After picking up some mid-70's Calbees at decent prices on COMC a few months back, I decided to take another look and came up with a few more good ones to pick up. Here's two from the 1973/74 set:
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| 1973/74 Calbee #324 Masahiro Doi |
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| 1973/74 Calbee #192 Hiromu Matsuoka |
I am always a sucker for Yakult Atoms cards.
These two are from the 1974/75 set (although COMC had mislabeled the Kinugasa card as being from the 1975/76 set):
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| 1974/75 Calbee #243 Sachio Kinugasa |
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| 1974/75 Calbee #392 Kiyoshi Morimoto |
The Morimoto card is from the "shootout" cards from Series Eight which featured scenes from particular games. This is from a game between the Fighters and Braves on August 8th, 1974 at Jingu Stadium. The Braves won the game 6-0.
COMC also mislabeled this next card as being Koji Yamamoto since he was card #7 in the 1975/76 set. See if you can see why that's not right:
For starters, Yamamoto was right handed and never played for the Braves. But I'm being a little too hard on COMC as it can be extremely difficult to tell the difference between different Calbee sets from the 70's, especially when those sets don't have consistent back designs. The backs of the first series from the 1975/76 set look more like the backs from the 1974/75 set than the rest of the set and the first series from 1977 (well, first series of what we call the "1977 set" which aren't the first,...you know what, nevermind) look very much like the other cards from the 1975/76 set. Anyway, this is really a card showing Clyde Wright of the Giants pitching to Yutaka Fukumoto of the Braves in the 1976 Nippon Series. It's card #7 from the 1977 "Gray Back" set.
Here's the last Calbee card I picked up:
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| 1977 Calbee Gray Back #66 |
In addition to the Calbees, I picked up a couple more recent cards of interest. A couple years back, Kenny (aka Zippy Zappy) of "Torren' Up Cards" gifted me with a ton of cards, including a partial 2019 BBM Brilliant Dragons set. The set was missing three cards - Akira Neo, Raidel Martinez and Joely Rodriguez. I hadn't really though much about completing it but I came across the Neo card a few months back for $1 so I picked it up. Similarly I found the Martinez card on COMC for $1 so I picked it up as well. Now I just need to find the Rodriguez cheap.
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| 2019 BBM Brilliant Dragons #13 |
Along similar lines, Ryan had picked me up a bunch of cards from the 1999 BBM Giants/Yomiuri Shinbum set a while. My base set was two cards short and I had 11 of the 18 "special" cards (basically cards with gold facsimile signatures). COMC had a "special" card for Daisuke Motoki so I picked it up. I don't know how serious I am about trying to complete this set but I do not it not being complete offends my OCD.
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| 1999 BBM Giants/Yomiuri Shinbum #S12 |
The last thing I picked up was the "Baseball's Best" insert card of Ichiro from the 1998 BBM set:
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| 1998 BBM "Baseball's Best" #R2 |
5 comments:
Ah, there is so much good stuff in this post I don't even know where to start commenting!
Those cards are all fantastic additions.
I've really fallen in love with that series in the 74/75 set (shootout as you call it) which that Morimoto card is in. There are a lot with great scenes pictured on them, including that Morimoto.
Also, I can somewhat sympathize with that COMC seller mixing up the first series of the 1977 set with the first series of the 1975-76-77 set. It wasn't until a year or two after I started collecting the 75-76-77 set that I learned that, and I had to purge my set of a few 1977 cards I had erroneously included.
That is a really cool Raidel Martinez card too. He is having an amazing year so far - but even with an ERA that is literally perfect (o.00) the Dragons have already managed to saddle him with a losing record.
Thanks!
I had done a deep dive a while back on the "shootout" or "Exciting Game" cards from the 1973/74 set and I've always meant to do one for the 1974/75 set's cards as well. And I think there's some from the 1975/76/77 set too, right?
I need to be more careful with COMC's listings. There were a couple of cards I picked up in the last batch that they had identified as 1978 Type II but when I got them I realized they Type I cards. Again, 1978 is really difficult but I probably wouldn't have bought the cards if I realized they weren't Type II.
Poor Martinez - it's got to be really frustrating to be an outstanding closer for a bad team. So much pressure in those few save opportunities.
I had found the Joely Rodriguez card from the set for 50 yen yesterday and asked Ryan to pick it up for me. Right around the time I was posting this I got an email from him saying he got it. So I have a complete Brilliant Dragons set.
Hello NPB Card Guy,
Just curious if you could answer this? Besides in boxes/box sets, I know that BBM cards are distributed in SCM as inserts, and "event specials" are distributed at baseball games ... but, do you know how and when "promotional" cards are distributed ... or how and when "book store special" cards are distributed? Thanks for sharing your expertise!
I don't know a whole lot about it. I know that the card shops end up getting sent promo cards by the companies and they usually will pass them on to customers as a bonus for purchases. My last trip to Japan coincided with the publication of the 2019 Epoch NPB set and several shops gave me a couple one card promo packs for the set when I bought cards from them. I suspect that the "book shop specials" are somewhat similar but I don't know that for sure.
Thank you for your reply. I appreciate the information!
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