As Dave recently noted, the regular card of Fighters pitcher Hiromi Ito in this year's Calbee set contains an error.  On the back of the card it lists his height as 176 metres rather than 176 centimetres. I pulled a copy of the card a few days ago but hadn't noticed the error until seeing Dave's post.  My kids thought it was pretty cool. Japanese collectors have taken note (Calbee itself put an announcement on its website about the error, promising to replace them with corrected versions).  Yahoo Auctions is now full of Hiromi Ito Error cards with asking prices much muc ..read more

  I printed off a checklist for the 2024 Calbee set yesterday and last night after work my daughter and I sat down with the pile of cards we've accumulated so far, opened a couple of bags of the chips, and she got to work checking off the ones we have. We have 35 different cards now and are making good progress.  She also pulled a Lucky Card which was her first (the past two years her big brother had pulled them but she hadn't) so she was extremely excited about that. A lot of the cards now have salt and chip grease marks on them from being handled by hands that were simultaneously ..read more

  As I've mentioned in my most recent posts, I've been enjoying  collecting the 2024 Calbee set so far this year.   But for the sake of throwing some rain on my own parade I thought I'd raise one complaint I have with the set.  Too many damn Title Holder cards. For many years Calbee has been fairly consistent with how it structures its sets.  With each series you get the regular base set, plus several subsets.  The subsets usually consist of: 1) a 24 card "Star Card" set that is a bit harder to find than the regular cards (as noted in my previous post these ..read more

  I've been having a bit of luck with 2024 Calbee Series 1 so far.  My kids and I have opened 8 packs (for a total of 16 cards) and we've just gotten one double.  That double is Munetaka Murakami's Star Card with the gold signature. This is really weird.  This is one of the big "hit" cards in the set this year. The Star Cards are a kind of "premium" subset that is slightly harder to pull than the regular cards.  The gold signature version of it in turn is a much harder to pull parrallel which is basically the main thing that the box-breakers chase in these.  And ..read more

  The 2024 season is finally here!  After watching my Dragons drop their first series against the Swallows in Tokyo I was extremely pleased to see them win their home opener last night against the Giants on a dramatic Sayonara home run by Seiya Hosokawa in the bottom of the 11th. That good baseball mood carried over into today when I stopped at a convenience store in the train station while on my way to work and found bags of this year's Calbee baseball chips were on sale.  It was the same convenience store that I bought my first bags at last year, they seem to get them earlier ..read more

This recently acquired card of Carp pitcher Souhachi Aniya from the 1973 Calbee set (#131) is a cool addition to my collection. It might not be in the best of shape, but that photo is a classic. That ball looks like it must have hit the camera (or at least nearly missed it) the second after this photo was taken. The blurry form at the bottom of the image suggests this was not planned and might indicate a cameraman rapidly moving to get out of the way. Calbee sets from the 70s are hard to beat with photos like this ..read more

  I’ve been focusing a bit of my recent collecting attention on the 1975-76-77 monster Calbee set’s slightly smaller but equally appealing older cousin, the 1974-75 Calbee set. I’ll devote a more elaborate post to it at a later date, but I thought I’d do a post about card #754 from it which I picked up a few days ago. It features a scene from the opening day game between the Giants and Whales played on April 5, 1975. What I love about the card is that the pitcher and catcher are both Elementary School kids. According to the card back, the two kids were chosen to throw out the first pitch ..read more

  October 14, 1974 was the last day that Shigeo Nagashima played a baseball game. The Calbee set that year produced a few cards in the Oh/Nagashima (ON) series which commemorated the occasion since it also marked the end of  Sadahauru Oh and Nagashima appearing in the same lineup. The end on an era. Card 426 in the set is one of the more interesting ones. It shows Oh presenting flowers to Nagashima at the end of the game (the Dragons Yasunori Oshima is on the right, having also given Nagashima some flowers) Its a kind of neat picture, with all those 70s photographers in the backg ..read more

  I picked up this card featuring Iwao Ikebe of the Hanshin Tigers the other day.  It's from the 1978 Calbee set (JC 7C).  I'm not actively trying to complete that set mainly because it is as confusing as hell.  There were at least 11 different sets released by Calbee that year according to Engel's guide, most of which look the same and none of which have numbers on the cards so keeping track of them just looks like a nightmare.  Despite that headache, I can't resist buying cards from that year because so many of them have really wonderful photography on them, which ..read more

I reached another milestone in my 1975-76-77 Calbee set recently: I have surpassed 1300 cards (out of 1472).  Its been a long, slow slog but in some ways it has become more satisfying the fewer there are left on my want list. This week I added a couple of new ones.  The first was a big one, card #609 featuring Takeshi Koba. It is from the rarest series (Red Helmets) which, not surprisingly, is the one that I still need the most from. Over the past couple of years cards from it have become noticably harder to find. Normally there aren’t any to be found on Yahoo Auctions and they onl ..read more