The First Wave of Calbee 2012 Pro Yakyu Chips will hit store shelves on March 26.  To celebrate its fortieth year, the chip-maker will also be packing special Turn Back the Clock cards for current active managers, plus Shigeo Nagashima and Sadaharu Oh.  A complete list of cards (for the First Wave) can be found at the Calbee website.

With all that's been going on, I completely forgot to look into what was going to happen to the Calbee Pro Yakyu Chips this year.

In looking at the official Calbee site, I see the chips were delayed and will only be available in the Kansai (beginning on 4/11) and Hokkaido (4/18) regions.  As of 3/22 (when the Calbee page was lasted updated) there is no scheduled release date for the Tohoku, Kanto, and Koshietsu regions.

Second Pack

From Calbee 2010

Third Pack

From Calbee 2010

I thought I'd start sharing the Calbee baseball cards I tend to collect during the course of the year.  Here's two cards from the first pack of chips I bought.

From Calbee 2010

The Calbee 2010 Pro Yakyu Chips, Series 1 will go on sale beginning March 8th.

The checklist (in Japanese) for Series 1 is available at the official Calbee site.

I went to the store the other day and noticed that the 2009 Calbee Pro Yakyu Chips were on sale again and picked up a couple of packs. And it looks like they've gone back to 2 cards instead of 1 (with a slight price increase I think).

Here's what the packaging looks like this year:

According to the official website, they went on sale on March 9th. Here's the checklist for the first series. If I have some time, I'll try to translate that for everyone.

Incidentally, here are the cards I got in my first batch:

021 Kensuke Tanaka
037 Naoto Watanabe
040 Takeshi Yamasaki
071 Tsuyoshi Shimoyanagi
090 Shigenobu Shima
093 Hiroyasu Tanaka

The 2008 Pro Yakyu Chips went on sale on March 24th. I have yet to see any in the stores I've been to, but then I had a hard time tracking them down last year in Tokyo as well. Looks like I'll have to stock up again when I visit my GF in Sendai. I'm not really sure why many stores in Tokyo don't seem to carry them. Maybe I'm not just not looking in the right places?

The first series features 166 cards: 96 regular cards, 12 team stat cards, 2 league champion cards, 4 Climax series cards, 4 Nippon series cards, 4 checklist cards, 24 top player cards, and 20 special box cards.

I will, of course, be once again on the prowl for Yu Darvish and Masahiro Tanaka cards. It appears that there are no regular cards for Darvish and Tanaka in the first series, but they both have 3 non-regular cards. Guess I'll be going after these 6 cards.

In case anyone is interested, I posted up another short video, this time showing just how much space 40 bags of chips takes up.

These are just silly videos so you may not want to waste your time. Last thing I want is people blaming me for their loss of time.

I decided to record my latest adventure in opening up 10 bags of Calbee Pro Yakyu Chips and uploaded the results to YouTube. Not really exciting, but at least you get a chance to see what 1) these bags of chips look like, and 2) what these cards look like.

Notable cards: Shinnosuke Abe, Atsuya Furuta

I'm heading back to Tokyo tomorrow so I'll be able to scan in some of the better cards I've managed to attain.

BTW: I now have 23 bags of chips... Ugh... They actually aren't bad tasting, but there's no way I can finish off 23 bags of chips.

I've been doing my best to collect as many of this year's Calbee Baseball cards as I can. I'll try to post a few of the cards I've managed to attain later, but for now, here is an image of the bag of chips that the cards come packaged with (they are sealed in a non-see-thru plastic envelope on the outside of the bag).

Each bag costs about 80yen (or about 75 cents a bag) and come with two cards each. If you look carefully, you'll see the number 3 in a green circle on the right-hand side of the bag: this indicates the third series of cards. I unfortunately didn't get the chance to purchase too many from the first and second series, so most of my collection is from the third series. I'm currently trying to get a Tanaka Masahiro and a Yu Darvish card (I missed both their Series 2 cards ), but it seems they are somewhat hard to come by. I did manage to get a Tanaka Masahiro Star Card and a Yu Darvish Ace Card. But I don't have much time as Calbee will only sell these chips with cards until the end of this month. That means I need to cram in a few more bags of chips.

Oh, and this is what 13 bags of chips looks like (I've bought 15 bags over the last 5 days or so and have only managed to eat 2 of them).

BTW: I got a Kosuke Fukudome card in one of these bags of chips. And those gray rectangles you see on the back of the bags are where the two cards are located. And yes, all of these have been emptied by me.