Quote:
Originally Posted by nat
My card is from the 2000 Calbee set. It’s much larger than the tiny 80s Calbee cards, but still slightly smaller than standard baseball card size. Somewhere along the line (1990?) Calbee started putting text on the front of the cards in English instead of Kanji. I don’t know why.
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Nice write up, I like Tatsunami quite a bit and was happy he got in.
Calbee started writing player names in Roman letters on the front of the cards literally in the middle of the 1990 set - the first series had the names in kanji then series 2 had them in Roman letters (and the size switched then too). I think the decision was specifically made to make the cards more accessible to foreign collectors, they actually presaged this in the 1989 set by writing the player's names in Roman letters on the card backs for the first time.
Since 2016 they have reverted back to putting the names in kanji on the front and back, I kind of like them better that way, though it does make them more of a challenge.