The Damn Guides are Messing Up a Lot

I'm getting a little frustrated with the two guides I have to Japanese baseball cards: Engel and Sports Card Magazine (SCM).

These both have their upsides and are useful resources, but as someone collecting vintage Calbee I can say they are both quite a bit off on a few things.  I already noted in an earlier post that they often get prices wrong, but in this post I'd like to note how they don't accurately reflect the scarcity of some cards either.

I've been documenting on this blog my ongoing attempt to put together the entire 1975-76-77 Calbee "monster" set of 1472 cards.  I am over 70% of the way there, with more than 1,000 of them in my collection.

I recently took a bit of time to review my checklist (pictured above, I use my copy of SCM to keep track of what I have.  Analogue, baby).  In doing so I've become aware of some patterns in the cards I am missing that seem to coincide with scarcities rather than just random chance.  Some of these are reflected in both guides, some are reflected in neither.

The set was issued in 40 series.  According to the guides, 4 of these series are short printed (I'll refer to them as the "known scarce series"). These are:

Chunichi Dragons Defending the Lead Series (#37 to 72, issued only in Nagoya area)
Hiroshima Carp Defending the Lead Series (#145 to 180, issued only in Hiroshima area)
Hiroshima Red Helmet Series (#609 to 644, issued only in Hiroshima area)
High numbered final series (#1400 to 1436, not regionally issued but harder to find and more expensive)

So I've been paying more money for cards from those known scarce series and still have quite a ways to go on completing them (about half way there overall with these 4 series, but the Red Helmet Series in particular I need a lot of and they are the most expensive).

This leaves 36 other series which both guides view as "common" and don't note any distinction in price or rarity with respect to.

At this stage after years of collecting and scouring auctions for anything and everything I could lay my hands on, the remaining holes in my collection should therefore be more or less randomly scattered throughout these remaining 36 series.

But they aren't.

With 33 out of the 36 remaining "common" series I can describe my collection of them as almost complete, with just a few stragglers that I have yet to round up.  These 33 series I feel confident in saying are the easiest to find (relatively at least) and I am at least 80% complete on all of them, with many exceeding the 90% complete level.

But that leaves 3 outliers which I have noticeably fewer cards of. Instead of having 80% or more like I am with all the other series except the four known scarce series, with these three I only have between 30 and 40% of the cards.  They are:

Series 14: 76 Pennant Race Opening Game Series  (#465 to 500, I have just 11 out of 35)
Series 23: Sadaharu Oh 700th Home Run Series (#789 to 824, I have just 14 out of 35)
Series 27: Defending the Lead Series (#933 to 968, I have just 10 out of 35)

Looking around Yahoo Auctions, the pickings for these three series are extremely limited compared to common series and they seem a lot closer to the 4 known rare series.  Prices reflect this: these cards sell for more.

Looking at the guides, the only one of these series which are priced higher are the Sadaharu Oh 700 Home Run ones, and that is because the cards feature Sadaharu Oh (both guides list his cards at the same premium in this series as they do for his cards in others).

With Series 14 and 27 I'm fairly confident that they are short printed and quite a bit harder to find than the others (maybe the same ballpark as the 4 known scarce series).  With the Sadaharu Oh 700 home run series its possible that they are simply more popular because of Oh, which would explain why they are harder to find and more expensive, though I'm not sure I buy that  (the number I have are suspiciously similar to the other two, and Oh's cards in other series aren't particularly hard to find despite his personal popularity, which leans towards these being short printed too).

So there is another problem with the guides:  relying on them you would only think there were four expensive, rarer series in this set when in fact there are seven.

While frustrating, its actually also kind of fun to discover this sort of stuff on my own.  On the downside though I now realize that I'll have to shell out more money on those other three series if I am to have any chance at completing this thing!

An Album Full of 70s Goodies

 One unique thing about collecting Calbee cards is that sometimes they show up in Calbee albums.

In most (perhaps all?  Not sure) of the 46 years since Calbee started selling cards, they've also produced albums which were usually given away as mail-in redemptions.  So in addition to all the vintage cards floating around there are also a lot of old albums.  I don't collect the albums themselves, but sometimes a non-card dealer, usually antique dealers, will come across old collections stored in them and put them up for sale.  These are so awesome when you can find them.

And recently I did find one.  Or more accurately I found ten of them up for sale individually by the same seller.  Each album was from the 1970s and was stuffed full with 1970s Calbee cards from various years.  You can cram 72 cards into one of these albums if you put two cards per pocket, which is what these contained.

 My recent post lamenting the fact that auctions almost always end exactly as I am in the middle of putting my kids to sleep was partly inspired by these.  I put bids in on all ten of them.  I didn't expect to win all ten (in fact, couldn't afford to really) but was hoping to win three or four.  But while I was happily telling them the story of an epic battle between Pokémon and dinosaurs (I let them decide the topic of each night's story), the auctions ended and I was outbid on all but one of them.  When I looked at the final prices the ones I got outbid on went for I kicked myself since I definitely would have bid higher on a few of them had I been there to do so.

But I was also happy that I did win one!  And it was a great one.  The albums were sorted by team and mine contained cards of Hiroshima Carp and Hanshin Tigers players from Calbee sets issued between 1973 and 1979.  I paid around 7000 Yen total with shipping, so the cards cost  me about 100 Yen each, which is a good deal, especially for what I got.

 Look at those beauties!

There were quite a few cards from the 1975-76-77 Calbee set that I am working on, but most of them turned out to be doubles unfortunately (though expected).  The real highlights for me were the cards from the 1973 and 1974 sets, which I have way fewer of.

The Hiroshima Carp cards are especially distinct in the 1973 set since they still had their blue helmets and hats back then.  This makes it super easy to distinguish cards from the 1973 set from later ones after they switched to their red and white only uniforms. There were some really great Hiroshima Carp cards of Sachio Kinugasa and Yoshiro Sotokoba:

 Some cool action shots too:

 This card here though was the highlight.  Yutaka Enatsu (See Dave's great write up about his cards here and a great write up of his career here on Eye of the Tiger) is one of the most interesting players in modern Japanese history.  He holds the record for most strikeouts in a season (401!) and had a resume that should have made him a no-brainer as a hall of famer.  But he was involved in one of the most famous gambling scandals in Japanese history (the black mist scandal, kind of Japan's version of the Black Sox) early in his career, and then arrested for drug use after he retired, so he's been left on the outside looking in.

I have a few cards of him, but this one is now my favorite.  Its from the 1973 Calbee set and its one of those great 1970s Calbee cards that shows you a wonderful glimpse of stands full of spectators and colorful advertising billboards.

 I was surprised to find it in there because this is one of his most expensive cards.  SCM lists it at 20,000 Yen and it rarely shows up on Yahoo Auctions.  Its a bit lower grade (there is a crease to the right of his head) but this card alone made the purchase price worthwhile.

There were a lot of other beauties in there which were fun to flip through.

I'm not sure if these cards were actually put in this album a long time ago by their original owner, which would be neat, or if the seller just shoved them in there for the purposes of selling them.  Either way, except for the smattering of 75-76-77 Calbee singles I needed for my set, I've decided to keep these as they are in the album.  Its kind of neat to flip through them the way they were intended to be back in the day.

Which is the Most Valuable Card from the Monster?

 Behold!  Hiroshima Municipal Stadium at Night, as depicted on card #157 from the Monster 1975-76-77 Calbee set!

I just picked this up and am quite excited about it because the card has a very dubious claim to being the most valuable from the set, and thus the key card to my years long quest to finish this 1472 card monster.

Why is the card's claim dubious?  Lets review the merits of the case.

Basically the claim lies with its value in my copy of SCM from 2010 (admittedly out of date but its the most recent I have).  It lists this card, which was from one of the two rare Hiroshima regionally issued series in the set, at 15,000 Yen. That puts it in a tie with the Senichi Hoshino cards from the Nagoya regionally issued series, also rare.  So perhaps its better to describe its claim as being tied for first place rather than solely occupying the position.

But the tie isn't what makes its claim dubious.  Engel lists it at $150, about the same as SCM, but it lists several other cards at $200 which is obviously higher.  The cards Engel lists are mostly those of foreign players (like Richie Schienblum's card #155 from the same series) or big stars (like Sachio Kinugasa's card in the same series).  So according to Engel, this is one of the higher priced cards, but not #1 in the set.

But even that isn't what makes the claim dubious.  I like the Engel guide and admire the work that went into it, but the prices for Calbee cards from the 1970s listed in it are completely out of whack with what the market for these cards is.  No way is the Schienblum card worth more than this one, at auction this one will easily fetch 2-3 times more than Scheinblum (or even Kinugasa), which is considered a common in the series (worth a lot by virtue of being in the rare series, but not the key card in the series).  So I prefer SCM to Engel on that point.

But....in reality neither of these is right.  The real most valuable card is, ironically, a different card featuring Hiroshima Municipal Stadium that has a photo almost identical to this one.  It is card #630 in the set, from the other rare Hiroshima regional issue (the "Red Helmet" series).

You wouldn't know this by looking at either guide.  Engel lists #630 at just $40, while my old SCM lists it at just 5,000 Yen, so both seem to agree that it is worth just about 1/3 of what #157 is.  But both are way wrong on that point.

Having followed Yahoo Auctions sale prices on the big cards in this set for a few years now, the big trend I've noticed is that the Red Helmet series that card #630 is in  is considered by far the most valuable of the entire set (which is comprised of 40 series).  Cards from it almost never sell for less than 3,000-5,000 Yen each, compared to cards in the other Hiroshima regional series which #157 is in, which usually sell in 1,000-2,000 range.  This is the reverse of SCM and Engel, which price the Red Helmet series much lower.

I'm not sure why the market is working like this, just looking at availability there usually are about the same number of cards from both Hiroshima series available (which is to say not many of either, I don't think one is noticeably rarer than the other), but the Red Helmet ones are definitely hotter and sell for higher prices. This is reflected in my own collection, I've been having more difficulty and am paying more money for the cards in the Red Helmet series than for any other.

So whatever the reason, the Red Helmet series are definitely now the most valuable series in the entire set, and #630 is considered the key card from that series, which likely makes it the key card of the entire set.  I'm still looking for it and expect it will be the card I have to shell out the most for in the entire set.

 But anyway, back to the card I actually do have.  While #157 isn't the key card to the set, it is the key card to what is probably the second hardest to complete series in the set, which means it still has a place in the pantheon of major cards in the set.

Its a bit of an odd one, it is dedicated not to the game depicted on it but rather to the general topic of stadium manners.  The back says:

Baseball Stadium Manners

When Rooting for you team, throwing objects or jumping down onto the field of play is not right.  Even when a player from an opposing team makes a fine play we should all clap.

I'm not sure that Japanese fans need to be admonished like this given that their stadium etiquette is legendary around the world, but there you have it.  Come to think of it, perhaps their etiquette is so legendary because they get reminded to be polite so often that they even dedicate baseball cards to it.  So maybe all those nicely-tidied-up-after-the-game-in-which-a-Japanese-team-played World Cup and Olympic Stadiums over the years have this card to thank for that.  

I got a pretty decent bargain on this, I only paid about $20 with shipping for it.  The cheap price is explained by the back, which has a little pen mark if you look closely.  Otherwise it probably would have sold for quite a bit more.  

This also demonstrates why the 1975-76-77 set is do-able despite its size.  You will never find the key cards from the other Calbee sets from the 1970s for $20 no matter how hard you look.  The key cards from those sets will run you into the hundreds or thousands of dollars even in lower grade condition.  But the 75-76-77 set are still kind of obtainable!

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?

2019 Calbee Series 2 is Here (Yawn)

I just realized that it is already July and I am only just now getting around to doing a post about this year's Calbee set.  I'm so late Series 2 is already out, so I'll skip the first one and do a post about the second, which I just bought in complete form off of Yahoo Auctions.

Since last year I've decided that my way of evaluating new Calbee sets is based on photography, since the base design only seems to vary slightly from year to year now (between using Roman letters and Kanji for player names).  As I noted last year Calbee sets have become dreadfully predictable in their use of photography, to the extent that it is all based on three rules.  1) position players except for catchers are only shown batting, 2) pitchers are only shown pitching and 3) catchers are the only ones who sometimes are shown fielding at their position.  So my way of evaluating a new Calbee set is based entirely on how much they were willing to "wow" me by deviating from these three rules.

This year, unfortunately, the boring photography trend has continued.  70 out of the 72 cards in the base set (such as the entire Swallows team, pictured above) conform to the rules.  Individually none of the photos are bad, but collectively the repetitive site of everyone doing more or less the same thing gets very monotonous.

Its not just the poses that are boring, but also the framing - the players are always cropped so that they take up all the card.  Again its not a bad thing individually, but sometimes its nice to see a bit of variety (like a picture of a player with an impressive backdrop taking up a bit more or the card, see the Nagashima and Oh card at the head of this blog).

The monotony in framing leads to odd things, like the fact that every card of the Chiba Lotte Marines has the same infield dirt taking up the exact same amount of the bottom of the card - it almost looks like a colorful border but no, its just the result of near identical photo framing.

These are the only two cards that deviate from the batters batting/pitchers pitching/ catchers catching photo selection: one guy running the bases, the other fielding.  Neither are particularly exciting and suffer the same identical framing problem, but at least they are a bit different.  But I mean come on, just 2 cards out of 72?

In addition to the regular 72 card set I also got the 12 card opening day pitchers subset (boring!  Same photo problems as the regular set), and the 4 card checklist set which has the only interesting pictures in the entire thing:

See?   This is what I want Calbee cards to look like! Both of these cards show guys doing exciting things other than batting/pitching and both of them are framed to allow some background to be visible in the picture.  Wouldn't it be nice if Calbee made the entire 72 card set like this instead of just the 4 card checklists!  I mean, they used to do that back in the 70s for crying out loud, why not now???

Set Building and Wall Hitting

As I've detailed in earlier posts, I'm working really hard on the 1975-76-77 Calbee "Monster" set of 1472 cards.  I've added quite a few cards to it over the past year and I'm about 75% of the way to completing it - I now have more than 1,000 of them!  I even have made decent headway on the rare (and expensive) regional issues and am about halfway to completing those series.

 But I've entered a new phase in my pursuit recently which has caused the pace at which I cross these cards off my checklist to drop significantly.  Basically the collection has had two phases which preceded this one:

Phase 1: just randomly amass as many cards as possible, buying them in lots whenever I could find them and not worrying about getting doubles since there were so many cards that I needed any lot I bought was bound to have a lot I didn't yet have.  Since the lots I could find were small and rarely exceeded about 50 cards at most (less than 5% of the set total), this was feasible for a long time.  This lasted about 5 years and got me past the halfway mark.

Phase 2: Stop buying the cards randomly in lots because once you pass a certain threshold the lots start producing too many doubles and it no longer makes sense as a collecting strategy.  Switch to buying the cards you need one by one.  This strategy lasted a little over a year and got me to where I am now.

Now I'm at a difficult point because I realize how few of these cards are in circulation and how small the number of dealers there are out there who actively deal in them.  I've basically stripped every dealer who has a stock of these of the cards I need, so now when I go through each dealer's list I only find cards I already have (and its getting frustrating).  So phase 2 has more or less run its course and I'm still several hundred cards short of completing the sucker.

Phase 3 is where things get tough.  I now have to wait for "new finds" of the cards I need to spring up, which is a real long game to play.  Some of the cards I still need probably aren't all that rare but rather its just coincidence that nobody happens to have any at this point and as they break up collections or whatever they do to put cards up I'll probably find them one by one for reasonable prices.

Some of the others are from the rare regional issues, which I know I'll have to pay real money for and am fine with picking those up over a long time period as it helps balance the monthly card collecting budget better that way.  I suspect though that there are also some "hidden" rarities lurking out there.  I've noticed with other vintage Calbee sets that there are a lot of cards which the guides (Engel and SCM) don't put a high price on and aren't part of any known regional limited series but they get bid into the stratosphere whenever they show up nonetheless.  I've unexpectedly lost a couple of bids on 1975-76 cards that the guides tell me aren't rare, yet they sold for several times more than what they are listed for.  Card #948 of Tanizawa Kenichi for example lists as a common that I thought I would pick up for 200-300 Yen in an auction a few weeks ago, but it ended up selling for 10 times that much (2280 Yen) much to my chagrin!  I'll try to record the existence of these as I find them for information's sake. Its obvious to me that I am not the only person in Japan working on this set, and other collectors (who are my competition) seem to be aware of which cards are rare and which aren't, despite what the guides say.  Despite all I have learned about this set over the years, there is still much that I do not know.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting to note that I've hit "the wall" at about 75% of the way to completing the Monster.  That percentage probably varies quite a bit from set to set.  With junk wax era cards, there is no "wall", you just buy the set for five bucks.  With US sets from the 60s and 70s too the "wall" probably only exists as a financial constraint.  Even the harder short printed series in most of those sets are available for sale on Ebay at any given time, and difficulty in buying them may be more related to waiting for one to come along at the "right price" rather than waiting for one to come along at all.

Hitting the wall where I have is probably not only the result of limited supply, but also of the limited circle of dealers who sell vintage Calbee cards.  There are about half a dozen guys selling on Yahoo Auctions that I deal with regularly to get cards from the set and that is about it, anything else is just somebody who specializes in other stuff but happens to lay their hands on a few old baseball cards. The brick and mortar card shops, at least here in Nagoya, don't really have anything at all and specialize in modern stuff.

Anybody else hit a wall in their attempts to put together a full set of something?

The 1980s Calbee Sets Ranked by Difficulty

 As I’ve been documenting on this blog over the years, my main (though not exclusive) collecting interests are Japanese Calbee sets from the 1970s and 1980s. These two decades produced radically different Calbee cards.  1970s cards are closer to standard sized and tend to depict scenes from games rather than of individual players.  Though many cards of that era do feature a single player, the back of the card usually focuses more on describing the specific game or scene depicted rather than general biographical information on the player.


In the 1980s that changed radically.  The cards became smaller, about the size of 1950 Bowmans, resulting in the decade being called the “mini card era” among Japanese collectors.  Also the cards moved away from depicting scenes in games and instead adopted the more conventional card depicting a single player on the front and having biographical information about the player on the back.  


The 1980s Calbee sets aren’t quite as popular as the 1970s sets, in part I think because the photography on the 70s sets is a lot better and also because the bigger card size displays them better.  But they do nonetheless remain among the most popular for Japanese collectors, depicting a lot of guys like Ochiai and Randy Bass who didn’t appear on cards from the 1970s.  


The sets vary widely according to how difficult they are to collect.  Compared to American sets from the 1980s they are infinitely more difficult: this was not the junk wax era in Japan and a closer comparison would probably be lie between the 1950s Topps and Bowman sets (on the easy side) and the T-206 set (on the harder side) in terms of difficulty.  Though even this is inaccurate since some years are nearly impossible to complete due to the rarity of some cards and sheer sizes of the sets, while others are actually quite do-able as collecting projects, albeit still challenging (especially if you are outside of Japan).  So here I thought I’d list the sets from the mini card era (1980 to the first series of 1990) in terms of difficulty, starting with the easiest at the top and going to the most difficult at the bottom.


1. 1990 First Series

Overview: This is in a league of its own in terms of ease of collection for three reasons.  The first is its small size – only the first 55 cards of the 1990 set are mini cards, for the upper series they completely redesigned them and the cards of the higher series are effectively a completely different set (though they continue the numbering from 56).  The second is the fact that there are no short printed cards in this series, so there aren’t any individual cards that are insanely hard to find (and expensive) compared to the rest. Finally, having been released in 1990 it seems that more of these cards have survived than ones from earlier in the decade.  There aren’t a lot of them out there but they are a bit easier to find than the cards from the early 80s, and generally can be found in a bit better condition.


My Collection: This is the only mini card set that I’ve been able to fully complete thus far. At about 100 Yen per card it cost about $50 (though that is fancy accounting as there were some doubles produced - if I sold those I could get it down to $50)!


2. 1986

Overview: The 1986 set is significantly harder to complete than the first series of the 1990 set, so there is a huge gap between the #1 and #2 spot on this list, but its definitely the easiest of the sets that encompass an entire year (in contrast to the 1990s minis which are only part of that year’s Calbee card release).  At 250 cards it is a lot smaller than the average set of the 1980s, which helps a lot.  The biggest reason for its relative ease though is that it’s the only full size set that doesn’t have any short printed series of cards: all 250 in the set are equally easy/difficult to find. It does feature the rookie card(s) of Kazuhiro Kiyohara, which used to be quite sought after and expensive, but in recent years his popularity has fallen off a cliff and they don’t command anywhere near as much of a premium as they used to (which is great for set builders).


My Collection: I am about 80% of the way to completing this set, with about 200 out of the 250 cards.  I haven’t had to shell out big money on any of them, I’ve been averaging about 100 Yen per card, so if I keep that up I could conceivably complete this set (in mid grade condition) for about $200-$250 US (though this will require a lot of patience on my part!)


3. 1987

Overview: The 1987 set is noticeably more difficult than the 1986 set, but still ranks among the easier to complete.  The bump in difficulty is explained both by the larger number of cards (382) and the fact that one series (cards 75 to 99) was short printed and is more difficult and expensive to complete than the rest of the set. These make it more difficult than the 1986 set, but two other factors make it easier than most other 1980s sets.  The first is that 1987 was a good year for baseball popularity in Japan, the Giants doing well that year, which I’ve heard boosted the sales of Calbee baseball chips that year and resulted in a somewhat higher supply of these cards being out there.  Second is the fact that while it does have a short printed series, that series is not super rare like some in other sets are.  The premium you pay for them is pretty modest and they can be found.


My Collection: I’m almost finished this set, with 378 out of 382 cards down.  The only 4 I have remaining are from the short printed series.  I’ve probably averaged about 100 yen per card for the regular cards and more like 300-400 Yen per card in the short printed series (though some of those I obtained through a trade).  So I’m looking at having spent about $400-$500 to complete this one, in upper mid grade condition (probably averages about EX).



4. 1988

Overview: For the most part collecting the 1988 Calbee set isn’t much different than collecting the 1987 or 1986 set: the cards cost about the same and are about as easy/difficult to find.  Number wise it lies between the two, at a manageable 329 cards.  The thing that puts it lower down the list though are the short printed cards, which there are a number of.  These are significantly more difficult to find than the 1987 short printed series and prices reflect this: singles in the short printed series usually sell from 30$ to $100 each on Yahoo Auctions.  There are three main blocks of short printed cards in this series.  The first are cards 101 to 115, the second are cards 251 to 265 and the final ones are cards 305 to 329.  Interestingly only the first and last of those blocks are priced highly in both Engel and my (now out of date admittedly) copy of Sports Card Magazine.  I’ve been able to determine that the cards from 251 to 265 are rare both by the fact that I don’t have any and that I’ve seen cards from those numbers sell at auction in about the 3000 Yen range, which is way out of whack for regular cards in that set.  The cards in the final series (305 and over) seem to be the most expensive and generally sell for over 5000 Yen each.  Its worth noting that there are two versions of card 305, one of which features a “fine play” with borders looking like film strips, and the other featuring Kiyohara.  The Kiyohara version is the more valuable of the two.


My Collection: I have about 70% of this set complete, but that is almost entirely made up of cards from the easier to find series. I only have 4 of the short printed cards, and none of them from the most expensive series above 305.  I’ve probably averaged about 100 Yen per card, but with the short printed cards selling for so much you’d probably be looking at spending nearly 1000$ US to complete this sucker, more than what you’d likely pay for the 1986. 1987 and 1990 first series combined.  Those short prints are wallet killers!


5. 1985

Overview: The 1985 set is a tough one.  At 465 cards it is a bigger set than the later 80s sets higher up the list.  It also has some hard to find short printed cards that are extremely expensive, notably cards 441 to 465, which have gold borders and usually sell for 5,000 Yen or so each.  Cards 276 to 325 are also short printed, though not as expensive.  One other thing that sets this one apart is that even the singles in the easier to find series are harder to find than they are for the sets of the late 1980s.  The non short printed cards in the 1986 to 1990 sets are, while fairly scarce, notably easier to find that the pre-1985 sets.  I’m not sure why 1985 is the drawing line for this, perhaps baseball chips were a more popular snack after that year.  You can see evidence of this on Yahoo auctions, despite their being more cards in the set a search for “1985” in the Calbee section only gets you 242 hits, while a search for “1988” gets you 909.  The set is also notable for having Choji Murata’s rookie card, one of the earlier examples of a higher priced (about 5000 Yen) rookie card in a Japanese set. It also has Warren Cromartie’s first Japanese cards. 


My Collection: I have a little over 100 cards from this one so I’m nowhere near completing it.  I don’t have any of the short printed ones either. I’ve probably averaged a little over 100 Yen per card on this one, though again that doesn’t include any of the valuable ones.  You’d definitely be looking at around $1500- $2000 or so to finish this one and it could take decades to track them all down.


6. 1982

Overview: This is a big set, 651 cards, and was the first of a three year run of Calbee sets with more than 650 cards.  Confusingly it is numbered to 751 because 100 cards (452-551) don’t exist! It has three short printed series (201-250, 351 – 401 and 702 – 751) which are quite expensive.  The cards from the rest of the set aren’t too hard to find, but there are a lot of them which makes it much more challenging than the 1985 set.  Its also quite hard to find the cards in this set in nice condition (most of the ones you find are in mid grade or lower). Its notable for having the rookie card of Tatsunori Hara. 



My Collection: I have over 100 cards for this set, so I’m not very far into it.  None of the ones I have are from the short printed series and most of the ones I have are mid to low grade.  This set will probably set you back about $5,000-$6,000 if you try to put it together, it’s a doozy.


7. 1984

Overview:  This set is a really hard one to collect.  At 713 cards it is massive, the biggest Calbee set of the 1980s and almost triple the size of the 1986 set.  Its also got a lot of extremely expensive short printed cards.  The entire run from card 591 to 690 – 100 cards! – is short printed and every one of those is going to set you back $30-$50 each if you can find them (at the moment not a single one is available on Yahoo auctions, they only show up from time to time).  Another 90 card block, from 401 to 490, was also short printed so overall you are looking at nearly 200 expensive short printed cards to finish this set.  As with the 1985s, even the non-short printed cards from this set are harder to find than the ones in the sets from the late 1980s.  This is especially the case if you are looking for them in upper grade, probably 90% of the early 80s Calbee cards are in mid grade (vg-ex) or lower (the ratio is probably more like 50% with late 80s cards).  The set is notable for the fact that most cards in it have a unique design that is different from the standard full bleed photos of other 80s Calbee sets.

My Collection: I have about 250 cards from this set, which means I am over 1/3 of the way there!  But I only have 2 of the short printed cards, and I don’t think I’ll be making any headway on them in the near future.  I’ve averaged about 100 Yen per card on this set, but its in lower grade condition than my later 80s Calbee sets are (probably averages about vg or vg-ex).  Completing this one could easily run $6,000- $7,000 because of all those short printed ones and is beyond my means (barring an unexpected lottery win).


8. 1983

Overview: At 710 cards this is one of the bigger 80s sets, almost the exact same size as the 1984 set.  It has some very hard to find short printed series, particularly cards 401-450,  501-550 and 601 to 700 – between the two of those you have about 200 Short printed cards that sell for 3,000-5,000 Yen each to track down.  In addition to that you have 10 cards that aren’t numbered which are the hardest to find.  I’ve never seen any on Yahoo Auctions, my old SCM lists them at 6000 Yen each but I suspect they would sell for more (prices on the short printed 1980s cards have risen quite a bit in recent years, my SCM is from 2010).  The set is notable for having the first cards of Randy Bass.


My collection: I have about 300 cards from this set so I’m actually getting close to the halfway point.  As with my other early 80s sets though I am severely short on the rare ones: I only have one of the short printed cards.  I probably averaged about 100 Yen per card for the ones I have, but like my 1984s the condition of my set is significantly lower than my late 80s sets (probably vg or vg-ex).  I guess this would be a $6,000-$7,000 project if I were to seriously pursue it. 


9. 1981

Overview:  This is a tough one.  At 450 cards its about average size, and it actually only has one hyper rare short printed series (201-250).  But what sets it apart and puts it so low down this list is that the non-short printed cards are also quite hard to find, much more so than even the 1983s or 1984s.  There are no easy to find lots for this set – every one out of those 450 cards is going to be one you have to track down and pay something for.

My collection: I have about 25 cards from this set, none of them from the short printed series. I paid about 300 Yen each for them, and that was quite a deal.  This would be about a $6,000 to $7,000 project if you were to ever try it, not for the faint of heart.


10 . 1980

Overview: At this point down the list its getting harder to justify differences in rank since they are all so damned hard, but the 1980 set is one that definitely belongs somewhere down here.  It does have one advantage, which is its small size.  At 296 cards it’s the second smallest Calbee set of the 80s after the 1986 set.  Technically speaking you could even shave 96 cards off that list though since the first 96 are actually bigger sized cards more like the 1970s Calbees, for some reason they changed the design mid year to the mini card style (much like they would ditch the mini cards half way through the 1990 set a decade later), but for our purposes we can treat it as a single set.  Its “easy” points end there though.  About half the cards (basically everything from 49 to 196) are short printed and extremely expensive.  And actually even the non-short printed cards are pretty rare, singles from this set across the board are the hardest of any from the 1980s to come by. 


My collection: I only have two cards from this set so it’s the 1980s set I am furthest from completing.  Even the commons from the non-short printed series usually sell for 500-1000 Yen each, and the short printed ones for many times that much, so despite its relatively small size this set is probably going to be a $5,000- $6,000 endeavour (maybe more) that will take years of work.  I am not actively pursuing this set due to the sheer cost of it right now.



11.  1989

Overview: I’m a bit torn about putting the 1989 set as the most difficult because depending on how you define it, it might be closer to the 1988 set in difficulty much higher up this list.  It’s a 414 card set and most of the cards are about as easy/difficult to find as cards from other late 80s Calbee sets.  But cards numbered 111 to 220 were short printed and sell for a premium similar to what the short printed series in the 1988 set sell for.  Those aren’t the real deal breaker that drops the 1989s to the bottom of the list though.  That belongs to the last cards in the set, 391 to 414.  These are short printed, but so short printed that nobody seems to know if they were ever even distributed in packs.  They are kind of legendary among Calbee card collectors and so rare that they are the only 1980s Calbee cards that SCM refuses to put a price on since there are so few transactions involving them.  I’ve never seen one come up for auction on Yahoo Auctions.  So if you include those 23 cards in the 1989 set, it’s the most difficult.  Without them this set would probably be between the 1988 and 1985 sets in difficulty.  The set is notable for having cards of Cecil Fielder, the only Calbee set to do so.


My Collection:  I have about 60 cards from this set, it’s the only late 80s Calbee set I’ve never made a serious attempt to collect mainly because those mysterious super short printed ones discourage me from doing so.  Most of the cards in the set are about as easy and cheap to get as 1988 or 1987 Calbees, but I can’t speculate on how much a full set would cost.  Those hyper short printed ones could easily sell for thousands of dollars each, making this the most expensive 1980s Calbee set out there if you were to include them.