2023 Calbee Found

 
In typical fashion, as soon as I complain aloud about not being able to find something, I immediately find it.

After writing yesterday's post about not being able to find any 2023 Calbee, I decided to take another hunting expedition to try to find them while on my way home from work.  

Things didn't get off to a good start - I hit three separate convenience stores (Family Mart, Lawson, 7-11) and came up empty at each.  I was about to give up when I decided to try one last place that I viewed as a long shot.  In Ozone station near the Nagoya Dome, which I was passing through anyway, there is a little place called Bellmart Kiosk which sells snacks and is basically a convenience store.  Not being one of the major chains though I didn't think they would have any, but I would be walking right past it so I decided to duck in and take a look. 

To my surprise, they had them!  They were 116 Yen per bag, which is more than they usually cost. I'm not sure if this is due to inflation, or just due to how they price stuff at Bellmart Kiosk.  Anyway, I gladly bought three bags (one for me, and one each for my kids).

I got home just as the Dragons game was starting on TV so I sat down to watch the game with the kids and we each opened a bag. This was what we got:

The Oshima Star Card was a great find, and we actually saw him get a hit just a few minutes after pulling it which was a nice touch (even better was watching the Dragons beating the Swallows 3-1, breaking a four game losing streak).  

Being able to buy Calbee chips in stores like this has become a very important ritual of my life in Japan (which started off as just a one year stint as an English teacher looking for an overseas adventure in a new country and somehow evolved into me having spent more than two decades of my life here).  There are three things that mark the start of spring in Japan for me: 

1) Cherry blossoms coming into bloom;

2) NPB regular season starting;

3) Buying bags of Calbee baseball chips

Not being able to check off that third one had been bugging me for a while, it was almost like without being able to do that  winter would not be over in my mind.  Now that it is, I feel much better.

Anyway, this year's set is pretty much the same as every Calbee set for decades.  Same design, same predictable photography, etc, so I won't repeat my criticisms about those elements.  The one new thing, which Dave noted a few weeks ago, is that unfortunately the set this year is smaller than usual - just 60 regular cards rather than 72 as has been the norm in recent years.  That means that they feature just five players per team on regular cards.  Assuming they keep this up for Series 2 and 3, they'll end up with only 15 players per team on cards, way fewer than the full roster.  So likely my kids and I are not going to be able to get cards of a lot of Dragons players who we like, which is a bit of a bummer.

Hopefully now that I've confirmed that they are in fact starting to appear in some stores they will soon start appearing in others. In fact that is going to be a pre-requisite to us collecting the set via bags of chips again this year - that Bellmart Kiosk is a bit too out of the way for me to regularly stop there for chips so I'll need one of my local supermarkets to get their act together ASAP!

2023 Calbee: Missing in Action

 

Something weird is going on with this year's Calbee baseball chips.

Last month on Calbee's website (as also noted by Dave in his post about it) it was announced that Series one would be on sale from March 27th.  That is pretty normal, Calbee usually puts there Series 1 sets on sale at the end of the March, roughly coinciding with the start of the season.

I was looking forward to that date since I had so much fun putting the sets together with my kids last year.  So on March 27th I eagerly hit one of the supermarkets that normally sells Calbee baseball chips.  They didn't have them.  I then went to another.  They didn't have them either. And another. And another, etc etc.

Day after day for the past 10 days I've been hitting everywhere they might be available and always coming up empty.  I initially thought this might be due to the fact that most stores were still selling Calbee's Team Japan soccer chips and wanted to burn though their stock of those before switching to the baseball chips.  But last weekend all those soccer chips were pulled from store shelves, but no baseball chips appeared to replace them.

On looking a bit deeper into it, I discovered in a Calbee press release that the March 27th date was their release date for convenience stores only, which would explain why I didn't find any in supermarkets.  But I haven't found any in convenience stores either yet.  And the release date for supermarkets, April 3rd, has also already come and gone without them showing up. 

So I'm playing a very frustrating waiting game with Calbee right now.  Its not unusual for Series 2 or Series 3 to appear in stores later than the official release date since stores usually only start selling those once they've exhausted their supply of Series 1 chips.  But I've never seen Series 1 fail to appear on shelves within a day or two of the offical release date before.  I know the sets have been made because re-sellers on Yahoo Auctions are already selling singles and even sets.  But I want to do it the old fashioned way this year (even though, as Dave has informed me, the set is smaller than usual and has no design innovations or anything like that).  

My 1986 Calbee Set

 

In addition to my 1975-76-77 Calbee set another project I've dusted off is my 1986 Calbee set.  

After finishing my 1987 Calbee set three years ago I decided that 1986 would be the next Calbee set from the 80s that I would try to complete.  I actually have most of the other 1980s sets "on the go" but the 1986 set is the only one I have a realistic shot at completing in a reasonable time frame (ie this decade).  All the other sets  from the 80s have at least one or two hyper rare series that make them extremely difficult to put together. The 1986 set isn't too bad in that regard and at only 250 cards its quite small and probably even easier than the 1987 set, which has almost 400 cards, to put together.

As you can see from the pictures in this post my 1986 set has a binder of its own and sits in lovely 12 pocket pages that are the perfect size for 1980s Calbee cards.  This is a mark of honor for it, those pages are extremely hard for me to obtain.  Nobody sells them on YJA or Amazon (they do have other 12 pocket pages available, but they aren't quite the right size for 80s Calbees which only THESE specific pages work for).  I make a visit to the local card shop Bits once a year or so and the main thing I buy is however many 12 card sheets they have, which is never enough.  I'd like to put all my 1980s sets into them, but thus far have only scrounged up enough for the 87 and 86 sets.

Anyway, by my latest count I have 212 cards (84.8%) meaning I just need another 38 to finish the set.  Not bad!  When putting together my 1987 Calbee set I had narrowed it down to the last 31 cards I needed about 2 years before finishing it, so maybe that might be a realistic timeline for these.  Of course that was before the pandemic when cards were a bit easier to get for a decent price so I might have to factor that into it.  

One thing I've noticed is that even though there don't seem to be any known short printed series in the set, nearly half of the cards I still need (listed at the bottom of this post) fall between 100 and 150.  This could be just a coincidence, but I do wonder if those ones might be a bit harder to find than the other series.  

Anyway, I kind of like this set.  Its got Kiyohara's rookie card(s) in it and most of the famous 80s foreign stars like Baas and Cromartie.  I'll be happy when its finished.

The remaining cards I need are:

59,60,62,74,81,90,99,100,102,103,104,113,115,119, 123,127, 130, 134, 137, 139, 188, 190, 224,240, 245,250

Nippon Ham Sausage Home Run Card Mystery

 

Over the past couple of years I've been slowly adding cards to my 1975-76 Nippon Ham Sausage set.  I like this set a lot, the colorful band along the bottom with the team names and rock/paper/scissors game look really cool.

This is a really tough set to collect though since pretty much every card in it is scarce and even mid grade commons will generally set you back at least 1000 Yen each.  Add to that the fact that the cards aren't numbered and we don't even know how many of them were even made.  The latest version of Engel's guide lists 397 different known cards, which is up from 351 in the 2018 edition, indicating that new ones are still being discovered.  There are multiple cards of star players so way fewer than 397 players appear in it, something Dave noted in his write up about it.

I've got 35 cards, less than 10% of the set, after years of collecting so this is not a realistic set build for me, but I still like to pick them up every once in a while and add them to my miscellaneous 1970s album (which also holds a near complete 1973 Calbee first series set and a complete 1978 Yamakatsu set which I finally found). 

There is one thing about this set which I don't think the Engel guide captures which is the relative scarcity of some of the cards.  Engel rates the set at R2 (fewer than 250 copies of each card exist), which seems about right for the easier to find ones. Having followed prices a lot on Yahoo Auctions though I suspect that some of them are short printed and much harder to find than the others.  

For example, this card of Keiji Osawa, manager of the Fighters, is listed on YJA now for 29,800 Yen.  Osawa is not a Hall of Famer and its hard to figure the rationale for that price.  That dealer knows his stuff, I've bought from him before and he has good prices. If you browse his listings you'll find other cards from the same Nippon Ham Sausage set featuring big name Hall of Famers in similar condition for a fraction of that price.  So its not like its some random guy listing stuff for ridiculous prices or anything.

There are quite a few other examples out there, like this card of Yutaka Enatsu for 100,000 Yen from a dealer who I've also bought from numerous times before (including some of the cards pictured in this post) and has much more reasonable prices on other cards from the set.

The only thing I can think of that would explain these cards being so expensive is that they are known rarities to Japanese collectors.  Engel lists the Osawa as a common, and the Enatsu at what you could call the "medium level star" price, but this doesn't seem to jive with what those and some other cards go for in Japan.

The mystery to me though is how do collectors here know which ones are extremely high value and which ones aren't?  There is no Japanese guide that catalogues these, Engel is the only one out there and his guide doesn't note any difference in rarity or value.  SCM during its day never even tried to tackle this set.  And there is nothing distinctive about the cards themselves either that would indicate they came from a given series or anything (something which the lack of card numbers also complicates).

One possibility that I am toying with is that the cards might have been regionally distributed according to team or possibly league.  If you look at the 35 cards I have you'll notice there is an extreme imbalance.  I have:

32 cards of Central League players

3 cards of Pacific League players (1 Hawks, 2 Orions)

Looking at Engel's checklist guys from teams of the two leagues look roughly evenly represented, yet the number of Pacific League cards in circulation seem to be quite a bit lower than Central League cards.

My collection isn't really big enough to draw any conclusions from of course, but when I look at YJA there is further evidence to support this.  When I do a search for Nippon Ham Sausage cards, then organize the results from highest price to lowest, its really noticable that almost all of the high priced cards from this set (excluding the other Nippon Ham Sausage set from 1977 and the more recent ones) are of players from Pacific League teams (particularly the Fighters and Lions it seems), with only a smattering of Central League players (mostly Sadaharu Oh, whose cards are expensive because hey, he's Sadaharu Oh).  

The Yutaka Enatsu card seems to be the only outlier as it pictures him with the Tigers, but there may be an explanation for that.  Enatsu switched teams to the Hawks while this set was being made and is also featured as a Hawk on other, presumably later, cards in the set, so that card of him with the Tigers was likely short printed.  

I'm not too sure what this means in terms of how the cards were originally distributed (I know they came in paper packs sold with sausages, I have one of the wrappers), but it seems the end result is that most (possibly not all?) cards featuring Pacific League players are harder to find than most (all?) cards of Central League players.  But even that doesn't perfectly explain the evidence, since there are also some cards of Pacfic League players that aren't too expensive out there.  Its still a mystery to me, but something is definitely going on with this set.   

Oh, and OH MY GOD WHAT A GAME!  Yay Ohtani!!

The Emperor is Watching

 

I decided to pull the trigger on one of the most famous Calbee cards from the 1970s this week.

Actually, that isn't quite accurate.  It would be more accurate to say that I put a bid on a card that was way out of my normal budget expecting the bidding to go way higher, and then it didn't and I ended up accidentally winning the card.  

The card is #433 from the 1974 Calbee set and features Shigeo Nagashima at the plate having just connected for what would be a game winning sayonara home run in a game against the Tigers that was played on June 25th, 1959. 

You'll note that Nagashima is oddly framed in the photo, appearing as a little figure at the bottom while most of the photo is taken up by people sitting in the stands at Korakuen Stadium.  

The reason for this is the people sitting in the box seats at the very top of the card.  One of them is the Emperor of Japan.

This is from one of the most famous games in pro Japanese baseball history, the "Tenranshiai" ("Game the Emperor Watched" - my inelegant translation).  Japanese Emperors had previously viewed Sumo tournaments and some amateur sporting events, but had never attended a pro baseball game until that day.  Getting the proverbial imperial seal of approval was a pretty big endorsement for NPB and so everyone has made a huge deal about it ever since over here. The fact that it was actually a good, close game that ended very dramatically with Shigeo Nagashima, in his second season, hitting a sayonara home run contributed to making it a legendary game.  You can see highlights of it on this contemporary news clip.

I'm not a huge fan of royalty but I can still appreciate the importance of the game and Nagashima's home run.  

Of course I have to say that now that I own an expensive card featuring it.  

This card is from the "famous scenes" series in the 1974 Calbee set which is somewhat hard to come by.  Its the only card that commemorates this event (or at least the only vintage card that commemorates it, I would be surprised if BBM hasn't produced a ton of cards based on it over the years) so it is one of those cards that is very highly sought after by Japanese collectors, though probably of a bit less interest to international ones. 

I've been vaguely interested in it for a long time, but because copies usually sell for high prices (over 100$ US usually) I had never put a serious bid on one.  But its also one of those cards that every decent 1970s Calbee collection needs so I've been entering kind of teaser bids on copies over the years which never came close to winning until I ended up unexpectedly winning this one.  Which is cool, its a nice addition to my collection.  

Celebrating my 10th Year of Trying to Finish the 75-76-77 Calbee Set

 

With spring weather having arrived this week and the season just around the corner, I've re-started the engine on a baseball card collection that has lay dormant since November.  The first project I dusted off over the weekend was the 1975-76-77 Calbee set.

I realized as I did so that I've been working on this set for a full decade now, having gotten my first cards for it back in 2013.  At 1472 regular cards its probably the biggest set ever made, and having been originally sold one at a time in bags of chips almost half a century ago they aren't super easy to find.  Thus this has been a decade long collecting project, which is not yet complete.

Doing a bit of stock taking though I realize that I am finally nearing the "home stretch".  I picked up five new cards that I need this week off of Yahoo Auctions, which brings me to a grand total of (drum roll):

1273 cards.

That puts me at 86.5% complete!  Not bad. Just 199 cards to go.  

I've got the set in two binders.  The first binder holds the first 900 cards, the other one everything above that. At some point I'll splurge on a proper second binder, but for now it is sufficient.

Binder #1 is pretty thick:

I love opening the first binder and being greeted by the lovely All Star cards that begin the set.

There are three regional series in the set which are fairly scarce and hard to track down, two issued in the Hiroshima area and one in the Nagoya area.  I've made pretty good progress with the Nagoya ones (pictured below) and am almost finished with one of the Hiroshima ones.

That said, the second Hiroshima regional issue (the "red helmet" series from 609 to 644) seems to be the rarest in the whole set and I'm still less than half of the way to completing it.  This creates an aesthetically displeasing run of pages near the middle of the first binder which still have a lot of empty pockets in them.

Fortunately one of the five cards I picked up this week was from that series, the very last card (644) featuring Sachio Kinugasa which now satisfyingly sits in its place.  It was a bit expensive (5250 Yen), but I decided to treat myself.

Another thing that really stands out in the first binder are the pink bordered series cards, which have clear 1975 Topps influence in their design.  I've got almost all of those now and just need to round up a few stragglers to finish them off.

The last series in the set, from 1400 to 1432, is also pretty hard to find.  I have about 2/3 of them but still need quite a few.  This is the last page of the entire set:

Nothing is more satisfying to me as a collector than the feeling of flipping through pages of cards that you have painstakingly spent an entire decade of your life putting into their little places.

In related news, a complete set of these has recently been listed on Yahoo Auctions, with a starting bid of 980,000 Yen or a BIN price of 1,200,000 Yen (about 8900$ US at today's exchange rate).

This is the second time I've seen a complete set for sale, one sold a little over two years ago for 880,000 Yen.  This is definitely not the same set being re-sold as I know where that previous set ended up (er...not with me, but they buyer, who requested I not disclose his identity, and I had a little back and forth email discussion about it).  Between these two and a third that I read about in an Asahi News article back in 2012 when Calbee was marking its 40th anniversary that makes three complete sets that are known to exist (in addition to one, cough cough, almost complete one).  Not bad, and I think that the price of the above is a pretty decent deal (though as the owner of a near complete set I have an obvious incentive to talk the value of this thing up now, so take what I say with a grain of salt).  

These are the remaining cards that I need to complete my set, hopefully when 2023 comes to a close I'll have whittled this list down a bit further!

40, 44, 45, 47, 58, 61, 63, 67, 72, 83, 106, 113, 124, 190, 193, 196, 203, 209, 213, 271, 311, 312,  (star he no ayumi), 289, 295, 306, 321, 322 (Hiroshima series), 377, 477, 478, 481, 482, 483, 491, 499, 500, 525, 610, 611, 614, 615, 616, 617, 618, 620, 621, 622, 624, 625, 626, 628, 629, 632, 634, 637, 638, 641, 643, 691, 701, 707,  728, 742, 766, 770, 790, 793, 794, 796, 801,803, 805, 807, 811, 815, 824, 827, 828, 829, 830, 833, 838, 840, 843, 847, 848, 850, 852, 855, 872, 894, 920, 923, 933, 936, 938, 939, 942, 943, 945, 946, 950, 951, 954, 955, 958, 959, 961, 963, 974,  1041, 1044, 1056, 1114, 1116, 1117, 1122, 1127, 1130, 1132,1169, 1207,  1293, 1298, 1312, 1320, 1329, 1357, 1359, 1361, 1363, 1365, 1374, 1378, 1379, 1383, 1384, 1388, 1393, 1394, 1396, 1401, 1403, 1404, 1405, 1408, 1414, 1426, 1428, 1430, 1433, 1434

50% Vintage Japanese Beauties, 50% mid-grade 1988 Donruss

 

A very interesting lot is up for auction on Yahoo right now.  Its about 350 cards.  

The good news: roughly half of them are lovely vintage Calbee cards from the 1970s and 1980s.  My favorite kind of baseball card and exactly the sort of thing I like to browse for and bid on.

The bad news: the other half is 1988 Donruss cards.  More specifically, 1988 Donruss cards with dinged corners.

What an odd pairing.  I'm not sure if my desire to own more vintage Calbees outweighs my desire to not own more 1988 Donruss cards (and a slightly stronger desire to not own more 1988 Donruss cards with dinged corners).  

Well, its not really a dilemma as the Donruss would be going straight into the cardboard recycling bin on arrival if I did win this lot, so I'd really just be bidding for whatever I think the Calbees are worth.  I more just find it amusing that lots like this exist with such odd combinations.