Three Random Team Issue Cards

I forgot exactly how I came to add them to my collection, but I have three more oddball cards now:

 Shacho Chips (President Chips) did a special promotion with the Marines last April. Well, let me back that up a little bit. Shacho Chips is a company that provides potato chip bags as a marketing/promotional strategy, seemingly similar to what Calbee's baseball card chips do. It appears that company presidents can apply to be in the product and have a trading card made for them.

The above card follows the same basic design as the regular President Chips cards, with the semi-transparent rectangle at the bottom and a small logo at the top. I don't know anything about the real product - the company website (scan the QR code above or go here) offers boxes of 70 bags of chips/cards for about $250. There is a B-League basketball set for $300, but that features the team presidents, not any players, apparently. More than $4 for a 25-gram bag of chips and a card sounds quite ridiculous to me.

Kazuya Fukuura Day (April 20, 2019) saw the distribution of at least five different cards, one of which celebrates his 2000th hit with a special foil front. I've found evidence of at least one more card, given out the next day at the Marine Festa event.

The Swallows also have at least two cards featuring different players, both of whom are wearing business suits.

None of the non-baseball cards can be seen on YJA, either for sale or sold.

 The second team issue is this Fukuura card promoting the Marines Star Card app, which seems similar to Topps Bunt in that you can collect and trade digital cards of your favorite players. There are missions in the app which can earn you points, which probably can be used to buy more cards. I'm not planning on installing the app to figure it all out.

Finally, I thought I had shown this card before, but perhaps I haven't. This is a BBM promotional card for the Route Inn BCL independent league. It features Gyaos Naitou (real name: Naoyuki Naitou), who was the manager of the Niigata Albirex team. Naitou played for the Swallows, Marines, and Dragons in the late 1980s and 1990s, and is a radio commentator these days. He managed Albirex for only two seasons before he "retired".

I don't recall ever seeing any other BCL cards; I certainly didn't find any this spring at the few games I was able to attend. So it's a cool find!

Until next time...

The Only Two Boxes I Opened Last Year

As much as I love opening boxes and packs, I rarely do so. These days, box busting is more about the chance of pulling big hits, so it's not very cost effective. Instead, I pick up the scraps; eBay, COMC, Sportlots, and shops and shows in Japan give me singles I want for far less than trying to pull cards out of packs.

I don't completely avoid them, though. I built the 2018 Topps flagship set via jumbo boxes; it was much more expensive than buying the set, but it was pretty fun. And when I last went back to the US, I grabbed a few packs at Target for the thrill of the rip.

But in 2019, I stayed away from packs. Until the Card Festa in early December.

Card Festa is a card show, but it features a bunch of card shops instead of independent dealers. There are a couple non-shop dealers, but the event is run by the Mint chain of card shops. PSA shows up, and the OB Club arranges for a retired player or two to sign autographs and (in the past - that didn't happen this time) give a speech. A couple manufacturers usually set up tables, too; I've never seen BBM, but Epoch and TIC Secretariat/Produce 216/whatever their name really is make appearances.

TIC brought some overstock from their two Used Ball sets to the show, and towards the end they dropped the price to $25 a box. Given the original price was $60, I feel like I got a good deal for some pack busting fun. I picked up one BayStars box and one Swallows box.

 This is the BayStars box; the Swallows box has the same design, just using pictures of Swallows players.

 Each box came with two free "mini trading paper" packs, each of which had two mini trading paper cards. The packaging indicates that they were originally packaged to be distributed at the 2019 BayStars Fan Festival, so I suppose these were leftovers as well. So in addition to two sealed boxes for $50, I got eight of these trading paper cards.

 Here are four of them, so you can see the designs. There were two BayStars mini trading paper sets issued last year, and the packs had a mix from both. As you can see, there was a mix of regular and SP gold signature cards. I'm not sure if there were any hand-signed cards included, though it's entirely possible.

 There were also free "cheki" (polaroid-style) photos, one per box. There was only one type for each team, so I took one of each. Sorry, the picture is blurry.

Okay, let's get to the packs. First, the BayStars:

 Twelve packs per box. The BayStars set originally came out in mid-July.

 Each box guarantees two "rare" cards, which usually come as one relic and one autograph. The game-used ball relic I got is the regular version with a facsimile signature, and I got a regular autograph card. I also got two SP insert cards and one photo card.

 The Swallows also have 12 packs per box. These were originally released in early August.

The ball cards for the Swallows don't have facsimile signatures, because there are no authentic signatures. So the second hit here is a "photo" card and facsimile autograph. I also got another Photo card, which is more rare than the photo and signature card. This time, I pulled three of the short printed inserts.

Photo cards are considered "rare" cards, so technically I got three rare cards in each box.

As for the base cards, each player has multiple cards in the set. There are 15 players in each set, and 81 cards. Players have up to nine cards in the base set; they also appear once in every insert/rare set.

There are several different designs. Here are all nine of Jose Lopez's base cards so you can see the different designs.

As you can see, there are basically five designs for the base cards. There are some additional cards in packs:

 Both boxes included one Exchange card each. These allow collectors to trade one regular card for another regular card, one special card for another special card, or four regular cards for one special card.

 Each box also included one Original Binder Application Ticket. If you had three of these cards, you could trade them in for a special binder for your cards.

Finally, my Swallows box included one Reservation Card. These are generally distributed with pre-orders. I didn't see any box cards, and the BayStars box didn't have a card.

Overall, busting these boxes was fun, and at the price I paid, I feel like I got my money's worth. We'll see when I finally get another box to bust!

Until next time...

2007 Calbee Discovery: Corocoro Comics Promo

A couple weeks ago, I was sifting through some of my extra cards, looking for ones that might fit some of my newer collections. And as I was checking the years on some Calbees, I saw this:

At first glance, it looks like a normal Calbee card. But more than just a simple glance reveals it's not: on the front, the card number is P-4, and the back has the same card number and a Corocoro Comic logo at the bottom.

This card had just randomly come to me at some point, possibly just protective filler for an auction, or perhaps part of a lot where I only needed certain cards.

So I've done some research, and I've found that at least four Calbee cards have been inserted into Corocoro Comic magazines that are related to baseball. There also seem to be at least four Kamen Rider Calbee cards, but that's a story for another post, or even another blog.

Only one real player appears in the set, and you see that card above. Hichori Morimoto is a Korean-Japanese (Korean descent, born in Tokyo) former baseball player who was drafted in the fourth round back in 1999. He played for the Fighters through 2010, and then he played for the BayStars (2011-2013) and Lions (2014-15). 2007 was his career year, batting an even .300.

Oddly, though this is numbered P-4, I couldn't find any evidence of P-1 to P-3. Perhaps (some of) the Kamen Rider cards fill in the numbering. I have discovered that cards P-1 through P-3 were issued through other magazines, and those three cards have two versions. I'll eventually get the proper information posted. (Edited 2020/01/17)

Checklist:

• P-4 H. Morimoto
• P-5 F. Miyamoto/Kuroemon (manga characters)
• PS-1 Kuroemon (manga character)
• PS-2 Miyamoto (manga character)

I just picked up the P-5 card (I should have it in hand by the time this post goes live, or in the next couple of days), and I hope to eventually get the other two (it seems PS-1 might be in the bag, too). PS- cards use the Starcard design. P-5 has two anime characters: Miyamoto is pitching and Kuroemon is batting. Each character has their own card in the Starcard design, and it looks like the images used on the Starcards are different from the P-5 card.

The characters come from a manga (Japanese comic) called Dorabase, which is a spinoff from the extremely popular Doraemon series. I might actually look into this more in the future, but for now I'm just happy to have discovered another rare/oddball Calbee card!