Saturday, August 9, 2014

2007 Calbee Pack Busting

Got an odd unopened pack of Calbees in the mail today from an Ebay win.  It's a clear cellophane pack with the Calbee logo on it and several cards in it.  From looking at the two visible cards, it was obvious that the cards were from 2007:

Pack Front

Pack Back
There were eight cards in the pack:



I don't know if it was by design, but the pack was all Pacific league and very heavy on Orix and Rakuten.

I'm curious how this pack was distributed.  Obviously the packs distributed with the chip bags only have 1-3 cards in them (depending on the year) and have never been transparent.  What are these from?

3 comments:

P-town Tom said...

I've received packs in clear cellophane before at major league and minor league baseball games as free promotional items. I wonder if this pack was something similar.

NPB Card Guy said...

Yeah, I think you're probably right that this was some sort of promotional pack for Calbee rather than an actual "for sale" item.

Sorry to take so long in responding - I never got notification of your comment. I wonder what happened and how I can prevent it from happening again.

Ryan G said...

This might have come from one of the special boxes too. Calbee sells what seem to me to be overpriced boxes containing additional cards. They probably are the ones with the chance for the special online-only cards, which is why they carry a premium. I opened one box last year and just got standard cards (none of the online-only cards). I recall it having a pack like that.

Based on info I found somewhat recently, this could have been an SGA as well, as Calbee has issued some special stadium-only sets in the past and somewhat recently too. I can't recall exactly when those sets were issued, and it seems that you would have received a special limited card to go with those, or instead of regular cards. Or perhaps that was packaged separately. That's just a second thought, less likely than my first opinion.