You'll have to read the article to see what we all picked but I will say I was surprised that no one picked the 1967 Kabaya-Leaf set.
Monday, February 12, 2024
Hobby News Daily Article
A week or so ago I got contacted by Horacio Ruiz, a writer for HobbyNewsDaily.com. He was asking several collectors of Japanese baseball cards to contribute a paragraph or so about their favorite vintage sets for an article he was working on. The piece came out today and besides me, it features contributions from JeffInTokyo, Robert Klevens of Prestige Collectibles and Sean of "Getting Back into Baseball Cards...In Japan" fame. It's a nice article and we each have our own perspectives on why our sets are our favorites.
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10 comments:
A set everyone likes but no one has enough to write a proper article?
Could be. TBH it's an odd set as it only has cards for half the teams
True that's always a concern. Though one of the other choices only has four teams as well. Anyway I'm no expert but if choosing just one would've picked the same as you.
Yeah, but I was just thinking about how I'd probably write about the Kabaya-Leaf set if it came out today. "Nice looking retro set but there's a lot of players missing and after a while the posed shots become monotonous. They could have thrown in an action shot or two to break it up. And having two different designs hurts my OCD..."
There are a lot of sets to choose from out there.
1967 Kabaya Leaf is a nice enough set, but its one I've never gotten into. The problems (from the perspective of a collector in Japan) are:
1) They are hard to find here. I think most of the stock was bought up and shipped to the US back in the day so its one of those Japanese sets that are easier to buy in the US than in Japan.
2) They are crazy expensive. At least compared to what singles for almost every other set go for here.
3) They are neat as one of (the?) first Japanese sets to mimic the look and feel of contemporary American sets. The downside of that is they look and feel like contemporary American sets - dull, posed photography, etc. They aren't horrible by any stretch, but at the same time they lack the distinctiveness of the menko that came before them and the Calbee cards of the 70s that came after.
4) As a set collector I shy away from sets with super rare short printed cards that will break the bank and that one has a few.
Sean, those are all really good points about that set. And yes, the bulk of the cards were bought up by Mel Bailey and shipped to the US - I did a post about that a few years ago. Getting a set of the non-scarce cards is ridiculously expensive and adding in the scare ones makes it astronomical. Plus there's the one card of Hiroshi Gondoh that no one knew about until 2019 - and when I sau "one card" I don't mean one card in the set, I mean there's only one known copy of the card and Keith Olberman owns it.
Every so often I'll come across one of the cards from the set that I don't have for what I view as a reasonable price. I used to pull the trigger on them but I've started to refrain from it now since I too view myself as a set collector and I'm never going to complete that set.
I know that this isn't really the point but at this point I've come to kinda accept the Japanese definition that menkos and bromides and most collectables in general from before 1991 isn't vintage, in the sense that those are more like vintage toys and vintage photographs as opposed to vintage baseball cards specifically. It's a little foreign (pun intended) to the American mindset where everything from tobacco cards and cabinet cards of people who were alive during the Civil War are included in the umbrella but honestly I can kinda see why and I think it's a lot better since it basically reduces Japanese cards to there being no vintage. Which is a lot easier than trying to figure out which defunct or renamed entity made what in x-year for whatever reason.
To be fair, the "vintage" designation primarily comes from Gary Engel and it allows him to ignore the plethora of sets that have been issued by BBM. I think Gary prefers to concentrate on the older stuff.
My favorite set has to be the 2001 BBM set. I love the design and the photos, it has some great rookie cards like Shinnosuke Abe, Seiichi Uchikawa, and Hiroyuki Nakajima, plus it was one of the first Japanese card sets I ever collected.
That was my first set too and I like it a lot.
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