2009 BBM Masaichi Kaneda Set

In late 2008 through 2009, BBM issued a series of three biographical box sets they called the "Legend Series".  The first two were for two greats who had retired at the end of the 2008 season - Sadaharu Oh and Kazuhiro Kiyohara.  The third (and final) set was for Masaichi Kaneda.  I'd been back-and-forth about getting this set for years but I finally decided to pick it up earlier this year.  I'm glad I did as it's a nice set.

I have to say though that I have no idea why BBM decided to do a Kaneda set in 2009 and, given that Kaneda rarely appears in an OB set, I have no idea why Kaneda agreed to do it (well, other than my favorite Krusty the Clown quote - "They drove a dump truck full of money up to my front door! I'm not made of stone!").  Like almost all BBM box sets, this one has x number of cards in it where x-1 cards are in the base set and the other card is a "special" card - parallel, autograph or memorabilia.  In this particular case, x = 35 and I'm not sure what "special" cards were available.  As usual, I got an opened set.

Having 34 cards in the base set works out well as 34 was the number that Kaneda wore during his career (including his two stints as Lotte Orion manager).  The first 19 cards in the set cover his days with the Kokutetsu Swallows from 1950 to 1964.  This includes a couple cards of him in street clothes.  Unlike some of BBM's other biographical sets, there are no childhood pictures of Kaneda in the set.

#01

#05

#08

#12

 Card #08 commemorates Shigeo Nagashima's first professional game, where Kaneda struck him out four times.  Two of the other cards celebrate the two no-hitters he pitched for the Swallows.

10 of the base cards deal with the five years he spent with the Giants from 1965 to 1969, the first five seasons of the Giants V9 stretch.  These five championships were the only ones of his career, as the Swallows were pretty pathetic during most of his years with them.  There are cards commemorating his 400th (and final) win in 1969 and his retirement ceremony on Opening Day of 1970.  This card shows him getting the final out of the 1967 Nippon Series:

#27

Four of the remaining five cards deal with his days as Lotte Orions manager during the 1970's (nothing for his return in 1990 and 1991).  The fifth card is for his Hall Of Fame induction in 1988, which I used for Card Of The Week a few months back.

#30

#34

Card #30 is the only color card in the entire set.  Card #34 shows the victory parade in downtown Sendai for Lotte's championship in 1974.

You can see all the cards here.  I really like the photography in the set and the cards have a very clean, unobtrusive design.

One card in the Kokutetsu cards kind of stands out - this one showing Kaneda and another player wearing Japan National Team uniforms.  I don't know for sure what this is from - the History Of Uniform indicates that the uniforms were worn in 1951, 1953 and 1956.  I think this picture is from 1956.  I don't know if these were worn during the post season tours by MLB teams.  The Dodgers toured Japan in 1956 but none of the pictures I've seen from the tour show these uniforms.

#19

Some Unknown Menkos

I've picked up a number of old menko cards in the last month or so from Ebay.  A couple of them I have been unable to identify.  Any suggestions anyone has would be helpful.

Kagome was a company that produced a number of sets of rectangular menko in the late 1940's and early 1950's,  The company had a distinctive logo - a six point star.  This Fumio Fujimura card was obviously made from Kagome but the set does not appear in Engel (or at least I haven't found it).  There's a set called Kagome 1 2 3 4 (JCM 52) that is somewhat similar but this card is not from that set.

This Masaichi Kaneda card looks very much like a Kagome card but it does not have the logo.  This is potentially a very early card of Kaneda, perhaps from his rookie year of 1950.

I think this card of Atsushi Otsu of the Tigers is from the same menko set as the "action" cards I wrote about last fall.  It would be from around 1957.

Marusan cards are among the more common menko cards.  They were produced between 1957 and 1964.  A couple of the sets were imported to the US by Mel Bailey and Bud Ackerman in the early to mid 1960s.  Given that the sets are pretty well known, I was surprised to discover that I could not place this Shigeo Nagashima card.  I suspect that it is from one of the JCM 12a-e sets from around 1961 and 1962 but that's really nothing more than a gut feeling.

The last card is of Shigeru Fujio of the Giants.  It's clearly a Marukami "Bat On Right" card from the JCM 14a-g sets from 1959-64.  Based on the size of the text and the location of the team name (and the fact that it's not in parentheses), it looks to me that it's from the 1961 JCM 14d set but it is not listed.  That particular set is the rarest of the "Bat On Right" sets - a couple of the later sets are perhaps the most commonly seen menko cards.

If anyone has any ideas about these cards or can point out to me where I missed them in Engel, please let me know.

2007 Calbee Pack Busting

Got an odd unopened pack of Calbees in the mail today from an Ebay win.  It's a clear cellophane pack with the Calbee logo on it and several cards in it.  From looking at the two visible cards, it was obvious that the cards were from 2007:

Pack Front

Pack Back

There were eight cards in the pack:

I don't know if it was by design, but the pack was all Pacific league and very heavy on Orix and Rakuten.

I'm curious how this pack was distributed.  Obviously the packs distributed with the chip bags only have 1-3 cards in them (depending on the year) and have never been transparent.  What are these from?

The World Is Saved

This discussion on Reddit NPB the other day reveals that there is another place to check out live streams of NPB baseball - a Korean site called WinTV24.  From what I've seen the last two mornings, the NPB games will appear in the channel list when they are available.  Video quality is very good and the streams are from Japanese channels, so you still get to see some of the more entertaining Japanese commercials:


Resist the urge to point out what the "ichi" alien looks like. This is a family blog...'

Can't seem to find the Koshien tournament Opening Ceremony however, so I still do miss Justin.tv...

BBM Scuff Marks

I got a message today from Evan Tokunaga who asked me a question that I don't think I can help him with:

Hello,  I just bought myself my first box of BBM cards.  2013 BBM 2nd Version to be specific.  ...  I had a newbie question I was wondering you could help me with...  Maybe I got a bad batch but it seems like every now and then I see a card or two with a streak/scuff mark that I assume is from when the cards were printed or packaged.  Do you have any advice/tips for either removing them or dealing with them?  I'd appreciate any input. 

I haven't bought much unopened BBM material in years so I don't have much experience with the problem he's talking about.  Has anyone else run into this?  Does anyone have any suggestions?

Well That Sucks

Justin.tv has shutdown.

2014 Calbee Series Two

Lately Calbee's sets are all very similar to each other.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, it just limits the amount of interesting things I can say about them.

So I'm not going to say much about this year's Series Two.  Like Series One, it contains 100 cards in the base set - 84 player cards and 16 cards split between two subsets (or non-premium insert sets).  The 84 cards were split evenly between the 12 teams so there are 7 cards per team.  They are numbered in continuation of Series One, so the numbers run from 85 to 168.  As always, the photography is outstanding:

#120

#113

#140

#148

#088

#129

I really like the way that the orange jumps out on Abe's card.

One minor complaint I have with the set is that 20 of the players appeared in Series One as well -Shunichi Nemoto, Yudai Ohno, Yuya Hasegawa, Yuichi Honda, Takahiro Arai, Shintaro Fujinami, Takashi Toritani, Kenta Maeda, Eishin Soyogi, Masaru Takeda, Yoshihisa Hirano, Yoshio Itoi, Takeya Nakamura, Ginji Akaminai, Takashi Saitoh, Motohiro Shima, Yasuhiro Ogawa, Sho Aranami, Daisuke Miura, and Hayato Sakamoto.  Just seems kind of odd to have almost a quarter of the Second Series repeat players in the First Series.

The 16 subset cards are split between the 12 card Opening Game Starting Pitcher set and the 4 card checklists.  The Opening Game Starting Pitcher set is pretty much self explanatory - it contains the starting pitcher from Opening Day for each of the twelve teams.  The checklists feature scenes from the first week of the season - Motonishi Tanishige's first win as Dragons manager, Seichi Uchikawa's hero interview from Opening Day, and the first wins for two rookie pitchers - Allen Kuri of the Carp and Ayumu Ishikawa of the Marines:

#OP-09

#C-5

#C-6

As always you can see all the cards (plus the Star inserts, the "Special Box Limited Edition" AVG Leader cards and the mail-in Lucky cards over at Jambalaya.  Ryan did a post on the set a while back as well.