Japanese Baseball Cards: Mail Days

Friday, October 18, 2024

Mail Days

I've gotten a couple packages of cards in the mail over the last week or so and I thought I'd do a quick post about what I've received.

First up was a surprise package from Kenny - aka Zippy Zappy. I had thought with his recent move to Japan that my days of being on the receiving end of his generosity were at an end but an envelope from overseas showed up at my house last Thursday with five baseball cards in it:

2024 Calbee Series Two #094 (Soichiro Yamazaki)

2024 Calbee Series Two #119 (Koki Kitayama)

2024 Calbee Series Two #C-12 (Chusei Mannami)

2024 Calbee Series Two #S-28

2024 Bandai "Pro Baseball Deforme" #BDC1-M03

I was kind of excited about that last card as I hadn't gotten any of these yet. The cards were given away with bags of what's basically a bar snack called kaki no tane. Typically they are a mix of soy crackers and peanuts although these packages apparently don't include peanuts. I have never tried these myself but Sean wrote a post about how gross he thinks they are. Kenny, on the other hand, told me that he's been eating the chips since he was a kid and really likes them. He actually bought the bag for the chips, not the card.

Ryan has picked up a couple of these cards for me and has hinted that he might send me a bag of chips as well so perhaps I'll get a chance to try them for myself.

The second package was some stuff I ordered from COMC:

1974/75 Calbee #569 (Yukitsuru Matsumoto)

1975/76/77 Calbee #364 (Yutaka Enatsu)

2019 BBM Infinity #03

2018 BBM Fighters #M2

2021 Epoch Dragons Rookies & Stars #SA-01

Usually Epoch's autographs are on-card ones but the Rosario one is a sticker.

I've already talked about some of the cards I got from Jason but there was a lot more in that package. I knew I was getting this jersey card of Yuki Nomura from the 2024 BBM Genesis set:

But I didn't know he was going to throw in a couple serially numbered parallels of "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards from this year's BBM 2nd Version set:

2024 BBM 2nd Version #FP03

2024 BBM 2nd Version #FP13

2024 BBM 2nd Version #FP17

2024 BBM 2nd Version #FP28

Jason had told me he had some KBO cards he wanted to send me but he didn't tell me how many. There were five from the 2019 SCC Premium Collection 2 set, 35-ish from the 2021 SCC Rainbow set and 30-ish from the 2022 SCC Rainbow set. I didn't have maybe one card from any of those sets so they were all new to me. I'll just show a couple cards from each set: