Stuff I found at my parent's house 1: The oldest card in my collection.

I just got back from a 3 week trip to Canada (hence the lack of recent posts) to visit family.  It was a great time, its been almost 3 years since my last visit which is way too long.

As always, while at my parent's place I got the chance to rummage through my old stuff that they have in storage (a tradition that will end next year, I've been given a "we don't want to store your crap anymore" ultimatum which I'll be complying with).  This year I made a particular focus on salvaging some stuff from my old baseball card collection that I amassed in the late 80s/ early 90s.  I already thinned it out a few years back by dumping a few monster boxes full of 1989 Donruss commons and the like, but still found a lot, some of which I brought back to Japan with me for the purposes of doing blog posts about them.

I decided to kick off the "stuff I found at my parent's house" series with this 1987 Topps Don Mattingly that would probably get a PSA grade of about negative 3 if they went that far down.  Despite it having no collector value, its one of the most important cards in my collection - its the "oldest" card in my collection in the sense that it was one of the first cards I ever got.

In 1987 I was a 10 year old living in Hutchenhausen West Germany and attending an American school on Ramstein Air Force base nearby.  All the boys in my grade were super into baseball cards that year but I didn't have any and couldn't get any (not a huge hobby in Germany back then...or today I guess).  So I had to acquire them from other kids on the playground who had brought their collections over from the US (being Canadian I didn't collect baseball cards before entering the American system so I didn't have one to bring over with me).  I did this either through bartering other things of value, or outright buying them from other kids by skimping on lunch and using the spare change I saved.  I don't remember which card was the first I ever got, but this 1987 Mattingly was one of them, and along with a 1987 Fleer Dwight Gooden (now lost) it was the centerpiece of my collection (which only had about 40 cards in it in its German peak).

Mattingly was my favorite player and I carried this one with me every day to school that year, which is how it came to have so many creases in it.  This was a bit irrational since at the time I had never even seen him play (we couldn't watch games over there), but everyone else liked him and he appeared in an issue of Boy's Life that I had, so he was my favorite.

So whenever I see this card it reminds me of the playground at Ramstein Elementary School in 1987, which was a pretty fun place to be a kid.

Anyone else fish anything out of their parents' place which brought back memories?

Hideji Kato's Weird half-head Card

One of the cards from my 75-76-77 Calbee set that I've always been struck by is card 646 featuring Hankyu Braves first baseman (and 1975 MVP award winner) Hideji Kato.

Its another one of the 1970s Calbee cards which display photo centering decisions which are very hard to justify. Why is the top half of his head not on this card?  This isn't a miscut or even off centred card, I have 4 copies of this one and his head is cut in half on all of them (also note that the text on the bottom of the card is correctly positioned).

The Calbee sets from the 1970s have photography that blows anything Topps was doing back then away, but there are a few cards like this one where you wonder what was going on at Calbee.  Why didn't they just slide the photo down a bit so they could get all of his head in?  Was it that important to include his feet?  Or was this like an unusually egregious Billy Ripken 1989 Fleer type of deal in which Kato for some reason had an obscenity written on his batting helmet which nobody noticed until they were getting ready to make the cards and they panicked since this was the only photo they had of him and they just made do with what they had?

I don't know, but I do know that I feel very awkward whenever I see this card.

Why isn't this a rookie card?

This is a 1983 Calbee Randy Bass card that I have in my collection.  Its my favorite card of his.  There are a lot of Calbee cards from the 70s and early 80s which have that Pepsi sign, which I think was in Korakuen Stadium, in the background and it provides a kind of striking backdrop to a guy swinging a bat.

This is also his first Japanese card (or at least one of them, he has a few in the 83 set), but its not considered his rookie card.

Sports Card Magazine for some reason explicitly excludes foreign players en masse from having their first card designated as a rookie card.  Only Japanese players are allowed to have rookie cards in Japanese sets.

This rubs me the wrong way.  Of course Bass already had cards from his MLB days but that is besides the point - Japanese players who go to MLB usually have previously issued cards from their NPB days but that doesn't mean that their first MLB cards aren't recognized as rookie cards in the US.  Also, this rule applies even to guys who have never appeared on a MLB card, as is the case with some foreign players who came straight from the minors or other leagues.

I can't tell if this is being driven by some anti-foreign sentiment - an extension of the view that foreign players are just temporary helpers and not really members of whatever team they play for, so they shouldn't have rookie cards either because its not "their" league after all.  Or is it more part of an inferiority complex - a lot of these guys did play for MLB teams so their first card as an NPB player is them taking a step down the career ladder rather than up like most rookies are. So maybe not designating their first card a rookie card is meant to be more an act of deference rather than exclusion.

Either way, I think its a stupid rule and this card perfectly illustrates why.  Randy Bass had a very short MLB career, but was one of the best players in NPB during the 1980s, racking up numerous important records (and famously being shut down in his quest for the big one).  He is literally the central figure in one of the biggest legends in Japanese baseball history (the curse of the Colonel). His career is defined way more by his time in NPB than MLB, yet this rule means he doesn't have an NPB rookie card.  I'm not necessarily saying the question of whether a guy has an NPB rookie card is super important, but to me the only sensible definition of an NPB rookie card is that it be the first regular card of an NPB player, regardless of where they come from.

Price Explosion: 1973 Calbee Edition

 I've noticed recently that prices on vintage (pre 1997) Calbee cards, and those from the 1970s in particular, seem to be selling for a bit more than they used to.  While I'm still getting pretty good deals on stuff, it also seems like I'm getting outbid more than I used to on stuff and am having to up my bidding strategies a bit to stay competetive.

Some cards in particular though seem to be going through the roof in price.  Yesterday an auction for 1973 Calbee card 125 provided a good example of this.  The card features Motoi Mitsuo and Higashida Masayoshi who played for the Lions in Fukuoka.  Neither is a hall of famer, though Motoi could be considered a "Hall of Very Good-er".

The card is one of the harder to find ones in the 1973 set as it was regionally issued only in Kyushu that year.  But the price it went for blew my socks off: 311,000 Yen!  That is about $3,000 US.

As I noted in an earlier post, Japanese collectors in general aren't too fussy about condition and this one isn't in the best, its got some stains on the back:

 And rounded corners too.  Basically its a mid grade card that I would love to have in my collection because its a beautiful card to look at, I love those Lions uniforms from the 70s:

The price though is notable since my copy of Sports Card Magazine from 2010 lists this as a 30,000 Yen card, so it sold for more than 10 times what it was listed for 9 years ago.  It isn't even the most valuable card in the set according to that, there are several which list for higher.  Yet here it is getting 94 bids and being driven up to the price of a used car.

I think 1973 Calbee set collectors have been driving the price of these regional issues through the roof like this, there just aren't enough of them out there to satiate demand.  This is one of the main reasons that, despite my love for the 1973 Calbee set, I've kind of written off the idea of ever being able to put it together, the regional issues have become just way too expensive.  Its also a reason why I'm really in a hurry to finish off my 75-76(-77) Calbee set as soon as I can, its got a lot of regional issues in it too but thus far the prices on them havne't exploded like this!

Don Newcombe the Dragon

Don Newcombe passed away yesterday at 92.  The baseball blogosphere is full of tributes, and I thought I'd just do one here that focuses on a claim to fame that he has which nobody is talking about: he was the first MLB player to play in Japan.

In 1962 he came to Nagoya, the very city I am writing this post in, to play for our Chunichi Dragons.
He wasn't the only former Major Leaguer to come over that season, Hall of Famer Larry Doby also played for the Dragons that year.  But Newcombe made his debut on June 23rd while Doby made his on June 30th, so Newcombe beat him by a week to claim the honor.

On a side note, that really makes Doby the perennial second man.  He was the second African American to play in MLB, the second to manage a team, and also the second MLBer to play in NPB.  The guy always had someone just a bit ahead of him (and Newcombe is the only one of those guys who wasn't named Robinson)!

There is a pretty cool picture of Newcombe with the Dragons here.

Another odd tidbit about Newcombe's time with the Dragons is that he was mainly a position player (splitting time between the outfield and first base) rather than a pitcher like he had been with the Dodgers.  He only appeared in one game as a pitcher during his Japan days and 82 as a position player.  He put up decent numbers for a pitcher, hitting .262 with 12 home runs.  For any other pitcher this would be a really weird way of ending their career, but Newcombe had been one of the best hitting pitchers of his generation.

Anyway, he'll be missed here in Nagoya too!

Rivals: 70s Style

 Another week, another new find in my ongoing quest for the 1975-76 Calbee set.

This week's discovery: its actually the 1975-76-77 Calbee set.

As I mentioned in my overview post on the set, it is numbered from #1 to #1436.  It is pretty well established (according to Sports Card Magazine) that cards #1 to 324 were issued in 1975, which cards from #325 to 1328 were issued in 1976.

But what about those last 108 cards from #1329 to 1436?  Sports Card Magazine doesn't list them at all.  I'm pretty sure that the reasons for that omission is that some or all of those high numbered cards were issued in 1977 rather than 1976, making this a 3 year rather than a two year set.

 I picked up three cards from the very highest series (additional tidbit of information: there were 40 series in this set), cards 1402, 1419 and 1431.  These are pretty interesting and carry the title "77 Central Pacific Rival Player Series".  Each card features a player from a Central League team and a Pacific League Team which have some trait that ties them together.   Card 1402 for example features Hisashi Yamada and Koujiro Ikekawa as the representative "Ace" starting pitchers for each league.  In addition to saying "77" on the front, the card backs present the full stats for the 1976 season, so they must be 1977 issues.  The other two I got are "matchup between the new players with the highest expectations" featuring Yasushi Tao and Masao Tamura (1431) and "Pitchers with the fastest pitches" featuring Takamasa Suzuki and Takashi Yamaguchi (1419).

In my overview post I mentioned that the high number series above cards 1328 are rarer and command a premium, but I think this is partially correct.  It seems it is only the 40th series which commands a premium and not the entire run above 1328.  I'm not sure but it seems to start around card #1400 (need to verify this though).  Not all cards in that 40th series feature two players like these, they are broken up between these ones and another simply titled "76 Star players" which feature lone players.

I'm not sure how rare these are compared to the regional Nagoya and Hiroshima issues, but they seem to be close.  A seller auctioned a bunch of them off last week and I put 1000 Yen bids on a bunch, but only won these three (for nearly that amount), which is almost as much as I paid for the regional issues.

Another interesting bit of info I gleaned from these three cards is found at the bottom of the backs of each:

These are the names of three different Calbee snack products.  The top one is Calbee Kappa Ebisen (a kind of shrimp flavored snack), the second is good old Calbee Potato Chips, and the bottom one is Calbee Sapporo Potatos, which I think is another kind of chips.  The lower series cards in this set don't have these printed on them, so its kind of neat to see, I guess Calbee cards in this series at least (possibly earlier ones as well) were sold with different kinds of Calbee snacks unlike these days where you can only get them with (boring) plain potato chips.  I would much prefer for them to be released like this again, I need more variety in my snack life!

Oh God, What Have I Done?

 Behold!  The entire 1995 Choco Snack/Calbee set!  Complete in all its glory!  Its mine!

Until a couple of days ago I only had one card in this set.  Now I have all of them.

I'm not sure what happened.  With my vintage Calbee sets (with Calbee, 1995 counts as vintage, these are hard to find) I've been pretty much putting them all together the old fashioned way, one card at a time.  This is made easier by the fact that full sets of pre-1998 Calbee sets almost never come up for sale (and when they do the prices are out of my range).

Then I found myself browsing Yahoo Auctions looking for 1995 Tokyo Snack/Calbee singles - the "other" Calbee set from that year - since I'm getting really close to finishing up the first series of that one.

And I noticed at the top of the listings this beauty - the entire 72 card Choco Snack set.  The starting bid was 9800 Yen, which works out to just over 1$ per card.  It has two Ichiros in it which alone are worth about that much.  And, only having one card so far, it was tempting.  So I put a bid in not really expecting to win - the set lists for twice that much in SCM and is pretty hard to find.

Then, as you can probably imagine, I won!  Nobody else put a bid on it!

Finishing this set wasn't even on my radar until I saw this, its a great set that I wanted to work on but was sort of on the backburner while I worked on others.  Now it has leapfrogged to "complete" status, it is the oldest Calbee set that I have complete (though the 1987 is bound to overtake it quite soon, I am only 8 cards short of finishing that one).

 I had some misgivings as I always do when I win something that I thought I had put a bid way too low to win on.  Why didn't anyone else bid on it?  Is something wrong with it?  Do all the Japanese bidders have some kind of radar that allows them to detect red flags that foreigners like myself are oblivious to?

I nervously waited for the package to come in the mail and discovered....everything was OK!  In fact, better than OK, this set is amazing!

The most impressive thing about the set is that every card came still sealed in its original pack.  Unlike other Calbee sets, the cards in this one came packed in transparent packs so you can see the card perfectly without opening them.  Its the only major Calbee set that I know of which was distributed like that.   A fair number of the listings I've seen for cards from this set are for singles still in their original package, which usually command a premium over ones being sold loose.  So finding an entire set still in its packages, while not something I would have necessarily set out to collect in itself, is just a kind of cool bonus.

 The set is crammed with stars.  Hideki Irabu before his tragic American odyssey:

 Shane Mack after his non-tragic one:

 Ichiro in just his second Calbee year (appearing on two cards, both of which are among his best Calbee cards):

 Atsuya Furuta:

 Hideki Matsui (also appearing on two cards):

 And a ton of other hall of famers or stars.

I'm totally ga-ga over this set.

As a bonus the set also included an Atari card, also still in its pack. Send in 8 of these and they'd send you a soccer ball (not so unusual as it sounds for a baseball prize since the Atari marks distributed with Calbee soccer cards that year were interchangeable with these).  Send in 3 and you'd get a card album.  Send in 2 and you'd get a baseball or soccer magazine of your choice.

This set is pretty hard to find, slightly more so that the other Calbee set, Tokyo Snack, of that year.  That is because this was one of the regional issues, only sold in Tokyo and Saitama that year.  Since Tokyo is a pretty big market its probably easier to find that some other 1990s regional issues like the 1994 Hokkaido one which was sold in a much smaller (population wise) region.  Still though, its pretty tough to find, Yahoo Auctcions currently has only 283 listings for all 1995 Calbee products and most of those are for the Tokyo Snack set which, despite its name, was released nationwide and is a bit easier to find.

The final thing worth mentioning about this set is the color of the player names on the front of the cards.  I have what could be called the "base set" since all the player names are written in black.  Calbee issued a parallel set which is identical except the player names are in gold.  The gold ones are said to be a bit harder to find and thus command a premium, usually selling for about double what the black letter versions sell for (a gold letter Ichiro is currently for sale for 10,000 Yen on Yahoo Auctions, not in its original pack.  The black letter version in contrast can be found for 3,000 to 5,000 Yen).  If this had been a gold set I probably would have been outbid by a wide margin on it.  Not being a parallel collector though I don't really care!

Still I'm of mixed feelings about this mainly because between this and my recent 1975-76 Calbee pick ups, I have already blown my entire 2019 budget for cards and we're barely halfway through February now.  Its hard to resist deals when they come around, but buying big ticket items like this radically throws off the pace of my collecting which I generally like to keep a bit more down to Earth.  So I'm left with a "Wow this set is a great pick up" feeling on the one hand and a "Oh god, what have I done" feeling on the other.