As soon as I saw this card, I knew I had to have it. It's a stadium card, it's vintage Calbee, and it was pretty cheap!
Older Calbee sets have little hidden gems like this scattered throughout its checklists. Not as cool as the bubble gum blowing contest card Topps inserted a few decades ago, but a pleasasnt change from close-cropped photos of players batting, pitching, throwing, or fielding, which is all it seems we get these days...
Calbee had a bunch of cards of the Dome in the 1988 set to celebrate its opening (which was 26 years ago today - 4/8/88). I've noticed there are some stadium cards in their 1970's sets - I'd love to get my hands on them.
ReplyDeleteBBM needs to do an updated stadium subset. It's been 22 years since they did one and six of the parks currently in use didn't appear in it. And one of the remaining six has changed quite a bit in appearance - they built a roof on it. Or maybe Calbee can do it next year as the theme for their 12 checklist cards.
I'd be happy with either manufacturer doing stadium cards in their sets next year, or even later this year as a subset or insert in some other release. BBM could theoretically do it this year for the Second Edition or any of the other random releases it chooses to do.
ReplyDeleteActually, I'd like a good historical subset with a card for each ballpark each team has used. My count has 30 stadiums that the teams have called home over the years (going back to 1936, using information from Wikipedia). Then there are the local stadiums the teams use/have used on their midseason barnstorming tours and ni-gun/spring training locations, though that's probably just wishful thinking, because then we're looking at a very large set. BBM could do that in the team sets next year as a subset or insert set - multiple teams would have cards for some stadiums in that case, of course, but I don't see a problem with that. Ahh, all the what-ifs I make about card sets I want...
I've been researching the ballparks too between Wikipedia and that mook you bought for me. I'm hoping to put up a definitive list of team names and stadiums as a page on the blog at some point. Having cards of some of the more obscure ballparks would be pretty cool. I need to figure out which ballparks are on those mid-70's Calbee cards - hopefully Osaka, Kawasaki, Korakuen, and Nishinomiya, all of which were no longer in use by the time BBM did the 1992 subset.
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