2023 Calbee Hawks

It was a bit of a surprise last January when Calbee somewhat abruptly released a 36 card set for the Hawks with little advance fanfare.  The cards had a similar design to the 2023 Calbee cards and were actually labelled "2023" so it appeared that the release had been delayed for a couple of months.  Ostensibly the set was for the the 30th Anniversary of the opening of Fukuoka Dome in 1993 although there's nothing on the cards that acknowledge that.

The cards have been somewhat hard to come by.  For the longest time, all the cards I saw were selling for 300 yen which would have made a complete set cost over 10,000 yen ($66-ish).  I had found a guy on Yahoo! Japan Auctions selling a bunch of cards for around 100 yen each and asked Ryan to grab them for me.  He ended up picking up 21 of the 36 cards and, of course, these were among the cards he gave me when I met up with him during my trip.

My expectation was that I would find the other 15 cards I needed during the trip.  I half heartedly asked about the cards at various card shops in Tokyo but wasn't terribly surprised when I was told that they didn't have any.  The cards were only issued in Kyushu so it was less likely that I'd see them in Kanto.  But I had high hopes that I'd find them in Fukuoka, specifically Mint Hakata, so I was somewhat surprised to not find any there.  I was less surprised to not find them at the other two Mint stores in Fukuoka as I had lower expectations for those stores.  It was one of the few disappointments of the trip to not get any closer to completing that set.

On the plus side, since I've returned I've located the remaining cards on Mercari and YJA and Ryan has picked them up for me.  So I'll have a complete set when Ryan makes his next card shipment to me later this year or early next year.

As I said, the cards themselves resemble the 2023 Calbee cards.  Enough so that it's a little difficult to tell the difference at a casual glance.  Here's Taisei Makihara's 2023 Series One card next to his card from this set:

2023 Calbee Series One #007 & Hawks #SH-06

The only real difference I see is that the Hawks set has the card number underneath the "2023 Calbee" text in hte upper right corner.  The design of the card backs are also virtually identical:

One thing to note is that although the design is the same, the text on the back is different.  The Japanese paragraph on the bottom of the card is obviously not the same and even the statistics are different.  The statistics on the Series One card are through the end of 2022 (and that's the case for the Series Two cards as well) while the Hawks set card has them through the end of August of 2023.  The career stats are also updated.

There aren't many surprises in the player selection.  Then-manager Hideo Fujimoto is not in the set but all the big names are - Yuki Yanagita, Kensuke Kondoh, Takyu Kai, Kenta Imamiya, Tsyuoshi Wada, Nao Higashihama, Ukyo Shuto, etc.  There are three foreign players - Carter Stewart, Roberto Osuna and Livan Moinelo.  Maybe the most surprising thing is that there's only one rookie in the set - Ryosuke Ohtsu.  With the delayed release of the set there ended up at least four players in the set who were no longer Hawks when it came out - Shu Masuda, Hiroshi Kaino, Keizu Izumi and Rei Takahashi.  obviously with there being 36 cards versus the meager 10 that were in Calbee's regular set, there's 26 guys in this set who didn't appear in either Series One or Series Two.  All 10 who were in Series One and Two are in this set.

The set unfortunately continues Calbee's recent trend of unimaginative photos.  It is 36 cards of "batters batting, pitchers pitching" poses.  Here's a handful of cards as examples but you can see all of them over at Jambalaya:

#SH-07

#SH-020

#SH-21

#SH-27

#SH-04

While it was unusual for Calbee to release at team set, it's not completely unprecedented.  They did a Tigers set in 1992 and a Dragons set in 1997 (which is rare enough that Engel never listed it - it was apparently given away in some sort of lottery in the Nagoya area, possibly as a tie-in with the opening of Nagoya Dome).  There was also kind of a Giants specific set in 1998 but it essentially was a subset in the regular set rather than a separate product.

2024 Topps NPB Set

I wasn't going to buy it this year.

The 2024 Topps NPB set was released around May 24th, right around the end of my trip to Japan.  I figured that no store would have had time to put together a complete set before I left but I bought a pack of cards at Mint Yokohama and looked at the set at Jambalaya.  

What I saw confirmed that basically the set repeated the stuff that I had hated about last year's set - all the photos were from last year, no players who switched teams over the winter were in the set, no new import players were in the set (I think there's only five gaijin total in the set) and the photos of the rookie players and new managers were all posed photos from press conferences or team's photo days.  Oh, and they put the same level of effort that they've put into the card backs as the three previous years - none.

I was still thinking about buying the set when I came back so I started checking Yahoo! Japan Auctions and Mercari.  No one was selling a complete set.  I kept checking regularly for a few weeks - nothing.  Ryan hadn't seen any either.  The only complete set I had seen for sale was from Jambalaya but they were asking 12000 yen for it - around $75.  There was no way I was going to spend that much on the set.

Not being able to find the set let me think more about whether or not I really wanted to get it.  The few pros - some of the photos are good, my OCD is happy if I have a full run of Topps sets - were far outweighed by the cons listed above.  So I decided that I wasn't going to get the set this year.

I was pretty happy with this decision for a few days.  I was so convinced that I wasn't going to get the set that I went through the cards at Jambalaya and decided on 20 or so that I wanted to get as singles.  I decided to contact my friend Jason who sells NPB cards on Ebay and has been my source for a lot of Topps NPB cards the past few years, figuring that I ask him about those singles.  I asked him how hard it had been to put a set together this year and he said it wasn't too bad - it was taking about a box and a half of cards.  He offered to sell me one at whatever price I wanted. Not wanting to take too much advantage of his generosity, I told him what I had paid for the set the past couple years.  He suggested a price in that ballpark for a complete set plus a couple of the "retro" insert cards and I decided to change my mind.  I got the set early last week and my opinion of it really hasn't changed so I'm essentially hate-posting about it.  (But I do want to thank Jason for his generosity!)

Some details about the set - this is the fourth edition of Topps' NPB flagship set and, like the previous three, it has a base set of 216 cards which works out to 18 cards per team.  Those 18 cards include the team's manager and three 2023 draftees (probably the top three but I didn't bother checking to verify that).  The previous editions featured a card design that was similar but not quite identical to that of that year's Topps MLB flagship set.  This year, however, I think the design IS identical for the first time.

With the set being relatively small, there are a number of players that were left out.  Besides the players who changed teams over the winter, there are no cards for Yudai Ohno, Atsuki Yuasa, Aren Kuri, Kohei Azuma, Takahisa Hayakawa, Yasuhiro Ogawa or Yuta Kyoda, all of whom appeared in BBM's 1st Version set.  On the other hand, this set has a number of players I was kind of surprised weren't in the BBM set - Hirokazu Sawamura, Livan Moinelo, Ryutaro Umeno, Cy Sneed and Tyler Austin.  I expect that at least a couple of those guys will have cards in BBM's 2nd Version set when it gets released next month.

Topps generally had decent photos in their sets (at least for the non-rookies).  I'd rate their photo selection second of the four NPB flagship sets, behind BBM but ahead of Epoch (and far ahead of Calbee at this point).  I still don't like the processing stuff Topps does to their photos though.  Here's some examples:

#106

#190

#148

#68

Topps also uses the horizontal format as well as BBM does, making what would be just ordinary "batters batting, pitchers pitching" photos look better.  (For comparison's sake, Epoch never does horizontally formatted cards while Calbee used to but doesn't bother anymore.)  Here's a couple examples:

#101

#118

#137

#47

I really like that Ohshiro card - I think it really captures his anticipation of catching the ball and tagging the runner out.

I've already complained about how the cards of the rookie players (2023 draft picks) were posed shots from either press conferences or photo day.  Here's a variety of these.  Personally I prefer cards of players actually on the field - BBM's got the "posed shot at the introductory press conference" cards down pat with the Rookie Edition set so I don't need more cards showing that.

#84

#176

#33

Topps used photos similar to Koja's for the three new managers for 2024 - Hiroki Kokubo, Toshiaki Imae and Shinnosuke Abe.  Curiously they also used similar photos for Hiroyuki Nakajima and Masato Yoshii too.

I noticed an error on one of the cards - Yuki Nishi of the Tigers has his name transposed on the front of the card where his family name ("Nishi") is in small letters on the top and his given name ("Yuki") is in larger letters on the bottom.  I don't know if Topps is correcting the card.

#200

I mentioned that once again Topps put minimal effort into the card backs.  Here's Roki Sasaki's as an example:

Every year Topps has a number of parallels and inserts with their set and every year the only one I'm really interested in is the one in which they reuse an old card design for active NPB players.  So far they've done the 1986 format with the 2021 set, the 1958 format with the 2022 set and the 2001 format with last year's set.  Of these, I've felt that they did the best job matching the "spirit" of the 1986 set.  All the photos used were action shots which were not uncommon in that set.  The 1958-style inserts ended up being done as a mug shot set rather than a variety of posed shots like the original set had and the 2001-style inserts had white borders rather than green for some reason.

For this set, Topps revisited the 1959 format and I have mixed feelings about the results.  They matched the design well but they again used action photos and the original 1959 set used posed photos.  I may just be nitpicking though and since Topps seems to think that "posed photo" means "mug shot", the action photos are probably better than the alternative.  Here's the cards that Jason sent me:

#59-12

#59-8

#59-14

#59-15

#59-16

I beat up on Topps a lot and I feel there's a good reason for it.  One of the things I've liked about Japanese baseball cards is that the sets are usually as up-to-date as they can possibly be when they go to press.  This is not the case with Topps' MLB sets.  For example, Topps Series Two was just released about a month ago and it includes a card of Gio Urshela with the Los Angeles Angels.  The problem with that is that Gio Urshela is a Detroit Tiger and has been since February.  It's really uncommon for something like that to happen with an NPB set but it seems pretty common with MLB ones.  I'm fairly certain that no Japanese baseball card has ever featured a player in an airbrushed or photoshopped hat and/or uniform (unless it was to remove a tradmark).  It boggles my mind that BBM can issue an up-to-date set in April (or March!) with photos that were taken in February but Topps is incapable of publishing an up-to-date set a month later.  What it tells me is that Topps isn't trying very hard with their NPB product.

And apparently they don't need to because for some completely inexplicable reason, the cards are popular, at least in the US.  I guess just having the Topps name on them makes Americans want to buy them despite their shortcomings.  I was flabbergasted recently when a long-time collector told me he really liked the Topps cards.  I just don't get it.

Honestly, I wouldn't care so much - I mean, it's a big hobby and to each his own - but I'm kind of worried about the influence their laziness is having on the rest of the card industry in Japan.  Calbee seems to have pretty much given up really putting any effort into their set anymore and Epoch has done a similar thing with the rookie cards in their NPB set this year that Topps did.  I really don't like this trend and I'm hoping BBM doesn't succumb as well.

I realize that I may be overly concerned but part of what got me into NPB cards was the decline in quality of MLB cards in the late 1990's.  I don't want NPB cards to go down the same path but perhaps, like Jimmy Mattingly, I'm alone in my principles (although hopefully not as much of a jerk).

Magazine Cards

I want to do yet another quick post about some cards I picked up on the trip.  This time it's cards that were distributed with magazines and it really will be a quick one.

One of my goals right now is to pick up all the cards that were distributed with the "Season Memorial" issue of Shukan Baseball every year between 2005 and 2016.  There are 36 total cards with four cards per year between 2005 and 2010 and two cards each year from 2011 to 2016.  I had asked Ryan to pick up a couple from 2006 off of Yahoo! Japan Auctions a few months back and it was among the cards he gave me when we met up in Tokyo:

What was kind of interesting about these cards is that they were still in the original package.  The cards were distributed in an envelope that was attached to the binding of the magazine.  Each card was sealed in plastic on one side of the envelope.  As I said, there were four possible cards but you only got two of them in magazine and there was no way to know which two.  Someone had removed the envelope from the magazine and split it open so that there were two separate pieces that each had one sealed card.  Here's what the outsides of the envelope looked like:

I did a scan of the cards still sealed on the envelope sides but it's hard to really see anything:

I have liberated the cards from the envelope sides.

I discovered that Bits had a number of these cards but I ran into a problem with my want list.  While it listed the cards that I knew I needed, there are a couple years where I'm unsure of what the cards are.  For example, for 2008 I know that two of the cards are Alex Ramirez and Satoshi Komatsu but I don't know who the other two cards are.  Now normally this doesn't present a problem for me because if I see one of these cards on Yahoo! Japan Auctions while browsing at home, I can check my database or even the card binder to see if I already have it or not.  I had neither of those resources handy at Bits, of course, and to make matters worse, the cards were a bit on the pricey side so I didn't want to just buy them all and sort it out later like I might have if they'd been 100 yen each.  I picked up this 2007 Michihiro Ogasawara for 500 yen because I knew it was one I needed:

But I also picked up a 2005 Yasutomo Kubo card for 500 yen that it turned out I already had.  I've updated my want list now to list the cards I have as well as the ones I know I'm missing to hopefully prevent a repeat of this in the future.

Bits surprised me by having one of the two cards I was missing from the 2004 Yomiuri Giants 70th Anniversary magazine.  It was 800 yen which may have been one of the most expensive cards I bought on the entire trip but I figured it was unlikely I was going to see it again:

For the record, the other cards that were available in the magazine were Eiji Sawamura, Shigeo Nagashima, Sadaharu Oh and Tatsunori Hara.  I now have all of them except Nagashima.

Finally Ryan and I were browsing one of the Mandarake stores at Nakano Broadway just a few hours before my flight left for home.  This particular one had a bunch of old magazines and I came across a 2005 Tigers Interleague Program.  It was shrink-wrapped and two baseball cards were sliding around inside the wrap.  I had remembered that BBM had done cards for the Interleague programs in both 2005 and 2006 so I bought the magazine.  It was 1000 yen which I figured wasn't too bad.  Since the magazine had been sold at Tigers home interleague games, both cards were Tigers players:

There were 24 cards in all - two per team.  Here's what the front of the magazine looks like (although it's a little bigger than my scanner can scan):

There's an ad at the back of the magazine that shows all 24 cards.  I took a picture of it since I figured that I might damage the magazine trying to scan the page:

Miscellaneous Card Pickups

I wanted to do a somewhat quick post about a bunch of random cards that I picked up on the trip.  Most of these were cards on my want list (which is much smaller now than before I left).

There were nine BBM team sets from between 2003 and 2007 that I was trying to complete.  I had gotten unopened boxes for most of them back in the day and decided a few years ago to get the cards I had missed on them.  I ended up completing six of them (2003 Giants, 2004 Baystars, 2005 Dragons & Swallows, and 2006 Swallows & Tigers) and reducing the number of cards I needed for two of the other sets to two each (2004 Giants & Tigers).  I had only needed one card from the 2007 Tigers set but it eluded me.  I'm not going to show all the cards I got from these sets but here's a single card from each:

2003 BBM Giants #036

2004 BBM Baystars #YB58

2004 BBM Giants #G45

2004 BBM Tigers #T36

2005 BBM Dragons #D59

2005 BBM Swallows #S78

2006 BBM Swallows #TY44

2006 BBM Tigers #053

I got most of these at either Bits in Nagoya or Mint Hakata in Fukuoka.  I had looked at Quad Sports but didn't find anything on my want list - Ryan eventually pointed out that he had already searched my want list there!

I had compiled a list a few months back of all the guys who had appeared in BBM's high end sets (Diamond Heroes, Touch The Game and Genesis) without having in the same year's flagship set.  I decided that I didn't want to get all the cards on the list but just the ones I found interesting for one reason or another (player I liked, only card for a foreign player, etc).  I don't remember how many cards I had originally decided to get but by the time I left for Japan, there were 23 cards I was still looking for.  Between Bits, Mint Hakata and Mint Odawara, I got all 23 of them.  Here's eight of those, one card from pretty much every set I got cards from:

1996 BBM Diamond Heroes #186

1997 BBM Diamond Heroes #154

1998 BBM Diamond Heroes #60

1999 BBM Diamond Heroes #105

2001 BBM Diamond Heroes #5

2005 BBM Touch The Game #009

2013 BBM Genesis #023

2014 BBM Genesis #048

I've become a big fan of the "Great Record" insert sets from BBM's Fusion sets.  I've gotten the complete insert set with my base set every years since 2019 so I decided to go back and get the ones from 2016 to 2018 as well.  The bulk of these I picked up at Quad Sports along with one or two that I got at Coletre.  I needed 65 of the 72 total cards (24 each year) and I came home with 63 of them.  Here's one card from each set:

2016 BBM Fusion #GR24

2017 BBM Fusion #GR21

2018 BBM Fusion #GR19

The other set that I'm trying to complete is the 1999 BBM Mr. Giants set.  This is a biographical set for Shigeo Nagashima but it includes cards of rival pitchers, teammates and players who he managed as well.  I needed 56 cards - roughly half the set - and I came home with 47 of them (and Ryan has since picked up the other nine for me).  I got most of these at Bits with a couple others at Quad Sports and Mint Hakata.  Here's three of the cards:

1999 BBM Mr. Giants #G1

1999 BBM Mr. Giants #G43

1999 BBM Mr. Giants #G82

The 2012 BBM Fighters team set had a three card subset entitled "Kamagaya Rookies" that included cards of three rookies wearing Nippon-Ham's farm team uniforms.  I've had two of the cards - Go Matsumoto and Takumi Ohshima - for a while but tracking down the last - Kensuke Kondoh - has been difficult.  When I've seen it, it's been much more expensive that I was willing to pay.  Luckily, Mint Hakata had it for a very reasonable price.

2012 BBM Fighters #F70

The final cards from my want list are ones that Ryan had picked up for me - the last three "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards I needed from the 2021 BBM Fusion set:

2021 BBM Fusion #FP47

2021 BBM Fusion #FP42

2021 BBM Fusion #FP35

The rest of the cards I'm going to show are just ones that I came across that appealed to me.  First up are three "secret version" parallels from the 2020 BBM 30th Anniversary set.  What's interesting about these is instead of being a photo variant, they're "design variants" - they use the same photo as the original card but the card design mirrors the 1991 BBM design instead of the "regular" 30th Anniversary card design.  I picked these up at Mint Urawa:

2020 BBM 30th Anniversary #124 "Secret Version"

2020 BBM 30th Anniversary #158 "Secret Version"

2020 BBM 30th Anniversary #180 "Secret Version"

Back in 2008 and 2009, BBM issued small figurines of players with baseball cards.  I think the figurines only came with the cards in 2009 and they only did them for a handful of the teams.  Deanna shared some photos with me and I did a post about them way-back-when but I had never seen any in the wild until I was at Bits.  Well, to be entirely accurate, I haven't seen the figurines in the wild but Bits had a couple of lose cards so I picked one up:

2009 BBM Dragons Figure Card #D-07

It's difficult to tell from the scan but the card is much smaller than standard size.  It's about 1.25 inches wide and a little over 3.5 inches high.

The next batch of cards I picked up while happily rummaging through boxes of cards at G-Freak one afternoon.  There's no real rhyme or reason to why I got them, just random cards:

2011 BBM Tohto 80th Memorial #BN07

2011 BBM Tohto 80th Memorial #BN18

2007 BBM Draft Story #LS7

2013 BBM The Trade Stories #BS6

2013 BBM The Trade Stories #BS3

2003 BBM Tigers Victory Road #35

2003 BBM Tigers Victory Road #49

2002 BBM 1st Version #PP6

2010 BBM 1st Version #GG02

This last card is the only non-BBM card in this post.  It's from a 2018 set that Epoch did in conjunction with "The Museum Of Hanshin Koshien Stadium" called "Footprints Of The Tigers".  I think I picked this up at Mint Odawara:

2018 Epoch Footprints Of The Tigers #26