I had mentioned the other day in my post about the Calbee cards I had brought home from my trip that I had completed my subset of the "multi-player cards" from the 1975/76/77 "monster" Calbee set.  Now, by "multi-player card", I don't mean a card that shows a photo with multiple players in it.  I mean a card that has multiple player photos on it - think of Topps' old "Rookie Stars" cards with pictures of two to four players on them.

There were 13 of these cards altogether and they were in Series 12 and 13 which were issued in 1976 - probably the spring.  There are eleven team cards that feature the manager (except in one case) and eleven players from each team except Lotte (whose parent company did not allow the rival snack company to include cards of their players until 1985).  I thought I'd go through all eleven cards and identify the players on each one.

#400

#410

#415

#425

#430

#439

#442

#452

#455

#461

#464

You may have noticed that the Lions have a coach (Takashi Eda) and not a manager on their card.  The Lions manager for 1976 was supposed to be - believe it or not - Leo Durocher.  He'd signed a contract but the 71 year old ended up cancelling out due to illness.  Masakazu Kito ended up being named manager during training camp that season - I'm guessing it was after the cards went to press.

I only had five of these team cards before I went to Japan.  I had asked Ryan to pick up four of the six I needed (the Tigers, Hawks, Fighters and Whales) from Mandarake a couple months back and they were among the cards he gave me when we met up in Tokyo.  I got the last two I needed (the Giants and the Lions) at Kinkies in Osaka.

Here's what the back of one of these cards looks like:

This is the back of the Hankyu Braves card.  The line just under the team logo identifies the team's home stadium (Nishinomiya Stadium).  The next line says the team was founded in 1936 (Showa 11).  The following lines say that the team has won six Pacific League pennants (1967, 1968, 1969, 1971, 1972 and 1975 or Showa 42, 43, 44, 46, 47 and 50) and one Nippon Series championship (1975 or Showa 50).  Their record in 1975 was 64-59-7 (which was a combined 1st and 2nd half record as the Pacific League was doing a split season format at the time).  The last line is a little weird but I think it's listing the team's winning percentage from 1975 - it was .520 and I think the "5" is the tenths digit in .520 and the "2" is the hundreths digit.  Some of the other teams have three digits on this line (although the Dragons card is missing this line altogether).

The remaining two "multi-player cards" are for each league's statistical leaders from 1975.  The Pacific League card has ten players on it while the Central League one only has eight.  The reason for the difference is that the two cards don't list the same statistical categories.

#404

Pacific League Leaders

#420

In 1975, the Yomiuri Giants did part of their spring training as guests of the Los Angeles Dodgers in Vero Beach, Florida, USA.  This would be the fourth time that the Giants visited the Sunshine State, having been guests of the Dodgers previously in 1961, 1967 and 1971, and they would return again in 1981.  What sets 1975 apart from the other visits is that it is documented on baseball cards.

I've posted about this before but there is a 24-ish 22 card subset in the 1974/75 Calbee set that features photos of Giants players taken in Vero Beach.  The cards start with number 693 and go to 714 either 715 or 716 UPDATE - finally saw card #716 and while it's of Oh, it's not from this subset UPDATE TO THE UPDATE - also saw card #715 and it's not from Florida either.  I only had three of these cards when I did the original post but I've added a few over the years - most recently as part of a big order from COMC - so I now have 12 cards which is roughly half the subset.  I'm not sure how serious I am about trying to complete this subset but I thought I'd do an updated post showing the cards I have so far.

According to the back of each card, the Giants were in Vero Beach from March 1st to March 17th.  This first card shows the team jogging on the warning track of a ballpark.  I'd originally assumed that this was Holman Stadium in Vero Beach but I'm not so sure anymore.  Holman appears to have had a berm in the outfield behind a wire fence as opposed to the more traditional fence with advertising.  Also note the flags flying on the left side of the photo - there's a US flag along with a Canadian flag.  Either this is Vero Beach and the Giants are playing the Expos or this is actually Daytona City Island Ballpark (now Jackie Robinson Ballpark), spring training home for the Montreal Expos during much of the 1970's (it certainly resembles the outfield wall in the background of a bunch of 1977 Expos cards):

1974/75 Calbee #693

This next card shows another group shot of the team, this time lined up along the first baseline.  It looks to me that this is at the same ballpark as the other card but the flag on the right flagpole doesn't look like a Canadian one - it's probably the Japan flag:

1974/75 Calbee #694

This next card is my favorite one in the subset, showing Sadaharu Oh in the batting cage with a bunch of Atlanta Braves players watching him hit.  Given the stands in the background, I suspect this photo was taken at West Palm Beach Municipal Stadium, the spring training home for the Braves at the time:

1974/75 Calbee #695

1975 was Shigeo Nagashima's first year as Giants manager.  Here he is with pitcher Shoji Sadaoka:

1974/75 Calbee #696

Here's another Sadaharu Oh card:

1974/75 Calbee #700

Toshimitsu Suetsugu batting:

1974/75 Calbee #701

Another great shot of Oh in the batting cage:

1974/75 Calbee #702

This next card shows Giants pitcher Kazumi Takahashi pitching against an unnamed Montreal Expos batter.  Once again I suspect that this was taken at the ballpark in Daytona, especially since the ad on the outfield wall behind Takahashi has the Expos logo on it:

1974/75 Calbee #703

Masaru Tomita batting in a game.  I suspect that this photo was actually taken at Holman Stadium in Vero Beach:

1974/75 Calbee #705

Officially this is a card of Kazumasa Kono who's the player catching the ball but that's Takeshi Ueda (#2) behind him with I think Tomita to the left of Ueda - I'm assuming this is infield practice and Tomita's the only other infielder with a uniform number in the 20's (#25).  I have no idea who the Dodger's coach wearing #75 is - if anyone knows, please let me know:

1974/75 Calbee #710

Another card featuring Nagashima - there are seven total in the subset:

1974/75 Calbee #711

The final card is another one of Oh in a batting cage - there are sixfive cards of Oh in the subset:

1974/75 Calbee #712

That's all the Calbee cards I have depicting the Giants doing spring training in Vero Beach (or elsewhere in Florida) but I should mention that there are also cards (stickers) in the 1975 NST "Mr Baseball" set that show scenes of the Giants in the US.  It's not clear how many of them there are, however, and I only have two that I know for sure fall into this category.  The first is this card showing Nagashima with Expos manager Gene Mauch:

1975 NST #189

I should mention that Mauch is not identified in the sticker album - the text for this card implies that it's Walt Alston.  Engel identifies two similar cards in the set - one showing Nagashima with Stan Wasiak who would have been the manager of the Dodger's Triple-A Albuquerque team in 1975 (#188) and the other showing him with someone who might be Royals manager Jack McKeon (#190).  Unfortunately I have neither of these cards.

What I do have is a card I've shown several times in the past showing Giants pitcher Tsuneo Horiuchi pitching to Ron Cey of the Dodgers:

1975 NST #224

For years now I've been noticing an odd phenomenon in Calbee's annual baseball card sets - there will be several players each year who appear in one of the subsets but don't have a "regular" player card.  I decided to sit down and figure out how often this happens.  I've got every complete Calbee set since 2012 so it was pretty trivial to figure this out for every set from then to last year - obviously this year's set isn't completely out yet so I can't make any conclusions about it yet.

Some notes on my methodology - there were a couple subsets I didn't take into consideration.  I ignored any subset that didn't primarily include active players (obviously) so I didn't count the "Memorial" subset Calbee did in 2012 featuring reprinted Calbee cards (although about a third of this subset did have active players in it).  For similar reasons I didn't include the "Managers" subsets from the 2015 and 2018 sets (or the two managers who appeared in the 2016 "First Win" subset).  I also didn't consider any of the players in the subsets featuring the previous years' first round draft picks from the 2013, 2017 and 2018 sets (with two exceptions) since typically these players don't have "regular" cards - although a couple of them did in 2018.  (The exceptions are Shohei Ohtani in 2013 since he also appeared in the "All Star" subset and Kotaro Kiyomiya in 2018 because he also appeared in the "Exciting Scene" subset.)  I'm also not including the "Star" insert cards or the checklist cards.  Bear in mind that if I had included any of these subsets, the following counts would have been worse.

What I found was that there were 89 instances of a player appearing in one or more subsets and not having a "regular" card in Calbee's set between 2012 and 2022 which is an average of a little over eight a year.  Here's the full list:

I want to finish up my series on Calbee's history with a post about the pack wrappers and chip bags.  I'm going to limit this to just items I have in my collection - for more information check out this post Sean did on some unopened packs he had from the 1980s (which then references some posts from the "Calbee Card Institute" blog).

I've been fortunate enough to pick up a number of unopened Calbee packs over the years.  They have not remained unopened for long, however, and I wasn't always good about minimizing the damage to the wrapper when opening the pack.  But I've tried to keep at least one example wrapper of every Calbee set that I've opened.  For the older sets there are often more than one wrapper design for a set.

When Calbee started out, each pack contained only one card.  The packs were not actually attached to the potato chip bags.  The shopkeeper who was selling the chips would keep the packs behind the counter and would distribute them to customers who bought the bags of chips.

The oldest set I have a wrapper for is the huge 1975-76-77 set.  Since both sides of the wrapper had the same design I scanned them both to give a sense of what an unopened wrapper would look like.

IIRC I pulled card #712 (Clyde Wright) out of this pack which would indicate that it was issued in 1976.

The next wrappers I have are from 1979.  Again these have the same design on both sides but since I did a better job opening them, I'm only scanning one side.  Despite there being three different designs, all three of the cards I pulled were from the "May Best" set so it doesn't appear that the wrapper design was specific to the Calbee series (or subset or whatever you want to call the 1979 sets).

The packs would have pretty much the same appearance for the next ten years, only changing in size (Calbee dropped the card size in the middle of the second series in 1980) and color occasionally.  Here are two packs from the 1980 set - these are the same size as the 1979 packs so they're from one or both of the first two series that year:

I think the vertical text on the right side says something about carefully cutting open the pack, something that I obviously didn't do.

Here are five wrappers from 1981.  I don't remember which cards I pulled from them so I don't know which series they were from.

Again the reverse side for all the packs had text on it - I think it says something about how to send in redemption cards:

Here's a pack from 1983 that illustrates what I said before about the packs looking very similar from year to year:

The other side looks the same as the 1981 packs as well:

As do both sides of the 1985 packs, although the color was green that year:

Back to blue for 1986 but there's a bit of change to one side of the design:

The next set I have a pack from is 1989.  This is the first pack I have that has the year on it but I don't know that the 1987 and 1988 packs did not.  Both sides of the pack were the same:

The player drawing disappeared with the 1990 packs.  Calbee issued their set that year in two sizes with the first series being the same size as the cards from the 1980's.  Here's what both sides of a pack from that series looks like:

The remainder of cards in the 1990 set were phone sized cards.  There was a change in the overall pack design for those cards.  I don't know the technical terms for this so I'm probably going to stumble a little over the description.  Hopefully it'll still make sense.  The previous packs were all essentially created by pressing two pieces of paper around the card and sealing all four edges.  Starting with the larger cards in 1990, the packs were created by wrapping one piece of paper around the card and sealing the overlapping ends together to form a seam on the backside of the back (and also sealing the top and bottom edges).  This makes it possible to open the pack by ripping open the seam on the backside of the pack rather than rip open one of the sides of the pack.  Here's the front and back of the 1990 large pack - I've scanned the backside in a vertical orientation to hopefully make more sense:

Seeing what look like glue spots on the back of the pack makes me wonder if 1990 was when Calbee first started physically attaching the packs to the bags.  I had thought that wasn't until 1996.

I think this next wrapper is from 1991 although it's entirely possible that it's actually from 1992.  You'll notice that it also has what appear to be glue spots on the backside.

I'm a bit confused about this next one as well - it's either from 1992 or 1993.  It looks very much like the previous one but the back side of it is different:

There does not appear to be any glue spots on the back of this pack.

Calbee had made a couple changes to their pack design by the time the next set I have an example wrapper from, the 1994 Hokkaido set, came out.  They changed the orientation of the design to be vertical instead of horizontal but the bigger change is that the packs were made of foil instead of paper.

The backs were blank and due to the four glue spots on it (that are still sticky after 29 years!) I believe that these packs were attached to the chip bags.

The next set I have a wrapper from is the 1996 set:

These I know for a fact were glued to the back of the bags.  How do I know that?  I have some empty bags to prove it:

Here's what the bag fronts looked like.  These are all from Series One.  I assume there were bags representing each team.  Note that these are labeled "Tokyo Snack" - Calbee cards were distributed with "Pro Baseball Popcorn" instead of potato chips in 1995 and 1996.

Here's what the front and back of the 1997 packs looked like:

Here's what they looked like on the back of the bags:

And here's what the bag fronts looked like.  These again are all from Series One (which you can see was released on March 26th).  You'll see that these are labeled "baseball chips" - Calbee was back to distributing the cards with potato chips in 1997:

The next wrapper I have is from 2001 Series One:

Here are the fronts of the Series 1, 2 and 3 packs from 2003.  The handwritten numbers obviously were added by someone other than Calbee:

Here's the front and back of a chip bag (with the pack still attached to the back) from 2004:

It's kind of odd - this is a Series One bag but it doesn't look like it was released until early May, about a month and a half later than I'd have expected.  I assumed that all the chip bags for a given series are released at the same time but maybe that's not the case.

According to Sean, Calbee increased the number of cards in a pack from one to two in 2007, dropped it back to one in 2008, then raised it back to two for 2009 where it's been ever since.  This is kind of reflected in the next two packs I have - Series Three from 2008 and Series Two from 2010:

The back of the 2010 pack has a little bit of the bag it was attached to still stuck to it.

Here's the front and back of both a pack and a bag from Series Two in 2011:

I started buying complete Calbee sets in 2012 which has made it much less likely for me to have any bags or wrappers.  In fact the only wrapper I have since 2011 is from Series Two in 2022 and this was kind of a fluke.  I had won an auction on Ebay for a lot of Calbee cards from last year that included some Star cards and the seller sent the cards wrapped in open Series Two wrappers: