I picked this 1983 Calbee Randy Bass card up the other day.  He has five cards in that set (217, 330, 355, 478 and 561) which was his rookie year in NPB.  Back in the 80s Calbee sets would routinely contain more than one regular card of players.  Actually they did that in the 90s too (when I have time I need to try to figure out which year it was that they stopped doing that).  Anyway I already have some of the other ones, but this one had eluded me for several years. 

This one is his first card in the set (#217) which I think counts as his true NPB rookie card among the five in my book (though since he played in MLB and had several American cards before that and it doesn't seem to be recognized as a rookie card among Japanese collectors).  

I'm actively collecting the 1983 set and outside of the hyper rare short printed series I have more than half of it complete so this is a nice addition.  

Its also a nice addition to my "cards with bat boys/girls in bizarre uniforms visible in the background" collection.  The horizontal red/white/blue stripes on them are pretty cool.  NPB teams in the 70s and 80s had some very eye-catching uniforms for them, including some bright yellow ones noticable on a few cards from the 70s.  These days they are a lot more toned down, and the way Calbee crops their photos you can't really see anything in the background anyway.  But in the 70s and 80s these were a nice detail that showed up on a few cards.

 I got the remaining 5 figures I needed to complete my 2012 Georgia Coffee Pro Baseball Foreigner Helpers set!  Ralph Bryant, Orestes Destrade, Randy Bass, Bobby Rose and Alonzo Powell arrived in the mail from a Yahoo Auction seller to finish them up.

I really do like these guys.  They just cheer me up in a way that I need in the middle of a pandemic.
 The player selection is pretty good, all these guys were all stars. Everyone played during the 1980s or 1990s.  Randy Bass and Boomer Wells with their 1983 debuts are the earliest, while Bobby Rose, who played his last season in 2000, is the latest.  Rose was the only guy still playing when I arrived in Japan in 1999 and thus is the only one I remember as an active player here.
I got two of the booklets (for Bobby Rose and Orestes Destrade) that came with the figures.  They are pretty cool, featuring a picture of the figure, a player bio and an ad for a Georgia brand battery charger on the front.
 And the back has a checklist of the whole set, along with an illustrated diagram showing how to assemble the figure for those who may have difficulty with whole the "round peg goes in round hole" thing.
This means I still "need" the booklets for the other 6 in order to have the things really complete, but I'm pretty satisfied to go without.  The figures themselves are enough for me.

This is a 1983 Calbee Randy Bass card that I have in my collection.  Its my favorite card of his.  There are a lot of Calbee cards from the 70s and early 80s which have that Pepsi sign, which I think was in Korakuen Stadium, in the background and it provides a kind of striking backdrop to a guy swinging a bat.

This is also his first Japanese card (or at least one of them, he has a few in the 83 set), but its not considered his rookie card.

Sports Card Magazine for some reason explicitly excludes foreign players en masse from having their first card designated as a rookie card.  Only Japanese players are allowed to have rookie cards in Japanese sets.

This rubs me the wrong way.  Of course Bass already had cards from his MLB days but that is besides the point - Japanese players who go to MLB usually have previously issued cards from their NPB days but that doesn't mean that their first MLB cards aren't recognized as rookie cards in the US.  Also, this rule applies even to guys who have never appeared on a MLB card, as is the case with some foreign players who came straight from the minors or other leagues.

I can't tell if this is being driven by some anti-foreign sentiment - an extension of the view that foreign players are just temporary helpers and not really members of whatever team they play for, so they shouldn't have rookie cards either because its not "their" league after all.  Or is it more part of an inferiority complex - a lot of these guys did play for MLB teams so their first card as an NPB player is them taking a step down the career ladder rather than up like most rookies are. So maybe not designating their first card a rookie card is meant to be more an act of deference rather than exclusion.

Either way, I think its a stupid rule and this card perfectly illustrates why.  Randy Bass had a very short MLB career, but was one of the best players in NPB during the 1980s, racking up numerous important records (and famously being shut down in his quest for the big one).  He is literally the central figure in one of the biggest legends in Japanese baseball history (the curse of the Colonel). His career is defined way more by his time in NPB than MLB, yet this rule means he doesn't have an NPB rookie card.  I'm not necessarily saying the question of whether a guy has an NPB rookie card is super important, but to me the only sensible definition of an NPB rookie card is that it be the first regular card of an NPB player, regardless of where they come from.

 I have been so obsessed over the past couple of years with trying to finish my 1987 Calbee set (92% of the way there!!) that it kind of escaped my attention that I am also closing in on that set's predecessor: 1986 Calbee.  So I thought I would do a little post on how that project is going since I have started to really get earnest about knocking this one off the wantlist and I might even complete it before I finish the 87s.

From the Calbee mini card era of the 1980s, the 1986 set is probably the easiest to complete (unless you count the 55 card first series of 1990 Calbee as a set on its own).  At 250 cards it is significantly smaller than the 1985 set (465 cards) or the 1987 set (382 cards) that flank it in the Calbee catalogue. It is also super helpful that, unlike those sets, the 1986 set does not have any short printed series, so all the cards are about equally as hard (or easy) to find.

Design wise the set is basically the same as all the others from the 80s and not much need be said about that.  The set is sort of notable for having one of the earliest hot rookie cards in the Japanese hobby, featuring the rookie card of Kazuhiro Kiyohara.  Sports Card Magazine identifies card 81 in the set as his official rookie, but he actually has several regular cards in the set, this one is #97:
 There is a really interesting parallel between the Kiyohara rookie and the other hot rookie card of 1986, Jose Canseco.  I remember when Canseco's 86 Donruss reached a high water mark of 100$ in Beckett and was probably the most popular card in the hobby around 1990 or so.  Kiyohara's rookie card reached a similar peak (8000 Yen).

Canseco of course had his career sidelined by injury and his well known use of performance enhancing drugs.  Despite putting up impressive career numbers (462 home runs, 1 ball bounced off of head to give opposing team home run) these kept him out of the hall of fame and he is basically an outcast in the baseball world today, a perennial weirdo who is probably just as well known for not being able to beat Danny Bonaduce in a celebrity boxing match as he is for being baseball's first 40/40 man.

Kiyohara is something close to a Japanese equivalent of Canseco.  Like Canseco Kiyohara was a power hitting superstar in the late 80s - 90s who had a mix of injuries and drug problems sideline him in the latter half of his career.  And despite finishing with even more impressive numbers than Canseco - being a member of both the 500 home run and 2000 hit clubs - he hasn't been inducted into the Japanese baseball hall of fame and may never be.  In 2016 he made headlines by being arrested and convicted of drug possession.  Since that he has basically been shunned by the baseball world, even having his high school bat removed from an exhibit covering the history of the Koshien tournament.

So the 1986 Calbee Kiyohara rookie is about as prized today as a 1986 Donruss Canseco - kind of a neat throwback card but not one anybody pays serious money for anymore.  Which is a big win for those of us putting this set together on a budget!!!

As with any set from the mid-late 80s, my favorite cards are always those of Randy Bass in one of those awesome 80s Tigers batting helmets!!!

My set is actually quite well along, I have 180 out of the 250 cards, which leaves me just 70 to go.  I added a few of those last week and am scouring Yahoo Auctions to get some more to scratch off my checklist!

Among my favorite recent purchases has been a stack of 52 cards from the 1985 Calbee set.  This is one set I only had a handful of cards for so I figured this would be a good way to get a start on building the whole thing.

The lot had some beauties in it, like this card with an excellent in action photo of the Iron Man Sachio Kinugasa:

Or Randy Bass in those awesome 80s Tigers uniforms with the white helmets:


What surprised me most on receiving these cards (they were a Yahoo Auction purchase) was the condition.  Every one of them looked brand new like they had just come from the bag.  This almost never happens with Calbee cards from before the mid-1990s, especially not in big lots.  I had bought them assuming they were the typical somewhat beat up lot that usually appears (the photos were a bit out of focus and the seller, who doesn't specialize in cards, didn't mention the condition int he description).

This is what the stack (left) looks like in comparison to a typical stack of 80s Calbee cards in my collection (right):

One thing I really like about the 1985 set which sets it apart from others is that a lot of the cards have hand drawn artwork of the players that was sent in by kids on  them.  These were winners of a contest to draw the best picture of each player and I think it is absolutely fantastic that Calbee did that.  Not only are the color drawings a big improvement on the normally bland card backs of their typical 1980s sets, it is also quite endearing that they would do that.  Its something it would be hard to imagine a card company doing today.

With Hanshin having trounced the Giants 4 straight (yes!) and about to play in their first Japan Series in over a decade (interestingly also played against the Hawks), there has been a lot of talk about 1985, the last time they actually won it all.

I picked up a couple of cards of Randy Bass, the key player on that 1985 Tigers team, off of Yahoo Auctions that arrived today.  They are both from the 1984 Calbee set, which I am starting to make a more serious effort at putting together (more on that in another post). I kind of like these cards.  The one on the left, from the "big hat" part of the set, has a pensive looking Bass staring at the ground.  The one on the right, from the "little hat" part of the set, is kind of an awkward photo with his face mostly lost in shadow, but I love the pinstripes of the hat that the 84 Tigers wore.

I have a soft spot for the Tigers and Randy Bass is one of my all time favorite NPB players, so I am very tormented about who to root for in this series.  I have spent 4 years of my life living in Fukuoka as a Hawks fan and 5 years of my life living in Hyogo prefecture as a Tigers fan (plus 2 years living in Nagoya, my current city, as a Dragons fan).  It is very troubling because both teams have things that strongly attract me to them.  I only left Fukuoka in 2012 so this year's team still has a lot of the players I used to root for when living there - Matsuda, Uchikawa, Morifuku, Settsu, Honda and company.  On the other hand, I kind of fell in love with this Tigers team.  Going into that series everyone was saying the Giants would just walk over them easily, and seeing the Tigers turn the tables and make Kyojin look awful.....it was immensely impressive. 

I will have to think long and hard about this before game time......