And recently an empty box showed up for auction with the same sort of writing 大相撲カード入 meaning "Sumo Cards Inside", but the box is clearly marketed towards baseball. The mystery deepens further.
As part of my 2019 Collecting Goals, I planned on picking up 5 more cards from this set this year. I snagged these two beauties for a great price on 2 January to come barreling out of the gate and they also happened to be under my budget: #1 Ozeki Kotozakura and #3 Ozeki Daikirin.
Ozeki Kotozakura was promoted to Yokozuna in 1973, shortly after this set was made. He was arguably a better Ozeki than a Yokozuna as he only won one tournament as a Yokozuna before retiring. In retirement he trained 4 Ozeki and was highly successful.
Ozeki Daikirin held the Ozeki rank for 4 years, but was never a formidable opponent and he failed to be much of a contender outside of a few tournaments.
This one stumbled in my shopping cart on 13 January, but it does have a decent corner ding: #12 Sekiwake Hasegawa. Hasegawa actually won the championship right before this card was printed, but struggled to go any higher than Sekiwake and ultimately retired a few years later instead of getting demoted back down to Juryo.
Sorry for these poor pictures as they are from the auctions and I won't have them in hand for a few months. Thanks for stopping by!
Wow, that is a really interesting riddle, I had no idea that the Sumo cards came packed with the baseball card packages. I had assumed they were sold separately with their own bags of chips, but this looks like they might have been some sort of bonus to the 1973 Calbee baseball set? That is really interesting.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I love those new 73s you got!
I wasn't aware either. Pretty interesting. I kind of wish they would have done a lot more sets in the 1970s, but then again I see how hard it is to complete Calbee sets so in the end I am glad they didn't.
DeleteThat's pretty cool that someone out there actually thought to hold onto that empty cardboard box. Congratulations on taking three steps closer to reaching your goal! You've got eleven more months to pick up the last two.
ReplyDeleteRight!?? Who would have thought especially these days with Marie Kondo cleaning house. Ha. A few more cards to go for this goal!
DeleteThat's just really weird they would group them together and not at least show a image of a Sumo wrestler on the box also.
ReplyDeleteNice find!
It is very interesting. Almost like they were doing a test run of the cards to see if they would be popular.
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