History Of Calbee Part 2 - 1977 to 1980

1977 was kind of a transitional year for Calbee.  After several years of having sets that spanned multiple years, Calbee switched to having multiple sets in one year!  The 1977-79 issues are probably the most confusing issues that Calbee has done, especially the 1978 cards.  They're so confusing that Sports Card Magazine just left them out of their listings for the Calbee sets.  I don't know if I'm going to make this mess any clearer but here goes...

1977

Calbee issued 933 cards in 1977 over a total of 10 sets.  Well, that's not entirely accurate because that doesn't take into account the 108 cards that are considered part of the 1975/76/77 Calbee set.  The first of the "exclusively" 1977 sets is referred to by Engel as the "Grey Back Star Border" which isn't really accurate but we'll get to that in a minute.  The set contained a total of 216 cards and was issued in six series of 36 cards each.  Once again the series each had themes and Calbee again did the weird parallel numbering for each card.  The first two series were labeled "Famous Scenes" (although I don't know if they are actually commemorating some important event).  The backs of the cards were grey ink with a border of alternating white and black stars.  There was also an ad for a Calbee product at the bottom of the back.  These backs were pretty much identical to the ones for the 108 cards issued in 1977 for the 1975/76/77 set.  Here's the front and back of card #71 (Isao Harimoto) - note that the card number is repeated just above the flag on the back.

Series 3 was labeled "Path To Stardom" and was very similar to the "Star History" cards from late 1975 as it had two photos of a player - a current one and one from some years earlier, possibly from the player's time in high school or college.  The 36 cards in this set have the parallel numbering system that restarted with card #73 so you'll notice on the back of this Koji Yamamoto card both the number 90 for the entire set and number 18 for the subset:

Series 4 was labeled "Camp Series".  I don't have any cards from this series to show but I assume they show scenes from training camp in 1977.  

Series 5 and 6 were labeled "Open War Series" and I believe they were all photos taken during the exhibition games before the 1977 season.  My main evidence for this is this card of Shigeo Nagashima and Masaichi Kaneda - there was no interleague play until 2005 so the only time the Giants and Orions would be playing is during the "open-sen" (exhibition) games.  This is also one of the few Calbee cards showing someone in a Lotte uniform as Lotte did not allow their rival snack company to make cards showing their team until 1985.

I had mentioned earlier that Engel calling this the "Grey Back Star Border" wasn't completely accurate and a look at the back of this card will show you why:

Instead of alternating black and white stars, the border has been replaced with what Engel refers to as "weeds".  The parallel numbers reset again as you can see that this is card #1 for the subset.

Series 5 includes one of the more famous Calbee cards from the 1970's showing Sadaharu Oh with "The Destroyer", a pro wrestler (card #178).  I don't have this card but I swiped the image from an Ebay auction:

After the 1977 season started, Calbee decided to restart the card numbering and change the color of the card backs.  The new set is known as the "Pro Series" and contained 252 cards issued in seven series that again each contained 36 cards.  Calbee continued doing the parallel numbering system but this time it was again the more complicated version where each series had cards that corresponded to two different subsets.  All seven series contained four cards of Sadaharu Oh that were labeled "One Legged Method" and had parallel numbers of 1-28 while 1-4 being in Series 1, 5-8 being in Series 2, etc.  The remaining 64 cards in Series 1 and 2 were labeled "Pennant Race Opening Special" while the other 160 in Series 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 were labeled "Aim To Capture The Pennant".  

The backs of cards in the first two series look like the backs from Series 5 and 6 of the earlier set except that they're blue instead of grey.  But they still have the "weed" borders with an ad for a Calbee product.  The backs of the cards in Series 3 and 4 move the ad outside of the "weed" border and the backs of cards in Series 5, 6 and 7 remove the ad altogether.

I only have a handful of cards from this set and none of them are Oh cards.  I have three cards from the "Pennant Race Opening Special" subset and only one from the "Aim To Capture The Pennant" subset.  Here's the front and back of a Koichi Tabuchi card from Series 2 and a Tsutomu Wakamatsu card from Series 3:

I'm going to list the remaining 1977 sets in the order they appear in the 1973 Calbee book's checklist rather than their order in Engel.  My suspicion is that the 1973 Calbee book's order is how the cards were originally released while Engel's order is probably how they were discovered/cataloged.  I'll also mention here that I don't have any cards from any of these sets so the text might get a little dense.

The next two sets appear to have been regional issues that are difficult to find.  The larger of these is what Engel refers to as the "Osaka Sries".  As the name suggests, these were apparently only sold in Kansai although the teams represented on the cards are not limited to the four teams in that region at the time (Hankyu, Hanshin, Kintetsu and Nankai).  There are 144 cards in all which were issued in four series of 36 cards each.  Once again each series had a theme with a parallel numbering scheme.  Series 1 was something like "Special Feature" while Series 2 was "Showdown!  Hanshin vs Giants", Series 3 was something like "Great Success" and Series 4 was something like "Hanshin vs Giants - Traditional".  The Series 2 and Series 4 subsets are numbered separately so the Series 4 one is not a continuation of the Series 2 one.  The backs of these cards are blue and resemble those of the "Pro Series" except that the card numbers (the set ones, not the parallel numbers for the subsets) have a prefix of "大" on them - that's the first character in the Japanese spelling of Osaka (大阪市).

The other regional issue was the "Nagoya Series" and, like the Osaka one, it is assumed that these were only sold in the Tokai area (a "subregion" of the Chubu region that contains Nagoya).  This set contains 36 cards and was sold as a single series.  Now you would think that with just a single series that Calbee wouldn't have done the parallel numbering thing for subsets but you would be wrong - there's actually five(!) subsets in this series.  All of the subsets are devoted to a particular team and are labeled "Ganbare <team name>".  The largest of these is the 22 card subset for the Dragons (naturally) while the others are for the Giants (6 cards), Braves (2 cards), Tigers (4 cards) and Hawks (2 cards).  Once again the backs resemble the "Pro Series" card backs except that the card numbers have a prefix of "名" on them, the first character in the Japanese spelling of Nagoya (名古屋市).

The next set is the "Giants Series" which contained 108 cards issued in three 36 card series.  All the cards in the set are for Giants players although I don't think this was a regional set sold only in Kanto.  Each of the three series had a different theme and the cards had the parallel numbers for whichever subset they were in.  Series 1 was labeled something like "Giants Attack", series 2 was "Ganbare Giants" and series 3 was "Giants vs Tigers" (which is odd since there aren't any Tigers included in that series).  The 1973 Calbee book says that there was a set of 18 cards that could be folded in a standup position (kind of like the Donruss All Star popups from the mid-80's) that Engel refers to as the "Standups Craft Cards" that is somehow related to this set.  They're labeled "Ganbare Giants" but otherwise don't resemble the cards from this set at all.

Sadaharu Oh passed Henry Aaron's career home run mark of 755 on September 3, 1977 and Calbee dedicated their next set from the year to him.  This is a 95 card set (Engel says 96 but the 1973 Calbee book says 95) that was issued in three series.  Surprisingly only one of the series - the third one - had 36 cards.  Series 1 was 32 cards and Series 2 was 27 cards.  Sean has a couple of posts showing some of these cards and I swiped the front and back of the most famous card from this set from a recent auction on Ebay:

The card was listed for $999.99 although the seller offered it to me for $850.  Since I don't want my wife to leave me, I passed on it.  

 

Mercifully the last three Calbee sets for 1977 are much simpler than the earlier ones.  Two of them were issued in only one series and none of them have the parallel subset numbers so I can summarize them pretty quickly.  The Tigers hit over 200 home runs that season and the "200 Home Runs Series" commemorates this event.  The 36 cards in the single series for the set all depict members of the Tigers.  The 36 card "Go Go Series" contains only Giants players and I suspect is to celebrate the team winning the Central League pennant.  The final set was a 45 card set commemorating the 1977 Nippon Series.  This set was issued in two series - an 18 card Series 1 and a 27 card Series 2.  This is yet another set that only has Giants players - despite the fact that the Giants lost the Series to the Hankyu Braves for the second straight year.

Before moving on from 1977 I should mention that Calbee also issued two sticker sets this year - a 30-ish "card" set containing stickers for players from the Carp, Dragons, Giants and Tigers and a 26 "card" set labeled "Our All Stars".  I don't know how these were sold or if they have any association with any the previously mentioned sets.

1978

1978 is the most difficult year for Calbee cards.  They again issued ten separate sets and the total number of cards is at least 600.  I say "at least 600" because no one actually knows for sure.  The problem is that the cards in nine of the ten sets are unnumbered!  Calbee had switched from having multiple numbers for cards in 1976 and 1977 to having none in 1978.

I'm going to list the sets in the same order that Engel does but I'm pretty confident that this was not the order that the sets were issued.  The reason I say that is that the first set listed is the 20 card set issued to commemorate Sadaharu Oh's 800th career home run hit on August 30th, 1978 and it seems unlikely to me that Calbee would have waited until nine months into the year to issue any cards.  This is the only set where the cards are numbered which is why it is also the only set that the size is known for.  I don't have any cards from this set (a phrase I will be using frequently in this section).

The next set is called the "1978 Pennant Race Series".  Most of these cards have two lines of text on the front - the top line says something like "78 Pennant Race Special Feature" and the bottom line (if it's there) will list two teams and the date that they were playing.  I'm pretty sure but not completely positive that this card of Kazuyuki Yamamoto is from this set - it's missing the second line:

Engel refers to the next set as "Regular Type I".  The fronts of these also have two lines of text but the top line has the player's name while the bottom line has the team name.  The back is pretty much the same except these cards don't have the "'78 Pennant Race Special Feature" text at the top of them.  Here's an example card for Tatsuhiko Kimata of the Dragons:

The "Regular Type II" set is very similar to the "Regular Type I" set except that the two lines of text are in one of the corners of the front instead of the bottom center.  I think the backs are pretty much the same.  I don't have any cards from this set.

The Carp apparently set a record for most home runs by a team in 1978 and had a set that Engel calls "Team Home Run Record" dedicated to them.  All the cards in the set show Carp players.  The text on the front has "Team home run record, great hits, red helmets" instead of the player's name and team.  I don't have any cards from this set either.  The card backs look like the previous two sets.

The "Player Name/No Team Name" set looks pretty much just like the "Regular Type I & II" cards except that - you guessed it - the card fronts only have the player's name and not the team name.  Engel says that all known cards from this set are for the Dragons although the Calbee Collector website shows a couple players from other teams.  The backs look like the previous sets.  I don't have any cards from this set.

The Swallows won their first Central League pennant ever that year and the next two sets both commemorate this.  The first set is called "Yakult Swallows V1".  The fronts for these cards look like the ones for the "Regular Type II" except that there's a big "V1" next to the player's name and team.  The backs look the the other backs.  This Charlie Manuel card is from this set:

The other Swallows pennant winning set is called "Yakult Swallows 1st Championship in 29 Years" which is a bit of a mouthful and somewhat misleading as it implies that the Swallows won a championship in 1949 as opposed to winning their first championship in their 29th year of existence.  These are the first Calbee cards since the "pink border" cards in 1976 to not feature a "pure card" front as the front of these cards have a blue, red or green border of swallows.  Engel says that the cards don't really show individual players as much as showing groups of players celebrating.  The backs of the cards also don't identify individual players - they just contain text describing the front of the card.  I again don't have any of these cards.

Engel calls the next set the "Vs Cards" as each card shows a matchup between two teams.  The only text on the front of the card lists the two teams playing - "Giants vs Whales" for example.  Like the previous set, the cards don't have individual player names although they are back to the "pure card" fronts.  Once more, I don't have any cards from this set.  I'm not sure that the 1973 Calbee book lists this set which may mean that they think it's part of one of the other sets.

The final 1978 set is the "Nippon Series" set.  The cards from this set show action from the 1978 Series between the Swallows and the Braves although the set may only depict Swallows players.  The front of the card has no text other than "Nippon Series" although the backs do identify the player.  This Charlie Manuel card is the only card I have from this set:

I should point out that it's a coincidence that all the cards I've shown for the 1978 sets have a horizontal orientation - there were also cards that used a vertical orientation.

There's no break down of which players appear in which of the 1978 sets but Engel does include a list of all players who are known to have a 1978 card.  What's striking about the list is that almost all the players are from the six Central League teams.  There are just two Pacific League players listed - Bobby Marcano and Shinji Nakazawa of the Braves.  I'm kind of assuming they had cards in the "Nippon Series" set but I don't know.

1979

The 1979 Calbee sets are a little better defined than the 1978 sets were.  While a number of the sets still lack traditional card numbers, prominent uniform numbers help identification of cards and actual checklists exist for all the sets.  On the other hand, some of the sets are similar enough that it can be difficult to figure out which set a particular card goes with.  Calbee published 404 cards in 11 (or possibly 12) different sets in 1979.  I believe that each set was issued as a single series as all the sets were relatively small (21 to 48 cards).

For the first time none of the cards in any of the sets had any text on the front of them.  

The first set was a 48 card set that Engel has dubbed the "Basic Series".  The cards are numbered by the players uniform numbers so obviously there are repeated numbers in the set.  The backs of the cards include instructions on voting for your favorite players.  This voting would drive the contents of six of the remaining ten sets for the year (or seven of the remaining eleven).  Voters were also encouraged to submit drawings of their favorite players and some of those caricatures would show up on the backs of some of the cards in the future sets.  Here's the front and back of Sadaharu Oh's card (with a little annotation added by someone) - the instructions for player voting start at the little baseball halfway down the card:

The voting apparently went on all season and the results would be reflected in card sets on a somewhat monthly basis.  The first set showing voting results is the "April Best" set.  This is a 48 card set that uses the player ranking as its card number.  Tigers pitcher Shigeru Kobayashi was the top vote getter so he was card #1.  There were a couple ties so again there's multiple cards with some numbers (three #8's, 2 #12's, 2 #16's, etc).  Hisashi Yamada was #14 in the voting:

The top portion of the card backs in all the sets that show the results of the voting are very similar.  The line starting with "4" indicates the month (April is the fourth month), the player's ranking in the voting (Yamada was 14th) and the number of votes he received (88 in this case).  The line below it has the player's name (山田久志) and uniform number (17).  You can also see that this card has one of the voter submitted caricatures on it.

The voting results were next reported in the "May Best" set which also had 48 cards.  This set actually has a handful of unnumbered cards as any player in the set that didn't appear in the top 40 of the voting doesn't have a number.  You can see by looking at this card of Masahiro Doi how similar these cards are to the "May Best" cards:

The next set or sets that reported voting totals did it in a little different manner.  Instead of having a single set of ranking, Calbee broke the vote down by league and position.  The voting was also cumulative from April to June.  Engel has split these cards into two separate sets, the "April-June Central League Stars" and the "April-June Pacific League Stars" but the 1973 book has lumped all the cards together into one set.  Personally my suspicion is that the cards were sold as a single set but I could be wrong.  There are 27 CL players - two at each infield position and catcher, seven outfielders and ten pitchers - and 21 PL players - two again at each infield position and catcher but only six outfielders and five pitchers.  Once again there are no traditional card numbers but the combination of league, position and ranking uniquely identifies the card.  There's no ties in any of the voting.  Here are cards of one CL player (Hisao Niura) and one PL player (Charlie Manuel):

The backs of these are kind of similar to the "April Best" and "May Best" sets.  If you look at the third line down, you'll see "4-6" which indicates "April-June" of course.  The fifth line lists the player's league and position while the sixth has his ranking (both players were second) and his vote totals (5,043 for Niura and 2,430 for Manuel).  And obviously Manuel's card back has a caricature drawn by a fan on it.

I'm going to discuss three of the remaining sets together just because they're so similar - the "July Best", "August Best" and "October Best" sets that - you guessed it - report the vote totals for July, August and October.  All three of these sets have 48 cards and pretty much share the same characterizations as the "April Best" and "May Best" sets.  Here's examples from all three sets - a Shigeru Kobayashi card from the "July Best" set, a Yoshihiko Takahashi card from the "August Best" set and a Hiromu Matsuoka card from the "October Best" set:

You'll notice that one of these things is not like the other.  Takahashi put together the longest hitting streak in NPB history - 33 games - which ended on July 31st, 1979.  This card is obviously commemorating this but what I don't know is whether all of the Takahashi cards in the "August Best" set look like this or if this was some sort of weird regional issue only sold in Hiroshima.  As far as I know, the rest of the "August Best" cards look like all the other 1979 cards.  (You'd think the longest hitting streak in NPB history would put him higher than sixth in the voting - although he was 26th in the "July Best" set so it obviously helped him.)

The rankings across the five "Best" series were pretty consistent.  Shigeru Kobayashi, Masayuki Kakefu and Sadaharu Oh were the top three in every set but the "April" one where Kakefu was fourth.  Kobayashi was the first place finisher in the "April" and "May" sets while Kakefu was first in the other three sets (with Kobayashi in second).  Oh was second in the "April" set and third in the other four sets.

Calbee issued a set between the "August Best" and "October Best" sets called something like "Red Helmet Aiming Series".  This was a 24 card set that apparently celebrates the Carp winning the Central League pennant as all the cards depict Carp players.  The set is numbered by the player's uniform numbers but since several players have more than one card, several cards have the same number.  The backs of the cards have a Carp logo and a "V2" marking (indicating the Carp's second CL pennant after the one in 1975) - you'll see why this is significant in a minute.  I don't have any of these cards.

Following the "October Best" set Calbee issued a second 24 card set celebrating the Carp's CL pennant called "Central League Championship Series".  Once again the player's numbers were used as the card numbers although this time only Koji Yamamoto had multiple cards in the set and there are five unnumbered cards with group photos.  The back of the cards feature a "V2" logo but not the team logo which may be the only easy way to tell the difference between this set and the other Carp set.  I don't have any of these cards either.

The next set is the "Hozoban-Title Holders Series" set.  This set has 25 cards that apparently feature players who either won an award or led the league in something.  The big difference between these and the other 1979 cards is the big gold trophy on the front of the card.  Once again the only card numbers are the player's uniform numbers and once again there are several different players with the same number.  Here's an example card showing PL Best 9 catcher Masataka Yoshida:

For the third year in a row the final set of the year commemorated that year's Nippon Series.  The big difference with the 1979 set is it included cards for both the Kintetsu Buffaloes and the eventual champion Carp instead of just the Central League team.  There were 23 cards in the set and they're again numbered by the player's uniform number although there are eight cards that are unnumbered.  Here's a card showing Sachio Kinugasa:

1980

An argument could be made that 1980 was the year that Calbee finally figured out what a card set was supposed to look like.  After seven years of either multiple "sets" in one year or sets that spanned more than one year, they put out one "set" of 296 cards that all came out in 1980.  All the cards had traditional card numbers on them and the set was issued in six series - the first two had 48 cards each and the remaining four had 50 cards each.  However this set still has some weirdness that I'll explain as we go.

The first series started out fairly normally.  The cards again had no text on the fronts but otherwise looked pretty much the same as they had since 1973.  The series' theme was something along the lines of "Opening Season" and the cards all had parallel numbers for the theme that were identical to the regular card number.  The one odd thing about this series is that because there was apparently two print runs for the cards, each card has two different versions of its back - one with a border and one without.   Here's the front and back of two example cards - one with a border (Yasunori Ohshima) and one without (Nobuyuki Kagawa) - the parallel number for the subset is in the circle just under the regular card number and just after the text containing the name of the series theme:

Series 2 is where things get kind of weird as Calbee decided to CHANGE THE SIZE OF THE CARDS BETWEEN PRINT RUNS OF THE CARDS.  As a result, there are two different versions of each card in the series - one at the 2 3/8" by 3 1/8" size that all Calbee cards had been since 1973 and one at the smaller 2 " by 2 5/8" size that would be the standard Calbee size for the next ten years.  To be completely honest, there's actually three different variations because there's some text about some sort of prize redemption on the card backs that was removed in one of the print runs of the smaller version of the cards.  (I should note here that Engel categorizes the two differently sized cards as two separate sets - a 96 card "Large Set" and a 248 card "Small Set".) 

The theme of Series 2 was something like "Winning Series" and the parallel card numbers on the back reset for the new theme.  The fronts of the cards had text again for the first time since 1978 - the top line repeated the card theme while the bottom line had the player's name and team.  I don't have any of the large cards from this series but I have examples of the two different backs for the smaller cards - one with the redemption text (Junichi Kashiwabara) and one without (Makoto Matsubara):

Series 3 was called something like "White Hot!" and it again featured a back variation - each card has both a pink back and a back black.  The cards again feature parallel numbers for the theme.  Here's an example card with a pink back (Yoshihiko Takahashi) and a black back (Tony Solaita):

The fourth series was for the 1980 All Star games.  The fronts don't have the player's name or team on them - the only thing on front is the name of the series theme - "'80 All Star Games".  The card backs had the parallel card number for the theme but as far as I know there are no variations of any kind with the cards in this series.  I don't have any cards from this series.

The final two series for the 1980 set mercifully don't have a theme or any known variations.  The player names and teams reappeared on the fronts of the card.  The backs have yearly stats going back to 1975 (if possible) including the 1980 stats up to the end of August.  Since there's no theme, there's no parallel card numbers.  Here's the front and back of Masataka Nashida's card (with a cameo from Taylor Duncan of the Lions - this may be the only NPB card showing Duncan as he was only with Seibu for about half a season):

I used my usual sources for the information in this post.  Both Sean's and Ryan's blogs were helpful - especially Ryan's posts for the 1977, 1978, 1979 and 1980 sets.  I also used the Calbee Collector's site, the 1973 Calbee book and Engel.  The 1980 cards were the last checklist in the the 1973 Calbee book so future posts may not have as much detail on how many series each set was issued in.