Calbees From The Trip

I wanted to a post about the Calbee baseball cards I brought home from the trip.  Now, I've already talked about the 2023 Hawks set, the 2024 Series One Team Home Run King set and the 2014 3-D cards but I picked up 25 or so vintage Calbees as well.

I'd only had seven vintage Calbee cards on my want list before I left and I was somewhat surprised to pick up six of those cards while I was there.  I was also surprised at how many card shops carried vintage Calbee.  I had gone looking for Calbees (and found them) at the Mandarake stores in Fukuoka and Nakano as well as an antique toy store in Osaka called Kinki's but I also came across them at several Mint stores.  Mint Ikebukuro had a bunch of binders full of them which wasn't TOO surprising since I'd gotten vintage Calbees there before but I was not expecting to see them at Mint Sendai and Mint Fukuoka Parco.  I brought home more than I had expected to get.  I should mention that not all of these cards I'm going to show I found in stores - a few of them are ones that I had asked Ryan to order from Mandarake for me a few months back.

* Despite the name, it didn't carry THOSE kind of toys

I'm not showing all the vintage Calbees I brought home in this post, however.  I completed the subset of multi-player cards from the 1975/76/77 Calbee "monster" set and I want to do a post just for them.  But without further ado, here's the other cards.  First up are three cards from the 1973/74 set.  

I really liked the Koshien Stadium stands in the background of this Junichi Ikeada card:

1973/74 Calbee #118

I have a lot of Shigeo Nagashima cards but something about this photo was hard to resist:

1973/74 Calbee #148

It's a staged photo but I still think this is a cool shot of Toshiro Yanagida:

1973/74 Calbee #178

On to the 1974/75 set.  Here's Tatsuhiko Kimata putting his shin guards on in what I assume is Nagoya Stadium (I mean, I don't know since I didn't get to go there...):

1974/75 Calbee #39

I find it hard to resist Yutaka Fukumoto cards, especially when he's doing baserunning:

1974/75 Calbee #817

I've been coming across more and more mid-70's Calbee cards that show views of ballparks lately.  I'm not sure how many there are but I try to grab them when I can.  I came across this card at Kinki's - it shows the smoke from fireworks on the field at Jingu Stadium on Opening Day, 1975 when the Swallows were hosting the Carp:

1974/75 Calbee #733

I was able to get four of the last five "Florida Project" cards I was looking for at Mint Ikebukuro.  Here's Shigeru Takada in the batting cage:

1974/75 Calbee #697

I'm not sure if this shot of Isao Shibata is from batting practice or an exhibition game:

1974/75 Calbee #699

I hadn't noticed when I bought it that this card of Shitoshi Sekimoto had been..uh..."annotated" by someone over the years.  I may have to see if I can find a replacement for it sometime:

1974/75 Calbee #708

I'd really like to know who Shigeo Nagashima is talking to on this card.  It's probably a Dodgers coach (since the Giants were training at Vero Beach) but I've wondered if it might have been someone from the Dragons (maybe manager Wally Yonamine) since Chunichi also did spring training in Florida in 1975.  It probably isn't, though, since I think the Dragons' windbreakers at the time were a lighter blue and I'd have expected that the card would have identified anyone from the Dragons but it doesn't say who the other person is:

1974/75 Calbee #713

Here's some cards from the 1975/76/77 "monster" set.  Here's Yasushi Tao:

1975/76/77 Calbee #1295

This is a multi-player card but not the kind that I mentioned above.  This card shows four members of the Dragons' starting rotation - Senichi Hoshino (#20), Yukitsuru Matsumoto (#21), Takamasa Suzuki (#29) and Masafumi Takeda (#46):

1975/76/77 Calbee #378

Takenori Emoto of the Tigers:

1975/76/77 Calbee #669

I picked up this well loved card of Kazuki Saeki of the Carp at Kinki's and I was somewhat puzzled by it.   None of my resources on uniforms indicates that the Carp wore a black uniform in 1975.  It wasn't until I started looking at it more carefully that I realized that, like the Sekimoto card above, it had been modified by someone else after the fact:

1975/76/77 Calbee #145

I did some searching and found what the card originally looked like:

Here's Kohei Shimamoto of the Buffaloes diving back to a base:

1975/76/77 Calbee #471

This is one of the cards I asked Ryan to pick up for me from Mandarake.  It's another stadium shot - this one shows the Carp and the Tigers lined up at Hiroshima Municipal Stadium on Opening Day, 1976:

1975/76/77 Calbee #476

Skipping forward a few years, here's a card of Adrian Garrett from the 1979 Calbee set:

1979 Calbee #5

Here's another card I asked Ryan to pick up for me.  This one's from the 1991 set:

1991 Calbee #118

I picked up this 1999 Star card of Kazuhiro Kiyohara at G-Freak:

1999 Calbee #S-25

I picked up a couple more recent cards.  Here's a card from the 2005 Interleague subset showing Jose Parra of Orix and Mitsunobu Takahashi of Chunichi:

2005 Calbee #IL-06

And lastly, here's a 2007 "League Champions" subset card showing the Fighters celebrating beating the Hawks in the 2006 Climax Series to go on to the Nippon Series.  That's Hichori Morimoto about to hug Atsunori Inaba:

2007 Calbee #LC-1

With that, I have pretty much finished all the posts I planned on doing about cards I brought home from this last trip.