Links to interesting stuff:
- Ryan's doing a series of posts on the history Of Calbee that's very interesting.
- Speaking of Calbee, I stupidly forgot that over a year ago Jason had sent me a link to a Japanese collectors site with tons of information about Calbee sets from 1973 to the present. It's all in Japanese but it's got hundreds of great pictures of cards.
- I was doing some Google searches in the last few days, kind of randomly looking around at stuff and I discovered that someone who has occasionally commented here, Sean, has a blog about baseball cards in general and Japanese cards in particular.
- I found the website for the "Giants Winning Game Cards", a series of cards put out by the Giants for each game they won this season. I believe that you order the set a month at a time but I'm not positive. I don't know if you can buy the sets from outside of Japan or not.
- I found an old article from the Los Angeles Times on April 21, 1991 regarding how a new manufacturer of baseball cards was going to change everything in Japan. Funny thing about the article is that the company in question appears to be Q-Cards, not BBM. I had not realized that Don Nomura (stepson of Katsuya Nomura and the agent who brought Hideo Nomo to the US) had been behind Q-Cards. The article implies that Q-Cards would really be the first licensed baseball cards in Japan which I don't think is accurate.
3 comments:
I'm wondering of the Giants just skipped 2012 for their GWG cards. They have galleries for 2009-2011, and they list all of this season's cards, but nothing for 2012.
The Hawks had a set of "Victory Cards" for the 2012 season, but I can't find a site for a set this season.
Many thanks for the link to my blog, its much appreciated!
Nice find with that 1991 article too. I had never heard of Q-cards before.
It was obviously written by a very poorly informed reporter if they thought 1991 was the first time baseball cards had been released in Japan. Perhaps Don Nomura`s company had deliberately fed them misinformation in order to boost the popularity of the cards in the US or something. Not that it worked of course...
The other very strange thing comes at the end of the article. If I understand correctly it says that the cards were sold in packs (sets) of two cards for 500 yen each. That is just insanely expensive for 1991....actually its insanely expensive for 2013 too but anyway. Then they say they are targeting them at kids, which makes no sense as that price would have been way more than kids could have afforded back then.
Anyway, interesting read!
Sean - the article kind of clouds the issue by saying these are the first "official" baseball cards but, yeah, it's just not true at all.
I know the cards were sold in packs of two (because I've opened them) but I don't know if that price is accurate. They had extraordinary bad timing - they introduced their product at the same time BBM was unveiling their initial product which had packs of 10 cards for (I think) 200 yen a pack.
Post a Comment