Japanese cards -- Love for Calbee!
 

I'm finding myself really liking the Calbee sets. Like many relative newcomers to Japanese cards, I started spending time researching early cards of Ichiro, Ohtani and Sadaharu Oh.

I've come to appreciate Calbee's simplicity (great, full bleed photos), accessibility (cards still come in potato chip bags that are more affordable for kids), and innocence (Calbee seems to have avoided the (cough cough) fanatical manufactured scarcity money scheme that BBM has happily adopted from its brethren in America.

Any other Calbee fans here?

Not a collector (I have 2 cards), but I love that most subjects got numerous cards per release.

There's some great classic on-field, off-field, portrait, etc. cards that are like a snapshot in time because of the sheer numbers of cards for a person in a release.

It's not the same distribution model, but it's similar to the feeling I have for my Mark Grace broder cards giving me 3-5-10+ cards from an era in a single release.

Calbee always made me wonder why Cracker Jack didn't do the same for the last 100 years. How is it that a snack so completely identified with baseball has only produced like half a dozen baseball card sets on the last 100+ years when a Japanese potato chip company has managed it every year since 1973?