There was a bit of a surprise over the weekend when some Twitter users in Japan started reporting that they saw bags of potato chips for a new Calbee set in stores in Fukuoka. It was a 36 card team set for the Hawks which led to some speculation that there might be sets for other teams as well.
It took a couple of days for "official" information about the set to finally be released. There's only a Hawks set and it's apparently to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of the opening of Fukuoka Dome. I don't think there's any inserts or parallels with it - the checklist simply lists the 36 cards.
I'm seeing some of these cards show up on Yahoo! Japan Auctions for around 300 yen each which would put a complete set at over 10,000 yen. I'm hoping that we'll see cheaper prices after a while but without the chase cards to drive the speculators and make the base cards cheap, I worry the cards will remain high in price. I guess we'll have to see what happens.
I suspect that the cards' release was delayed as they have "2023" on the front of them. They use the same design* as the regular 2023 cards although I think the ten players from the original set have different photos in this one. The backs have the player stats through the end of August which may be more evidence that the set was delayed. Or that Topps is having a bad influence on the up-to-date-ness of Japanese baseball cards.
*Yeah, I know, doesn't EVERY Calbee set use the same design? But 2023 was an odd-numbered year, so the player's names were in English on the front
H/T to Sean for finding the articles on this set for me.
2 comments:
I think you are right about these being an (extremely) delayed release. In addition to the cards are being released with "2023" on them even though we are already a month into 2024, there is also the fact that the event they are purporting to be commemorating - the 30th anniversary of the Fukuoka Dome - also happened almost a year ago (first game was played there in April, 1993).
That might also explain why there were zero announcements about these prior to them just magically appearing in stores out of nowhere. Maybe Calbee itself didn't know when they'd be ready for sale until so close to the date they released them that they couldn't do any of their usual PR updates, etc in advance.
I'm not sure if this bodes ill or well for Calbee's regular set release dates this year.
Hopefully the lateness doesn't spread. I don't want to see Japan go the way of Taiwan with the sets being 2-3 years late. CPBL has only just recently released their 2021 set.
Post a Comment