Calbee By Year: 1973 Calbee (Bat-Backs)

As Gary Engel puts it, Calbee is the dean of card companies in Japan. For over 40 years now, they have been including one-card (now two-card) packs with potato chips. Unlike Topps, Calbee didn't publish checklists for a long time, and without card stores and dealers, collecting more than 1400 different cards per year (in a couple cases) meant buying a ton of potato chips and then having to trade duplicates.

These days, collecting Calbee cards is easier - checklists are released beforehand and dealers are available to buy singles from to finish sets. But in 1973, kids had nothing but each other to go with.

 The 1973 set features color photographs with minimal text on the front. This card is of Katsuya Sugawara and the text is almost invisible due to his shoe and the shadow. It says his name in kanji; family name first and his team name again in kanji, in parentheses. Cards measure 2-3/8" by 3-1/8".

The backs are royal blue (my scan is a bit light) with a crossed bat symbol at the top. The backs seem to all have a lot of text on them, and Engel says they are sometimes known as monoshiri (know-it-all) cards. I really like how the kanji includes kana to help with pronunciation. If I ever wanted to really practice my vocabulary or at least kana reading skills, I could translate the backs of Calbee cards!

The top line says Pro Yakyu ?? Card in Japanese (yakyu is the Japanese word for baseball). The bottom of the card says Calbee in katakana and a pair of English letters. The first line below the crossed bats translates as Giants pitcher of third! Sugawara player. Player is used here as an honorific title, such as sensei. I'm not sure why he's labeled as "Giants pitcher of third" - he ended up with the second-most victories for the Giants that year but appears to have been usually used in relief - a duty he shared with a few other pitchers. Perhaps he was considered their number three pitcher overall. 1973 would be his last year, as over 6 games he had an ERA of 6.97 and who knows what happened to him after that.

A homerun-back version of the cards has the word "homerun" in Japanese between two baseballs, below crossed bats. A date of August 30, 1973 is printed at the bottom.

The 1973 set contains 91 cards, with the first six cards belonging to Shigeo Nagashima and the next six to Sadaharu Oh. After that, many other players have multiple cards in the set, so there are far fewer than 91 players featured. Many players have cards back to back. A quick glance shows Kazumi Takahashi has four cards total in the set: numbers 16 and 17, and numbers 43 and 44. There doesn't seem to be any actual reasoning for card numbers since not all cards for a player are in a row, but the cards aren't all randomly scattered either. Most of the cards are sorted by team. The Giants hold an overwhelmingly large portion of the checklist thanks especially to Nagashima and Oh.

The checklist for the 1973 crossed bats set is identical to the first part of the next set (1973-74 issue). The fronts are usually identical; 1973-74 sets have a different back style than you see above.

Sports Card Magazine, the Japanese price guide magazine similar to Beckett in the US, lists variations for cards 64-72. There doesn't seem to be any notation as to what the variations are; those cards are in italics in the checklist below. The "A" version of those cards carry a 50% premium in SCM. All those cards are of Dragons players, though two other Dragons cards in the set (#52 and 53) weren't changed. Further research indicates that the variations may only be which bat is on top in the crossed bats design on back; the left bat or right. I am assuming, because my card has a right bat on top, that the left bat on top is the scarcer version.

Card #14 apparently has two photos, one with a horizontal orientation (pitching motion pose) and one with a vertical orientation (set position pose). The horizontally oriented photo was reused in the 1973-74 set.

1. Shigeo Nagashima
2. Shigeo Nagashima
3. Shigeo Nagashima
4. Shigeo Nagashima
5. Shigeo Nagashima
6. Shigeo Nagashima
7. Sadaharu Oh
8. Sadaharu Oh
9. Sadaharu Oh
10. Sadaharu Oh
11. Sadaharu Oh
12. Sadaharu Oh
13. Tsuneo Horiuchi
14. Tsuneo Horiuchi
15. Tsuneo Horiuchi
16. Kazumi Takahashi
17. Kazumi Takahashi
18. Isao Shibata
19. Masaaki Mori
20. Isao Shibata
21. Shigeru Takada
22. Shigeru Takada
23. Shozo Doi
24. Shozo Doi
25. Masaaki Mori
26. Masaaki Mori
27. Takashi Yoshida
28. Yukinobu Kuroe
29. Shitoshi Sekimoto
30. Shitoshi Sekimoto
31. Katsuya Sugawara
32. Katsuya Sugawara
33. Masahiro Yanagida
34. Shozo Doi
35. Shigeru Takada
36. Shigeru Takada
37. Isao Shibata/Toshimitsu Suetsugu
38. Yukinobu Kuroe/Shozo Doi
39. Tsuneo Horiuchi
40. Yukinobu Kuroe
41. Toshimitsu Suetsugu
42. Takashi Yoshida
43. Kazumi Takahashi
44. Kazumi Takahashi
45. Tsuneo Horiuchi
46. Masaaki Mori
47. Takashi Yoshida
48. Tsuneo Horiuchi
49. Masaaki Mori
50. Takashi Yoshida
51. Koichi Tabuchi/Yutaka Enatsu
52. Kenichi Yazawa
53. Tatsuhiko Kimata
54. Akira Ejiri
55. Makoto Matsubara
56. Masaji Matsubara
57. Masaji Hiramatsu
58. Kazuyoshi Yamamoto
59. Yoshiro Sotokoba
60. Sachio Kinugasa
61. Koji Yamamoto
62. Toshiyuki Mimura
63. Mitsuo Inaba
64. Tatsuhiko Kimata
65. Mitsuo Inaba
66. Kenichi Yazawa
67. Kenichi Yazawa
68. Morimichi Takagi
69. Tatsuhiko Kimata
70. Mitsuo Inaba
71. Morimichi Takagi
72. Yukihara Shibuya
73. Koichi Tabuchi
74. Takenori Emoto
75. Katsuya Nomura
76. Taira Fujita
77. Teruhide Sakurai
78. Hiromitsu Kadota
79. Shinichi Yamauchi
80. Koichi Tabuchi
81. Katsuya Nomura
82. Taira Fujita
83. Hiromitsu Kadota
84. Teruhide Sakurai
85. Shinichi Yamauchi
86. Takenori Emoto
87. Yutaka Fukumoto
88. Atsushi Nagaike
89. Hisashi Tamada
90. Hideji Kato
91. Tadayoshi Okuma