Calbees from Ryan

I wanted to do a quick post on the Calbee cards that Ryan sent me in that big box of cards last month.

I had found four Calbee cards on Mandarake's website that I was interested in but I didn't want to spend $30 to have them ship me them so I asked Ryan to pick them up for me.  We'll start with those.

This card shows a matchup between the Nippon-Ham Fighters and Lotte Orions at Korakuen Stadium in Tokyo on April 3, 1976 which was Opening Day.  What's significant about this game is it was the first regular season game in Japan to be played on artificial turf.  Only 15,000 fans were in attendance as the Fighters won 8-3 - you can see there's a lot of empty seats:

1975/76/77 Calbee #503

Calbee experimented a little in their 1993 set with multiple exposure photos:

1993 Calbee #23

1993 Calbee #19

I'm pretty sure these were the only 1993 cards that were essentially collages but there was at least one other unusual photo:

1993 Calbee #26

Hideki Irabu spent his last two seasons in NPB with the Hanshin Tigers in 2003 and 2004.  For some reason, there aren't many cards of him as a Tiger.  There's are five BBM cards from 2003 (All Stars, Nippon Series, Tigers Victory Road (Prologue) and two cards in the Tigers Victory Road Championship set), three BBM cards from the 2004 Tigers set (including an insert card) and one 2004 Calbee card.  So no BBM flagship cards and no cards in the "regular" 2003 BBM Tigers set.  I have four of the seven BBM cards but I didn't have the Calbee card.  I found an auction for it on Yahoo! Japan Auctions and asked Ryan to grab it for me:

2004 Calbee #M-07

The big lot of Lions cards I asked Ryan to pick up for me had one Calbee card that I didn't already have - this rookie card of Hideaki Wakui:

2005 Calbee #076

Ryan will throw in cards that I'm not expecting - usually these are doubles he has.  I was surprised to find this 2022 Sadaharu Oh reprint card in the box - Calbee issued a bunch of reprints of old cards when they were celebrating their 50th Anniversary that year and this reprint of card #237 from the 1973/74 set was included in Series One:

2022 Calbee #M-02