this big pile of them up for auction it rekindled memories of a much younger, handsomer, less bothered by nagging back and knee-pain, newlywed version of myself stumbling across the existence of this set. I just knew that I had to complete the mission that guy had started all those years ago.  So I bought it.

I think it was a great buy actually, these cards are quite hard to come by in lots like that.  There are usually a few random singles up for sale on Yahoo Auctions but no more than that.  I don't think these were big sellers back in 2003, perhaps everyone had that same "what, only 3 cards?" reaction I had and stopped buying them after the first pack.  So today they are hard to come by (which is also the case with the second set).  Now I'm just two cards short of finishing the sucker though!  I'll try to track those last two down by the end of this year (the only collecting goal I've set for myself so far this year).