Japanese Baseball Cards: Cards From Suruga-ya

Thursday, January 12, 2023

Cards From Suruga-ya

I recently came across another on-line Japanese store that I could order baseball cards from - Suruga-ya. They seem to have a fairly extensive collection of baseball cards at reasonable prices. I found NPB cards from BBM, Epoch, Calbee and Topps as well as some food and team issues. Their inventory is mostly from the last 10 years or so but there's some older cards as well, although the oldest I came across was probably 1991. (UPDATE - I've realized since I've posted this that I've been told about this store by several people, including Ryan, Dan and Jason. I've no idea why it took me so long to check it out)

Establishing an account and ordering cards is pretty straight forward. There's really only two drawbacks that I've seen with the site. The first is the same issue that I have with Mandarake right now - the only shipping options are either EMS or DHL so shipping is potentially very expensive. I placed an order last week for 31 cards for 4250 yen and shipping ran 2950 yen! There was also a 500 yen "commission" fee so the total was 7700 yen (which worked out to about $62 or roughly $2 per card).

The second issue I have is that it's a very difficult site to search. I tried searching for set names and had very little luck. What I found worked the best was player names, The other thing I tried was "promotion" which led me to a number of team issued cards. But I had to wade through a bunch of listings of various game cards as well. There doesn't seem to be a way to increase the number of items listed on the screen at a time - you're stuck with 24 - and while there are ways to filter the listings based on release date, a lot of cards don't have release dates associated with them. I'm pleased with the order I put in with them but I'm not sure I'll order from them again - at least not until SAL becomes available again (if ever).

But I got some cool cards from this order so I thought I'd share some of them. First off are two Calbee Star cards for Munetaka Murakami which were 210 yen apiece:

2019 Calbee #S-64

2021 Calbee #S-48

Ryan had gotten me the 2018 Epoch Lions Rookies & Stars set a few years back but it didn't have any of the photo variations in it. I picked up the Takeya Nakamura one for 210 yen:

2018 Epoch Lions Rookies & Stars #55

I had held a complete 2019 Epoch Lions Rookies & Stars set in my hand in a store in Japan, weighing whether or not to buy it. I ultimately decided not to and I don't regret that decision but I decided to pick up Nakamura's card from it for 210 yen:

2019 Epoch Lions Rookies & Stars #55

Back in November Epoch did an ugly parallel version of one quarter of their NPB set called "NPB Luxury Collection" and I had figured out that there was only one card that was a significant change from the equivalent card in the original set. I got the card (which shows Akira Neo as a pitcher) for...you guessed it...210 yen:

2022 Epoch NPB Luxury Collection #037

This 2012 Bandai Owners League 04 card of Lee Dae-Ho wearing a retro Kintetsu Buffaloes uniform was just 50 yen:

2012 Bandai Owners League 04 #037

This card featuring an awesome photo of Tomoaki Kanemoto was originally given away in 2010 with cans of Georgia Coffee. It was only 70 yen:

2010 Georgia Coffee #012

Speaking of cards given away with food items, here's a 2019 Nippon-Ham "Home Run Sausage" card of Yuto Takahama that ran me 50 yen:

2019 Nippon-Ham #2019-N59

I picked up some team issued cards. I think I had seen some of these 2013 Hawks cards on Ebay a few years back but they were a little more expensive than I wanted to pay. These appear to have some sort of tie-in with the team's spring training camp in Miyazaki. This particular card was only 210 yen:

I picked up a couple cards from a 2015 "Hawks Player Card" set done with BBM. These were 50 yen each:

2015 Hawks Players Card #025

2015 Hawks Players Card #001

I think this Kensuke Kondoh card was a giveaway at a Fighters game last year. It may have been sponsored by Hotto Motto as the fast food restaurant's logo is on the back of it. At 380 yen, this was one of the more expensive cards I bought:

I have a bunch of these Giants OB cards that were giveaways at certain games in 2013 but I didn't have this particular Shigeo Nagashima card showing his infamous "swing so hard his helmet fell off" pose. It was yet another 210 yen csrd:

Finally I got a bunch of cards from the Lions "L Collection Vol. 1" set that they did with BBM last year. I bought 15 cards from the set for 80 yen apiece. I got 13 of the 30 base set cards and two of the six insert cards. I won't show all of them but here's a couple of the base set cards and one of the inserts: