Saturday, June 18, 2016

Recent Ebay Win

I don't very often crow about an Ebay win right after I've picked something up but I have to share this one.  Rather than tell you about it, I'll just show you:


Yup, that's 1973 Calbee card #1 of Shigeo Nagashima, probably the most iconic Calbee card ever.  I have a couple of reprints of it (one from SCM and one from Calbee), I never thought I'd ever get one.  It was a little more expensive than I'm usually willing to spend ($49 with shipping) but, hey, how often do you see one of these?  (Dean, the American that I ran into in Mink Ikebukuro a few years back, was in the store to talk to the guy working at it about this card.  IIRC the store was selling it for 20,000 yen or roughly $200.)

Here's what the back looks like:


I'm not big on graded cards so I haven't decided if I'm going to leave it slabbed or take a page from Sean and see if the Baseball Card Liberation Front can help me out.

7 comments:

SumoMenkoMan said...

Congrats, looks like a newly graded example as well.

Fuji said...

Any vintage Japanese baseball card is cool in my eyes. Just wondering what exactly makes this card one of the most iconic Calbee cards ever?

Dan Skrezyna said...

And in case you're wondering why it's a newly graded example is because PSA introduced the PSA hologram on the front flip for a security feature (last year, 2015).

Sean said...

Oh wow, that is amazing! I`ve been looking for a decent copy of that one for a long time, it is to us Calbee collectors what a 52 Mantle is to Topps collectors (though fortunately nowhere near as expensive)!

I actually have quite a few graded cards myself (I don`t buy them because they are graded, but more in spite of the fact that they are graded), I just think they are silly for the medium to lower end stuff I mostly collect, for a beauty like that I can kind of see the benefit of having it in a slab:)

NPB Card Guy said...

@Fuji - Hmm, I guess I left out that it was the first card from the first Calbee set. I did a post on the card and a couple recreations of Nagashima's pose a few years back.

Fuji said...

Oh... that totally makes sense. Part of me feels like I've seen this card before, so maybe it was your post or on another blog out there.

NPB Card Guy said...

I used the reprint of the card from the 2012 Calbee set (Calbee's 40th Anniversary) in the background of the title area of my blog so that may be where you've seen it before :-)