Showing posts with label Calbee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Calbee. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 7, 2022

Spurious Correlation? Japanese Potato Production and Calbee Baseball Cards

 



One thing that you sometimes see get mentioned in discussion about the relative scarcity of certain Calbee baseball card sets in Japan is that there was a poor potato harvest in a given year which in turn led Calbee to reduce sales of its baseball cards in that year.  This seems logical since the two are inextricably linked - all Calbee cards have for years only been sold with potato chips, so if there are fewer potatoes to make those chips its not entirely inconceivable that this would result in fewer baseball cards as well.  

This has always intrigued me since it suggests the existence of a potential correlation between two variables - potato and baseball card production - that would be unique to Japan and to the hobby.  And it would add a neat piece of hobby trivia to all the other bits floating around out there.

So I decided to try to statistically prove or disprove the existence of this correlation.

To do so I gathered data on both variables: potatoes and cards.  For data on annual potato production in Japan I consulted the Potato Pro website's Japan page which allows you to search official figures on potato production.  I hand collated the annual data from 1997 to 2013.

For data on Calbee baseball cards I could not locate official figures on annual production from Calbee, so I had to use a proxy.  Yahoo Auctions listings in its baseball card category for Calbee cards are broken down on a year by year basis and may be a useful substitute for official figures in this regard, subject to certain limitations.  Yahoo Auctions is the biggest auction site in Japan, effectively its equivalent to Ebay,  and is one where a large volume of baseball cards are bought and sold. At the time of writing there were 69,997 Calbee cards listed for sale so it represents a relatively large pool of data.  The number of Calbee cards available for sale on Yahoo Auctions in a given year category is not a perfect proxy for the number of cards produced in that year but the numbers are large enough to suggest that differences in the number of cards originally produced would show up as differences in the number available on Yahoo Auctions today.  I thus hand collated the data on the number of listings for cards available each year from 1997 to 2013.

I chose to set the year range from 1997 to 2013 for two reasons.  1997 was chosen as a cut off point since it marked the beginning of the "modern" style of Calbee card, and the availability of cards on Yahoo Auctions is likely to be a better reflection of the number of cards originally produced for cards after that year since the surviving population is less likely to have been affected by events like moms throwing them away, as cards from the 1970s to early 90s were (in Japan the collecting hobby developed a couple of decades later than its American counterpart).  2013 was selected as the upper limit simply because from 2014 onwards Yahoo Auctions stopped breaking listings down by year (for some reason).  One other oddity worth noting is that for the years 2000 and 2001 for reasons that are unclear Yahoo Auctions lumped both years into a single category, so I assigned half to each year in my data. Another limitation to note is that while most of the listings are for single cards, some are for lots, something I haven't taken the time to weed out. 

What do the data tell us?  I tried to present it in the line chart at the top of this post.  The orange line tells you the number of Calbee cards from a given year available on Yahoo Auctions, while the blue line tells you the domestic potato production that year (expressed in 10s of thousands of tons).  

On the card side you can see there is a huge spike in 1999, then a massive drop in 2002 which recovered in 2003 and 2004, since when there has been a general declining trend though marked by fluctuations from year to year.

On the potato side  there has been a decline in potato production between 1997 (3,390,000 tons) and 2013 (2,400,000 tons), though there is a fair bit of fluctuation year on year in there too (less pronounced however).  

When I run a simple linear regression analysis with the baseball cards set as the dependent variable and potato production as the independent, the results suggest there is no significant correlation between the two (R squared = 0.050602).  In other words, potato production has no effect on baseball card availability.

After running that though I realized that there was one factor which I had to adjust for.  In the years 2007 and 2009-2013 Calbee distributed their cards two per bag.  In the other years, they only distributed one per bag.  This would suggest that the "two cards per bag" years were being over-represented in the Yahoo Auctions data since every two cards would represent one bag of potato chips in those years.  To correct for this, I divided the number of Yahoo Auctions listings for those years in half.

Running the same regression using that data, the R-squared jumps to 0.328352.  That is still low - especially given the small sample size involved (just 16 years of data) - and suggests that a lot of other factors which this simple two-variable model isn't capturing are more important than potato production in determining how many Calbee cards get made. But its at least big enough that the relevance of potato production might be a bit more than background noise and could have some effect on Calbee card availability.

From a statistical point of view I haven't exactly put this question to a very rigorous analysis here, but I think it was kind of an interesting exercise.  In terms of its limitations, if you look at the data from individual years its quite easy  to see that potato production isn't always a major determinant of Calbee baseball card production in a given year. 2002 illustrates this point well - as you can see from the chart there was a huge drop in baseball card production that year, but at the same time potato production reached the second highest level in the data set (tied with 1998).  This was an outlier though - 2002 was the year Japan co-hosted the World Cup and the greater interest in soccer that year reduced demand for baseball cards.  For other years its worth noting that a lot of the correlation comes from the period between 2004 and 2013 in which both baseball card availability and potato production slowly declined in tandem.  Its entirely possible that this is pure coincidence and the two have nothing to do with each other. Or not, who knows?  We need more data on other variables to try to untangle this mess.   

Wednesday, May 15, 2019

The Japanese Baseball Card Lawsuit You Never Heard About

Here is an interesting fact you probably didn't know about Japanese baseball cards.

In the mid 2000s a renegade group of NPB stars sued their teams (10 teams in total, all except for the Hawks and Eagles) for allowing Calbee and BBM to use their images on baseball cards (and also for allowing video game makers to use it in their games).  It was the probably the most significant baseball card lawsuit since the major ones in the US in the 1950s and 60s, but nobody has written anything about it in English (or much in Japanese either), so I thought I would remedy that deficiency with this post.

A group of 34 players joined the lawsuit including some of the biggest names in NPB at the time: Koji Uehara, Takahashi Yoshinobu, Shinnosuke Abe, Shinya Miyamoto, Kosuke Fukudome, Daisuke Matsuzaka and Michio Ogasawara were among the named plaintiffs.

The litigation would actually span several years and two courts, the Tokyo District Court (Decision of 1 August 2006 1265 Hanrei Taimuzu 212) and, on appeal, the Intellectual Property High Court (Decision of 25 February 2008 2008WLJPCA02259001) which would both issue lengthy judgments.  In this post I'll focus on the first one issued by the Tokyo District Court in 2006 and perhaps in a future one I'll focus on the 2008 case which was an appeal of the first (spoiler alert: the outcome was the same in both).

The first decision is worth looking at in the context of this blog not so much for the legal doctrines the court applies (which I'll cover nonetheless, but I'll keep it brief) but because they contain a treasure trove of hitherto unknown information, both historical and contemporary, about how the business of baseball cards is carried out in Japan and how the complex relationship that exists between players, teams, the league and the card makers is organized.  It tells us everything from why Calbee photographs are so crappy (hint: Calbee doesn't have any photographers) to why "no logo" sets like recent Donruss and Panini ones have never existed in Japan to how players get paid (if at all) for appearing on cards.

So lets get started.

1. The Basis of the Lawsuit

The lawsuit turned on the player contract that each player signs with their teams.  Though each player signs an individual contract with their team, the terms of their contract are dictated by an NPB Agreement which assures that all players sign the same contract with just their salary and term differing depending on the player.  Article 16 of the standard player contract was mostly copied directly from s. 3(c) of Major League Baseball's Uniform Players Agreement (translated into Japanese of course)  which states:

3.(c) The Player agrees that his picture may be taken for still photographs, motion pictures or television at such times as the Club may designate and agrees that all rights in such pictures shall belong to the Club and may be used by the Club for publicity purposes in any manner it desires. The Player further agrees that during the playing season he will not make public appearances, participate in radio or television programs or permit his picture to be taken or write or sponsor newspaper or magazine articles or sponsor commercial products without the written consent of the Club, which shall not be withheld except in the reasonable interests of the Club or professional baseball.

There are two significant differences in the NPB agreement from the above.  The first is that the NPB agreement adds a clause stating that the teams agree to share any proceeds in an "appropriate amount" they receive from the use of player images with the players.  The second is that the second part of the provision in which the player agrees not to make public appearances, etc without consent of the team is more restrictive on the player in Japan.  The MLB one is limited to "during the playing season", while the NPB one is year-round.  Also the MLB one states that the Club won't withhold consent except when it is in the interests of the Club or MLB, while the NPB one contains no words to that effect which limit the Club's ability to refuse consent.

At the heart of the case was a basic question: Whether or not NPB teams could use this provision to sell player images to card makers.  The provision, after all, only gave them the right to use their images for "publicity purposes" and its not really clear if selling it to baseball card (or video game) makers falls under that.

2. The Facts and What the Case Tells us about Japanese Baseball Card Contracts

Based on the above provision the teams entered into agreements with both Calbee (from 1973) and BBM (from 1991) in which they gave them the rights to use the images of players on their cards.  Neither Calbee nor BBM received individual consent from any of the players directly.  This, it should be noted, is significantly different from MLB practice in two respects.  The First is that NPB is not itself a party to these contracts - the card companies contract directly with the teams (who retain the rights to their logos, unlike the US where the teams do this all through MLB).  Second is that the teams hold the rights to use the images of players rather than the Player's Association which is the case in the US. Despite the fact that the Japanese provision is based on the MLB one, in America it is interpreted narrowly and the provision has never been viewed as giving the teams the right to sell rights to use player images/names to card companies.  Historically in the US players negotiated individually with the card companies until the 1960s (hence the awkward differences in player selection between Topps and Bowman sets in the early 50s) and since the 1960s the Players' Association has negotiated on their behalf.  This means that in Japan, unlike the US, the teams hold all the cards (pardon the pun) and explains why you never see Japanese cards that  feature players but no team logos, like a lot of  sets in the US do since some makers only contract with the Players' Association and not MLB.

The terms of the contracts that the teams negotiated were, interestingly, different for Calbee and BBM.  With Calbee the original agreements they had with some (but not all) teams beginning in 1973 did not actually oblige Calbee to pay anything for the rights. These teams viewed the cards as a way of promoting the team and increasing the popularity of certain players, and thus they made what may have been a rational business decision to literally gave the rights to Calbee for free (which also means that the players received nothing).  The decision also notes that under special agreements Calbee would produce cards of a specific team during pennant races to be distributed exclusively at their stadiums (which I think is a reference to the Chunichi and Hiroshima regional issues, but its not clear) which the teams also gave Calbee the rights to for free.

At various points  Calbee and the teams entered new contracts which moved away from this "free" model and began requiring Calbee pay for rights. The current contracts (at least in 2006) required Calbee to pay each team a set amount based on the number of cards from that team which it produced.  Thus the amount each team receives depends on how many Calbee cards of its players Calbee produces.

 BBM on the other hand never received the right to produce cards for free.  Since it entered the card market in 1991 it has had a standard contract that it enters with each team which, interestingly, only varies according to its length.  For some teams they have 5 year contracts, others 3 year contracts and other still 1 year contracts.

BBM has to pay each team 6% of total sales for the right to produce cards which it is obliged to pay in April, July and December (I believe this is calculated pro-rata per team, not each team getting 6% of all sales, which would take up almost everything).  For "special" sets (its a bit unclear what this means, but I guess this refers to the team sets BBM is always putting out) they have to pay each team a flat rate of 20,000 Yen per card. As with Calbee, the teams distribute the money they receive from BBM according to different methods that they decide on themselves.

The first contract Calbee signed was, of course, with the Giants on 14 November 1972.  The Giants were among the teams that charged Calbee a fee from the beginning and they were (and continue to be) among the more generous teams in terms of how much of the revenue they share with players.  Originally they gave the players 75% of the money received (to all except Shigeo Nagashima, who got more) and kept 25% as their fee for the use of the Giants logo on the cards.  More recently they have bumped the player's cut up to 80%.  Additionally they require the card companies to provide samples of the cards they will produce which the team distributes to players for their approval (ie if a player doesn't like the photo used on a card, they have an opportunity to complain about it before it is released).

The Yakult Swallows on the other hand, didn't enter a contract that required Calbee to pay until 1981 and may not have begun paying players until as recently as 1994 (when Atsuya Furuta, also a plaintiff in the lawsuit, played for them).  They are also a bit stingier than the Giants, only giving players a 70% cut of the money they receive from Calbee, and evenly splitting the money the receive from BBM. They don't seem to provide players with the ability to preview cards either.

The Baystars are an interesting example.  They have contracted with Calbee since 1973 and received money from Calbee, but until 2004 they didn't pass any of it on to their players.  Instead each year they paid them....in cards!  Players were entitled to 30 copies of whatever card they appeared on as compensation (excluding limited number ones), which from the perspective of wealthy ballplayers must have been a joke. After 2004 they started sharing actual cash with their players, but on an extremely stingy basis - only passing on 20% of their take.  The Baystars also require Calbee to use photos taken by the Baystars own cameraman (who mainly takes pictures for the team's own magazine).  This is another interesting point that comes out in the decision - Calbee (and BBM) are at the mercy of the teams in terms of choosing cameramen.  For some they have to use the team's own cameraman or a cameraman employed by a company related to the team, for others they use newspaper cameramen.  They don't actually employ their own photographers, which may explain the crap photo selection in recent years!

The other teams had policies that fell in between these, with some paying a flat fee instead of a percentage and varying in some other details that aren't worth reciting in full here.

As an aside, an interesting historical nugget that the decision provides is that the Court reviews the practice before the Players agreement came into effect in 1951.  Prior to that the teams and NPB (or its predecessor organization) obtained permission from the players directly in order to give the rights to produce:

Between 1946 and 1950 Bromides featuring Takehiko Besho and other Giants players;
In 1948 a Gensokupan Insatsu Sha Karuta set featuring Michinori Tsuboichi and 44 other players;
Between 1948 and 1950 a Menko set featuring Takahiko Besho and other players.

Anyway, back to the lawsuit at hand.

3. The Player's Arguments and the Court's Decision

The players who launched the lawsuit were dissatisfied with this state of affairs and specifically the fact that Art. 16 of the players' agreements was interpreted by the teams as giving the teams the right to contract with card makers to sell their images on the one hand while also preventing the players from individually doing that on their own.  They advanced three main legal arguments against the practice.

The first centred around the definition of "for publicity purposes" contained in Art. 16.  The players argued that selling their images to baseball card makers (and video game makers) went beyond "publicity purposes" and was a purely commercial use of their image.  They drew a specific analogy with how the identical term in the MLB player agreement was not viewed in the US as giving the teams the ability to do so and argued it should be interpreted narrowly.  They also drew similar comparisons with J-League Soccer and Korean Baseball.

The second argument they made was that the provision, by completely denying them the right to their own image, was grossly unfair and unreasonable and thus ran counter to public policy.  This was based on Art. 90 of the Civil Code which states that "a juristic act which is against public policy is void" - a general catch-all provision that Japanese courts sometimes rely on to void contractual provisions which are unreasonable.

Finally they put forward an argument based on Article 19 of the Anti-Monopoly Act, which bars unfair trade practices (basically arguing that it was a vertical contract that, by preventing them from selling their image on their own, was an unfair restraint on trade).

Unfortunately for the players the Court ruled against them on all three of their arguments.  With respect to the first, the Court noted the different business models of Japanese teams and their histories and held that the narrow interpretation of "for publicity purposes" used elsewhere was innapropriate in the Japanese context.  Thus the phrase was interpreted broadly enough to allow teams to sell player images to card makers.

The second argument was also rejected based largely on a broader analysis of the player's contractual situation.  Citing among other things the high salaries players were earning since the introduction of free agency, and the fact that teams shared the revenue with players and that the system was reasonable within the broader business model employed by teams, it refused to find the practice to be unreasonable or unfair to the extent necessary to be counter to public policy.

Finally on the Anti-Monopoly Act argument they lost mostly on a technicality - they were not considered "enterprises" and thus couldn't fit themselves within the rule in the Act they were relying on.

4. Conclusion

Court documents and judicial decisions are a pretty useful way of finding information that otherwise isn't publicly available, since the parties to a lawsuit have to produce evidence they normally wouldn't present publicly.  I could probably write a dozen post exploring the significance of individual bits of trivia the case reveals to peculiar aspects of the hobby (and I may yet do so).  But for now its worth recalling that the decision contains a lot of interesting information about the contractual relationships between the main actors in the production of baseball cards in Japan: the players, the teams, the League and the card makers.

In contrast to the United States, we learn that players in Japan are in a really weak position with respect to the use of their images on cards (and anything else for that matter).  The ability to license player images has been a huge source of income for the MLB Players Association since the 1960s and helps to explain why it became such a powerful organization after that decade, which probably played a role in introducing free agency and turning journeymen middle infielders into multimillionaires.  In Japan, the player's union has no such source of independent finance and remains extremely weak, as do the players in general.

We also learn, interestingly, that what a player makes from his appearance on a card is highly dependent on what team he plays for (or at  least it was at the time of this decision).  Giants players were given wads of cash while Baystars players got paid in their own cards.

Whether this is a good system, and whether the outcome of the decision is beneficial, is another question altogether and would really require a consideration of a bunch of stuff outside the baseball card hobby.  Having teams themselves being the locus of all contractual negotiations might bring some benefits (it prevents the division of rights in the US that leads to no-logo sets) for example but also its drawbacks (the teams might benefit from giving the rights to the League, which would be in a stronger position to bargain with card makers.  Probably the Giants stand in the way of this).

Anyway, I'll try to do a post about the follow up appeal case at the Intellectual Property High Court at some point.  That might take a while.  The decision I reviewed here was 64 pages long, while the appeal decision was 123 and it takes a lot of time for me to plug through these things in Japanese!


Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Sports Market Report does Japanese Baseball Cards


As Dave over at Japanese Baseball Cards recently posted, the current Sports Market Report (PSA's magazine) is almost entirely devoted to Japanese cards, which is really cool to see.  Kevin Glew wrote most of the articles and interviewed me (and some other much more established people in the hobby, including Dave) for this one that is mainly about Calbee cards which has a few quotes of mine sprinkled in it.

Its great to see the Japanese card hobby getting this kind of exposure and the articles do a good job of outlining the basics of the hobby and comparing it to that in the US.  There is also a great article by Mark Holt about the 1967 Kabaya Leaf set which had a lot of tidbits of information I didn't know about it (I have 2 cards from the set, so pretty early in putting that one together).

As a Calbee collector I have my biases which I've elaborated on here before.  I wonder if this might spur some mutual recognition between PSA and Calbee collectors.  Their Population Reports indicate that almost nobody gets Calbee cards graded - the iconic 1973 set which is mentioned in the article for example has only had 46 cards graded according to their listing, and they only identify cards which have been graded so they don't even seem to have a complete checklist of the set (other sets are similar, the only exception seeming to be some Ichiro and Nomo Calbees from the early 90s for obvious reasons).  I'm not a collector of graded cards, but I do use PSAs website as a useful resource and it would be nice to see the Japanese side tidied up a bit!




Wednesday, March 28, 2018

2018 Calbee are here!

 The first series of 2018 Calbee cards hit store shelves the other day and I picked up my first 88 Yen bag of them at my local grocery store yesterday!

I love the "first bag of Calbee Yakyu chips" day, each year its timing roughly coincides with the start of spring, the cherry blossom season, 20 degree days, the end of the Spring Grand Sumo Tournament (Kakuryu won) and of course opening day.

In a shocking and unexpected twist both the bags of chips and the cards themselves look basically exactly the same as they have every year since I bought my first bag 18 years ago!

Well, there is one cool change that I like, they brought back having the player's name written in Japanese script on the card fronts!  They did that with the 2016 set too and I was super excited about it at the time, but then the 2017 set reverted to having the names in Roman letters, which I didn't really like.  Maybe they are going to do this with even numbered years from now on or something?  I'm not sure why they've been flip flopping but I'm happy to see that element of the design back for this year regardless.

Anyway, my first bag netted me a checklist C-1 featuring the Hawks celebrating their championship (which reminds me how much I miss living in Fukuoka) and the regular card of the Baystars' Joe Willard (54)..  

The card backs are pretty much the same as they ever were:


So that is one event in the 2018 calender ticked off.  I'll probably try to find a cheap starter set on Yahoo Auctions and work from there on completing this years', its a lot cheaper and involves way less crumbs than doing it bag by bag (though I'll pick up a few more here and there as the season progresses!)




Thursday, July 14, 2016

Beautiful Cards: 1975 Calbee #714 Kaimaku Series with Shigeo Nagashima getting flowers


I`ve had a big stack of recently acquired 1970s Calbee cards sitting next to my computer/scanner this week so the temptation to do posts about one of them each day has been too great to pass up.  Today`s subject is the above beauty, mainly focused on Giant`s manager Shigeo Nagashima.

The picture in the card was taken on April 5th, 1975 before the opening day (kaimaku) game at Korakuen Stadium between the Giants and Taiyo Whales (whose manager Akiyama can kind of be seen behind Nagashima). Needless to say, as with the Oh card I wrote about yesterday the main subject (Nagashima) is less interesting than the rest of the stuff in the photo, particularly the two women in kimono.

They are presenting the two managers with bouquets of flowers just before the game, which is something that happens a lot in Japanese baseball games (not necessarily always flowers, but some sort of ceremonial gift).  I did get to learn the Japanese term for that from the title on the back of this card (花束贈呈 - bouquet presentation).

Its interesting that the two women presenting the flowers, who totally steal the show on this card, aren`t named or even referred to on the back text.  I wonder if they are even aware that they were featured on it, and that forty years later a foreigner would pick it up, find their images interesting, and write a blog entry about it.  Probably not.  Interesting how life works out sometimes.

The card`s provenance is a bit confusing, since there are actually two seperate Calbee sets from 1975.  This card is from what might more accurately be called the 1974-75 Calbee set since numbers 1 to 504 were issued in 1974 while numbers 505 to 935 were issued in 1975 (this one is #714).  Then after that they began another set starting from card #1, which continued into 1976 and forms the massive 1975-76 set of over 1400 cards.  The two are distinguishable mainly on the back, the 1975-76 set having a border made up of stars and baseballs, while the 1974-75 set to which this one belongs has no border.

Anyway, its kind of a cool card, depicting a scene that is rarely featured on baseball cards.



Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Beautiful cards: 1973 Calbee #10 Sadaharu Oh


I certainly have been posting a lot this month, for some reason I have re-caught the collector`s bug and have been adding a lot of new cards to my vintage Calbee collection.

The above card is one of them, which just arrived in the mail yesterday (its a Yahoo Auction purchase).  It is card #10 from the inaugural 1973 Calbee set and features Sadaharu Oh.

I like this card a lot, that picture is just really cool.   Recently NPB Guy picked up the iconic #1 card from this set featuring Shigeo Nagashima   and I think this can be considered a pretty good companion to that one (which I don`t yet have) - since it is sort of the first Calbee card of the other member of the ON combo.

 The picture was taken on a different day from the Nagashima picture, since Oh is wearing a home uniform in his while Nagashima has an away uniform on in his, but both appear to have been taken at a spring training facility.

What I mainly love about the card is all the clutter in the background. The big pile of bats scattered around in the lower left of the card are a nice touch.  And its really interesting to see just how primitive NPB spring training facilities were 40 years ago, the fans are basically just sitting on concrete steps with no grandstand, roof or even a fence separating them from the playing field.  The little metal tower rising from behind Oh`s head has a loudspeaker perched atop it and also appears to be holding up a backstop net to prevent foul balls from hitting the spectators.  Other than that, its basically just a really basic concrete shell.

And Oh`s pose is kind of a classic in a similar manner to the one in Nagashima`s - its obviously posed, but its distinguished enough from the typical posed shot to give it its own flavor.

The back of the card is titled "Oh: The player`s journey" and provides a chronological list of career highlights, beginning with his NPB debut batting seventh in a game in 1959 to hitting his 500th home run in 1972.

As you can see from the scan my copy of it is pretty beat up - the corners are heavily rounded but fortunately it doesn`t have any creases so the picture looks great (and the rounded corners provide a kind of interesting frame to it, reminding you that some kid in the 1970s probably carried this card around a lot).







Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Calbee Cards on Ebay: 1975-76 Calbee Sadaharu Oh

Every once in a while I go on Ebay to see what Calbee cards are listed, mainly just out of curiosity since the prices are usually more than what I can get cards for here in Japan.

Everytime I do, the above card of Sadaharu Oh is usually near the top of the list that Ebay displays and has been for years.  The current asking price is $280 US, which is on sale from its usual price of $350.  The seller has 100% feedback and seems to have been an Ebay seller for a very long time with a lot of satisfied customers.  But there are a few things that kind of bother me about this listing.

For starters, this isn`t a particularly rare card.  The listing prominently notes that it has a PSA population of only 2, but that statistic is meaningless since almost nobody ever gets Japanese cards graded (there are only a handful of Calbees from the 1970s even listed on the PSA registry).  I have a copy of the exact same card in roughly the same condition which I think I paid  about 400 Yen ($4) for a few years ago, which I think is close to the market price.  While the 1975-76 Calbee set is a bit hard to find cards for, the pink bordered series which this Oh card belongs to isn`t one of the short printed ones and can be tracked down without too much difficulty.  Even giving a bit of leeway for the fact that I may have gotten a good deal on mine and that this copy is graded, offered by an Ebay seller who needs to pay fees and had to import it from Japan I don`t see how this gets to be anywhere near a $280 card.

There seems to be an interesting disconnect in baseball card hobby logic that might be at work here.  In the US the most valuable cards from any vintage set from the 1970s are always the big name hall of famers, particularly if it is a rookie card.  In Japan though there is this odd thing which I think actually makes the cards of hall of famers worth less than those of common players (at least sometimes).  Since Calbee in the 1970s was in the habit of stuffing each set with multiple cards of star players like Oh (and Harimoto, Nagashima (manager), Kinugasa, Yamamoto, etc) its actually way easier to get a card of Oh than it is for some journeyman middle infielder who played for a less popular team in the Pacific League, who might have only had one card issued in his entire career.  So demand for that one guy`s card might actually be more than it is for some random Oh card from the same set.  With the exception of short printed cards of common players, I don`t think this same dynamic ever really existed in the US, so taking a fairly common card of Oh and asking a ton of money for it kind of makes sense by US vintage collecting logic, but not by Japanese vintage collecting logic.

Anyway, I`m not accusing the seller of doing anything wrong here, though I do think the card is overpriced.  My point is more just that I think it provides an interesting example of how applying the logic of the American card market (placing importance on PSA population reports and big name stars) produces strange results when applied to Japanese cards.

And one more thing I want to mention about this card: PSA lists it as a 1975 Calbee, but the pink border cards in this set were actually released in 1976.  As I`ve mentioned before, PSA doesn`t seem to know much about Japanese baseball cards. 






Tuesday, March 22, 2016

2016 Calbee Cards are Here! And they have Kanji on them!!!!!


I was at the convenience store this morning and much to my surprise saw that they had a pile of bags of Calbee chips on sale.  They seem to have released them much earlier than normal this year, usually I don't see them until the first week of April. So naturally I bought a bag even though I wasn't specifically in the store to buy chips.

From my first bag I can tell you that there are some significant changes this year.  Well, "significant" is a relative term, for a set that has hardly changed at all in about 18 years almost any change counts as significant.

First, the bags look different than they have in past years.  The elements of the design are similar, but they are horizontally rather than vertically oriented as they have been ever since I started collecting Calbees.  Also, the card is attached to the front of the bag rather than the back, something that I have also never seen before.

The most significant change though is on the front of the cards.  Last year I wrote a post on here lamenting the demise of the use of kanji on the front of Japanese baseball cards.  

While I sincerely doubt that anybody at Calbee reads an English language blog that averages about 15 page views a day, they nonetheless seem to have somehow received my message because this year the player's names on the regular cards are written exclusively in kanji and they are fantastic!!

This is actually a really radical departure for the set, other than the company name "Calbee" and the team logo there is no English text anywhere on the cards, including the backs.  This is the first time since 1989 that Calbee cards haven't at least had the player's name written in English somewhere on the card to make them more accessible to foreign collectors and I wonder if this represents Calbee's abandonment of its attempts to woo those collectors.

I personally welcome the change.  As I wrote in my post last year, having the player names written in kanji really distinguishes these cards as a "Japanese" baseball card set rather than a more generic set geared towards an international market.  While it does make collecting them a bit more of a challenge, that very challenge in my opinion is what makes collecting them interesting in the first place.

So anyway, this has me really excited about collecting this year's set.  As the above photo indicates I now have the cards of Yasuhiro Ogawa and Ginji.  I'll have to look up the checklist to figure out how many more I have to go.....



Sunday, May 31, 2015

Calbee Baseball Chips in the Wild

 When I look around baseball card websites, blogs and magazines I see a lot of pictures of baseball cards.  Pretty much any baseball card out there you can see a picture of it in an instant.

What there are a lot fewer photos of out there are baseball cards in their everday context, particularly in the time at which they were issued. I can see a picture of any 1952 Topps card, for example, but it is almost impossible to find pictures of shops in 1952 with wax packs of Topps cards available for sale.

This latter thing is much more interesting from a historical point of view but for some reason nobody ever thinks to actually take pictures like that and post them.  I`d be really interested to see what a counter display with 1952 Topps packs would have looked like back in the day. We can easily find out what the packs and boxes looked like, but what did the rest of the shelf look like?  What kind of products were being sold next to them?  Candy and the like?  Or toys?  I`m sure for people old enough to remember buying packs of 1952 Topps cards (like my dad) this sort of thing seems second nature, but for the rest of us its a bit of a mystery.  Heck, you don`t even need to go back to 1952, try finding pictures of interiors of baseball card stores from the 1980s and there aren`t that many of those on the internet either.
 Anyway, I thought I`d do my own extremely small part to alleviate this lacunae in internet image search engines by putting up some pictures of this year`s Calbee cards as they appear in shops near my place in Nagoya, for posterity`s sake. 

As you can see, they generally get put on shelves with potato chips and other snacks on them. If you live in Japan this probably seems ridiculously obvious, but I suppose for any collectors out there who have never been here this might be at least a bit interesting.  The top photo here is from a supermarket (AEON), while the lower two are from convenience stores.  They all charge 98 Yen per bag, plus tax.  The bottom photo is my favorite display, not only are the bags sold on the candy shelf rather than the chips shelf (some convenience stores do that, others don`t, I am not sure why), but they also have a cool hand-written sign for them.  Its kind of a nice touch.



Friday, April 17, 2015

Fun Stuff: A big pile of 1985 Calbees


Among my favorite recent purchases has been a stack of 52 cards from the 1985 Calbee set.  This is one set I only had a handful of cards for so I figured this would be a good way to get a start on building the whole thing.

The lot had some beauties in it, like this card with an excellent in action photo of the Iron Man Sachio Kinugasa:

Or Randy Bass in those awesome 80s Tigers uniforms with the white helmets:


What surprised me most on receiving these cards (they were a Yahoo Auction purchase) was the condition.  Every one of them looked brand new like they had just come from the bag.  This almost never happens with Calbee cards from before the mid-1990s, especially not in big lots.  I had bought them assuming they were the typical somewhat beat up lot that usually appears (the photos were a bit out of focus and the seller, who doesn't specialize in cards, didn't mention the condition int he description).

This is what the stack (left) looks like in comparison to a typical stack of 80s Calbee cards in my collection (right):

One thing I really like about the 1985 set which sets it apart from others is that a lot of the cards have hand drawn artwork of the players that was sent in by kids on  them.  These were winners of a contest to draw the best picture of each player and I think it is absolutely fantastic that Calbee did that.  Not only are the color drawings a big improvement on the normally bland card backs of their typical 1980s sets, it is also quite endearing that they would do that.  Its something it would be hard to imagine a card company doing today.

Saturday, April 11, 2015

The New Holy Grail of my Collection: 1974 Calbee Frank Howard

With the new season underway my enthusiasm for collecting has been taken to a higher level, buoyed in part no doubt by how well the Dragons have been doing so far.

I have made quite a few acquisitions over the past couple of weeks, mostly Calbee cards from the 1970s, and I hope I`ll have the time to do a few posts about them (I have a 6 month old son bouncing on my knee as I try to type this so spare time for blogging is in short supply these days).

Today`s haul was the above card - Frank Howard`s 1974 Calbee #70!


This is by far the most valuable Japanese card in my collection.  Or perhaps I should say it is by far the card I have paid the most for, I`m not sure which card I own is the most `valuable` which is something hard to measure when there are so few sales out there to go on.

Anyway, NPB Card Guy did a post about Howard`s two cards from the 1974 set which is partially what got me interested in tracking one down.  1974 Calbee is one of the harder to find sets out there and it is the only one with Frank`s cards in it.  The other Howard card,#127, is the more valuable of the two and way out of my price range but this one, which Engel values at $300, was a bit more do-able.

My copy isn`t in the best of shape, which is why I was able to afford it.  I picked it up off of Yahoo Auction for about 3500 yen including shipping.  The front looks presentable but there is a heavy crease in it which you can notice on the back (which also has some tape remnants on it), which explains why I got it that cheap.  I`m not overly fussed about the condition of cards so long as the fronts look OK, so this was perfect for me.

Howard is of course one of the most famous major leaguers to ever play in NPB, having had an all star career in which he hit 382 homers.  In contrast, he may have the worst career numbers of any player in NPB history, having exactly one at-bat for the Lions in 1974 in which he struck out.  He injured himself while doing so and ended up retiring shortly thereafter.

Friday, April 3, 2015

2015 Calbees are here! And the set seems to consist of 2 cards.

Spring is here, the season has begun and the Dragons just swept a series against the Giants.  I am a happy camper.

And with the new season has come the annual ritual of visiting multiple convenience stores trying to get that first sighting of this year`s Calbee cards.  After taking in a few I finally found a 7-11 which had them last week at lunch so I bought a bag and brought it back to my desk at work.  I got Yamazaki and Higa.

The next day I bought another bag.  I got Yamazaki and Higa.

I wonder what the odds of this happening are. Probably pretty slim.  If only I had placed a bet on this happening beforehand, I could probably retire off the winnings.

Anyway, except for getting the exact same pack, which I assume is related to the way Calbee packs these (though it has never happened before to me), I kind of like the new set.  They made a slight change to the design this year, the player`s name is in a larger font and in black lettering with a thin white border.  While by no means a major change, it actually does give the cards a somewhat bolder look than previous sets with the solid white lettering, so I give them high marks for it. 

So I am looking forward to pack #3 and hoping it will have somebody - anybody - other than Yamazaki and Higa (though Ido  love the photograph on Yamazaki`s card).



Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Some Thoughts on the Unfortunate Demise of Kanji on the Front of Japanese Baseball Cards


The first time I ever visited a baseball card store in Japan was in 2002.  It was a shop in Himeji which has long since gone out of business.  I didn`t know much about Japanese cards at the time and I remember going over to have a peak in the glass case where they had all their valuable single cards on display.  In addition to the usual suspects – 1993 BBM Ichiro and the like – they had a fair number of older Calbee cards from the 1970s of players like Nagashima and Oh in there.  It was the first time I had ever seen older Japanese cards.  In my eye the thing that set them apart the most from contemporary cards wasn`t their smaller size or the lack of glossy foil borders.  It was the use of kanji on the fronts of the cards to indicate the player`s name and team.

This I found to be immensely appealing.  This was something that no American card ever had.  It harkened back to a pre-globalization era when countries actually mattered and products were designed for local tastes rather than for generic international markets.  The kanji on the fronts of the cards just screamed “These are Japanese cards intended for Japanese people who happen to like baseball. Nothing more, nothing less.”

I loved them.

I long wondered why Japanese card companies abandoned that practice and started using the Roman alphabet to display information on the front of the card.  Today pretty much all sets with a few exceptions like the odd Calbee Star Card subset don’t have kanji anywhere on the front of the card (the card backs, of course, are still written in Japanese).  If we look back at the development of cards year by year, it is easy to spot an exact point at which this transition happened – 1990.  The 1990 Calbee set started pretty much like any other that had preceded it – the first series was mini-card sized and featured the names on the front written in Japanese.  Then suddenly BLAMMO!  Series 2 comes out and not only are the cards much bigger in size, but the player names are now displayed in alphabetical form on the front.  A few months later the 1991 BBM set was released, also with alphabetized names on the front, and kanji card fronts basically died out.

If you haven’t read this excellent post on Japanese Baseball Cards about Larry Fuhrmann and the development of that first BBM set, I highly recommend doing so. In part I suggest it because it is an engaging and thoroughly well-researched article, but I also do so because it sheds some light on this very question that I have long grappled with.  Apparently the idea of using the Roman alphabet originated with Furhmann, who suggested that Calbee put player names in roman letters on the backs of the 1989 Calbee cards as a way of making the cards appeal not only to Japanese collectors but also to American ones.  His relationship with Calbee ultimately went sour, but the timing of the radical changes to the design of Calbee cards which occurred midway through the 1990 run, which seemed to presage many of the features of the 1991 BBM set that Fuhrmann had a big role in creating (larger cards, alphabetized names on front) seem likely to have been a result of his contact with Calbee (though the article does not explicitly state this).

Aside from this rather intriguing question, I find the abandonment of kanji on Japanese cards to be a bit of a lamentable development even when viewed from the standpoint of a foreign collector.  From a functional point of view, it is fair to say, having the names in alphabetical form makes them much more accessible and easy to read.  Kanji are hard to learn, especially those used in first names, which are often quite obscure.   From an aesthetic point of view, though, removing kanji from the fronts of Japanese baseball cards really robs them of their most appealing quality when seen through foreign eyes: their exotic nature. The kanji tell us something in addition to just the player`s name – they tell us that NPB isn’t just an independent minor league. Rather it is the Japanese league which is embedded within a completely different culture that uses a completely different form of writing to express itself.  Hey, isn’t that neat?  It kind of has the same appeal that the Dude’s T-shirt of Kaoru Betto in the Big Lebowski does:
That t-shirt would have been way less cool without those kanji.

Its not just the aesthetics though. Collecting cards where all the information is written in another language adds another challenge to collecting, which is kind of unique.  It forces the collector to actually learn something about the cards which they don`t have to with American cards - how to read basic stuff.  I have learned a lot of baseball related kanji, including a lot of player names, from having to read the info on their cards.  Having the basic stuff written in English feels like its adding a shortcut - dumbing down the challenge and enjoyment of collecting Japanese cards.It just sort of feels....wrong to me for some reason.
Post 1990 cards just don`t have the same kind of appeal that earlier ones do and I think a lot of that is attributable to this change.  They are incapable of impressing the way those 1970s Calbees did to me back in 2002.    They look just a bit blander and a bit too generic without those lovely kanji on them.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

1991 Calbee Hideo Nomo and Some Others

 I made another Yahoo Auction purchase the other day.  It was a bit of a splurge item, a large lot of 55 1991 Calbee cards, along with an album.

I only had a couple of 1991 Calbees before getting these so I guess this can be added to my list of Calbee sets that I am working on.  The 91 set is pretty cool, its design is simple and looks the same as the higher number cards from the 1990 set.  Among the highlghts are this card of current Chunichi Dragons catcher/manager Motonobu Tanishige back in his younger days:
 Of course the main highlight of the 1991 set are the rookie cards of Hideo Nomo.  I think there are 4 cards of Nomo in the 1991 set and this lot contained three of them, which was pretty awesome (though one did have a dinged corner, the only card with any damage out of the whole lot!)

55 cards still leaves me pretty far from a complete set so this will be another work in progress probably for another 20 or 30 years!




Sunday, December 21, 2014

2002 Calbee: Tough Set, Nearing Completeion

 I picked up a large lot of about 500 Calbee cards on Yahoo Auction last week.  It was a mixed lot and I didn`t know what cards would be in it until they arrived (the photos were pretty grainy and the seller`s description was pretty vague). I kind of like buying cards that way, it builds anticipation in me that is similar to opening a wax pack.  Sometimes you get screwed with a bunch of damaged cards, but sometimes it pays off.

This one actually did pay off.  There was a pretty wide selection of cards, including about a dozen from the 1975-76 Calbee set which were alone probably worth almost as much as I paid for the whole lot.  The thing that got me most excited though was that about 100 of them were 2002 Calbees. 

I think the 2002 Calbee set is probably the most difficult to find out of the post-1998 Calbee sets.  Word on the street has it that the reason for this is Japan`s co-hosting of the World Cup that year with Korea, which diverted everyone`s attention away from baseball.  This resulted in Calbee printing way fewer baseball cards (and presumably way more soccer cards) that year, making the 2002 Calbees harder to find than most.

This story generally squares with my own experience in buying these lots, which almost never include any 2002 Calbee cards (the 1999 and 2000 sets on the other hand are usually over-represented, making me think they were printed in greater quantities.  Those were Ichiro`s last 2 years in Japan, which makes me wonder if his popularity transferred into greater baseball chip sales in those years, followed by a steep decline after his departure in 2001).

As somebody actively trying to complete most Calbee sets, my 2002 set up until now had been way less developed than any other set of the past 16 years, with only a few dozen cards mostly from the regular set.  With the additions from this big lot, I now suddenly find myself about 75% of the way to a complete regular set and well on my way with most of the subsets too.

The design of these cards is slightly different from most Calbee sets in that it has a 30th anniversary logo on the front, but otherwise they are about the same.  I think this must have been Hideki Matsui`s last Calbee baseball card before singing with the Yankees.
 The lot even included an un-used Challenge card from that year.  The 2002 set had a pretty sucky prize system, you had to collect and mail in two of these, which didn`t actually guarantee you a prize, but just put you in a draw for one of 3000 card binders they were giving out.  I much prefer it when Calbee gives special card sets as prizes rather than these stupid binders that don`t even have enough space for the whole set and generally look terrible (at least the recent ones).
 To commemorate the 30th anniverary of their baseball cards they issued a special memorial card subset whcih featured reprints of various cards from previous years.  I now have almost all of this set.  I have to say it is really really poorly designed, with just horrible looking beige or grey borders and a very uninspiring `Memorial Card` band along the bottom.  Do they really need to tell us in such big letters that this is, in fact, a memorial card?  Also I think the use of the word "memorial" is a bit misplaced, it sounds like the set is dedicated to players who have died in the past year or something.  Anyway, they did something similar in the 2012 set when they commemorated the 40th anniversary with reprints of cards from previous sets, but the subset from that year was much better, dispensing with the borders and just making a straight-up reprint of the cards. 
Anyway, thats my 2002 Calbee set so far, I`m down to about 30 cards for the regular set which I need. 

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Collecting 1984 Calbee

 As I mentioned in my previous post, 1984 Calbee has recently officially entered my list of vintage sets that I am trying to complete.

This was spurred by a Yahoo Auction purchase I made last week of a lot of 59 cards from the set.  I added these to the 60 cards I already had (in a piece of incredible luck the new cards were almost all ones I needed), meaning that I now have over 100 different cards.
 This is the third vintage Calbee set that I am actively trying to complete, with the 1987 Calbee (about 3/4 complete now) and the 1990 Calbee low numbers (about 1/2 complete) being the others.

The big difference between the 1984 set and the 1987 and 1990 ones is the difficulty of putting them together.  The latter are among the more do-able of the pre-1998 rare Calbee sets to complete, while the 1984 set is among the hardest.  The sheer size of the set - 715 cards - is daunting (the 1987 set has about half that and the 1990 low number series only 55).  Among these are a number of series which were only released regionally in limited quantities (detailed here) which account for about one quarter of the total and are incredibly expensive.  I don`t have any of those and might content myself with tracking down the easier to find ones first and, if I become independently wealthy in the future, might work on the rare block ones then.

There are some pretty cool cards in the set, which has a distinctive look to it.  I love this Reggie Smith with his hair overflowing from under that batting helmet.
 The final cards in the set are season highlights.  This one commemorates Koji Yamamoto`s 2,000th career hit.
I`ll be curious to see how far I get with this.  Where as the 1987 and 1990 sets I think I have realistic shots at completing within the next couple of years, the 1984 one might be more of a pipe dream.  Still though, I like this set quite a bit and hope I at least make the halfway mark or so.

Monday, October 20, 2014

In the Mail this Week: 1995 Calbee Tokyo Snack Cards

 I got a small pile of 1995 Tokyo Snack cards in the mail yesterday.  These are an interesting set.  Tokyo Snack is actually a subsidiary of Calbee, which for a couple of years in the mid-90s was given the role of baseball card producer in the conglomerate.  If you want to split hairs you could make the argument that in 1995 and 1996 there weren`t any Calbee sets, since both of them came with the Tokyo Snack brand, which is the maker name printed on the back of the cards:
But since Tokyo Snack is a wholy-owned subsidiary of Calbee, I think collectors are correct to regard this as a Calbee set in all but name only.  As such it fits into an interesting period in Calbee card development.  The 1990s are actually an odd decade for Calbee.  In the 1970s all their sets (except for part of the 75-76 set with the pink borders) had a standard form - full bleed photo with the player name and team written in small letters on the front.  In the 1980s they reduced the size of the cards but, except for part of the 1984 set with the little hats on it, kept the same design pretty consistently throughout.  In the 2000s and 2010s, they have pretty much had the exact same design throughout with only minor modifications from year to year.

In other words, in each decade Calbee had one basic design philosphy and applied it almost uniformly to every set year after year. Except the 1990s.

If you look at Calbee sets from year to year in the 1990s you`ll notice that it is the only decade in which the design of the cards changed, sometimes radically, from year to year.  This gives Calbee cards from the 1990s a degree of uniqueness not found in other decades.

It is kind of interesting to speculate why this was so.  My guess would be that the introduction of serious competition from BBM from 1991 forced Calbee to respond and they experimented with a series of design changes in a trial and error process.  In 1998 they seem to have had that "Eureka!" moment since from that year on they have kept pretty much the same design.  

The 1995 set is one of the more interesting ones from this period.  The shape and size are the same as that used from the latter half of 1990 through the 1996 set, but the design, which is quite colorful and distinctive, was only used in this one set.  Though I generally prefer the full bleed design they usually use, I kind of like this set.  It looks very 1990s.

I got a half-dozen cards in this lot.  Prior to that I only had one card - one of the low number Ichiros.  I will add this to my list of "sets in progress that I will hopefully one day finish but probably not."  The high number cards in this set are notoriously hard to locate, having been sold in very limited quantities and containing a couple of quite expensive cards of Ichiro (who, incidentally, had his first regular Calbee card in this set, though he had been featured in a regional set in 1994).




Sunday, October 19, 2014

Calbee Series 3 - Rarer than Other Series?

OK, so it is now mid-October.  The regular season is over and the first two rounds of championship series are also almost over (so glad that the Tigers beat the Giants in the CL series BTW).  And you know what has finally happened?  I have finally gotten my first bag of Calbee Series 3.

It seems almost every year this happens.  When Series 1 comes out in the spring, bags are available at almost every convenience store and grocery store I go to.  And, being so happy to see them after so many months and overflowing with excitement for the months of baseball ahead, I always jump in and buy them almost everyday.  My salt intake in the early months of the baseball season rises accordingly.

Then when series 2 comes out the occasion is marked by....most of those same stores continuing to sell bags of series 1.  It seems most of them prefer to burn through their inventory of the first series before moving on to the next.  Many of them don`t even bother, it seems that by the time they do sell off all their series 1 bags they decide to just move on and use the shelf space for some completely different snack.  So the number of stores selling Series 2 is always a bit less than the number that had been selling Series 1.

By the time Series 3 is released, the number of shops stocking them has shrunk to almost nothing.  Being released late in the season undoubtedly hurts it, as does the fact that those stores which bothered to stock series 2 still have bags of those to unload.

This year I have not seen a single bag of Calbee series 3 in any convenience store (and I go to a lot of convenience stores).  This is not unusual, the same thing happened last year.  The only places that seems to stock Calbee Series 3 are large scale retailers like AEON (which is where I finally bought my first bag).

This makes me wonder if Calbee Series 3 cards are rarer than cards from earlier series.  I have noticed when buying older Calbee series from the 2000s in large lots that the breakdown of cards on average is about 50% Series 1s, 40% Series 2s and 10% Series 3s - the drop-off once you get into the higher numbers is noticeable and for most of the sets that I am working on between 2002 and 2012, the biggest number of holes in my sets are in Series 3.

There is of course a historical comparison to be made with American Topps sets from the pre-1974 era when they issued them in series.  With only a couple of exceptions, for pretty much every Topps set from 1952 to 1973 the last series are considerably harder to find than the lower number series because fewer people were interested in buying cards towards the end of the season.  When Topps and other companies re-started issuing sets in series in the 1990s by then the hobby had gotten so sensitive to real or perceived scarcities they couldn`t issue one series in lower numbers than another without affecting the price, so they didn`t.

Its interesting that Calbee seems to be doing the same thing that Topps did way back in the old days....yet another little oddball thing that I like about Calbee.  Well, actually I kind of prefer it when the bags are available in convenience stores....


Sunday, October 12, 2014

Old Calbee Albums from the 70s and 80s

 Despite my lack of posts of late I have been picking up the odd thing or two here and there.  Among other purchases have been some Calbee cards from the 70s. I have about 60 Calbee cards from that decade now, almost all from the 75-76 set.  One thing which I like about having that many is that it has allowed me to finally fill up to a respectable degree my Calbee albums from the 70s. 

I have had those albums for a couple of years, I bought them at Mandarake in Fukuoka a while ago.  I am not sure but am guessing that these albums were availabe as mail-in giveaways back then like they are now.  The 1970s albums were a lot better though, I love the photography they use on the covers, rather than the sterile, generic look current ones have.


This is the photo on the inside flap of one from 1975:

Not a Nagashima fan, but that is a sweet photo.

I like the full bleed photos on Calbee cards, and the sets from the 70s has some of the best photography out there.  For some reason, and I`d be curious to know what the story is, part of the 75-76 set has a rather thick pink border, like these babies that were among my recent acquisitions:

The similiarity with the look of the 1975 Topps set is hard to miss, they even have the baseball in the lower right corner of the photo. I suspect somebody at Calbee must have decided to copy them as a template.   Anyway, these pink bordered ones include my only Japanese Davey Johnson card:
In the 1980s the albums took a turn for the worse. They made them a bit smaller (along with the cards themselves) and started using some generic baseball illustration on the front rather than actualy photos.
Worse still, they started using the same album design year after year rather than issuing unique ones.  Note that the two albums in the above photos are actually from different years.  The top one is from the 1987 Calbee (note the `87 on the front), but the bottom one is from 1988 Calbee.  The inside flaps are also almost identical, just a list of Japan series victors.  The only reason I know the bottom one is from the 1988 Calbee set is that it lists the victors up to the 1987 Series.

Anyway, just some random thoughts about Calbee albums.