A Difficult Dragons Season Put One Japanese Baseball Card Collector on Pause

A rough baseball season can quiet a card collection, too. For one longtime fan of the Chunichi Dragons, the club’s 2024 struggles took enough of the fun out of following baseball that buying cards and writing about them mostly fell by the wayside. One family routine, though, kept the year from becoming a complete collecting washout.

When losing drains the fun

The Dragons offered some promise during the opening two weeks of the 2024 season, but the rest of the summer brought a familiar, discouraging pattern. As the season wore on, another last-place finish began to look likely. Watching a team lose repeatedly can wear down even a committed fan, and this season’s frustration built on years of disappointment.

The slump reached beyond the ballpark. The collector usually takes his children to see a game at the Dome, but this was the first season in three years without a family visit. He felt bad about missing that tradition, especially because a win and the celebration afterward are part of what makes a live game exciting for kids. Still, the prospect of another defeat made the outing harder to look forward to.

That mood carried into collecting. When watching baseball no longer felt appealing, picking up cards of its players felt less compelling as well. The hobby didn’t disappear; its pull simply weakened alongside the fan’s interest in the team.

Plans that lost their appeal

At the beginning of the year, the collector expected to buy a box or two of an Epoch or BBM set with its hits already removed. He had tried this approach in 2023 and found it great fun. These products later appeared on Yahoo Auctions during the 2024 season, but by then the Dragons’ struggles had undercut his enthusiasm. The boxes that once sounded like an enjoyable project became an easy pass.

The timing didn’t help. The collector wondered why the sets arrived so late in the year, when the season was already underway and his interest was flagging. For hobbyists, a product’s appeal can depend on more than its contents: when it becomes available and what’s happening in the sport can shape whether opening it feels timely.

His disappointment with the 2024 Calbee release added to the lull. The set had only 120 cards across two series. Looking back at Calbee sets from the 2000s, he missed the roughly 300 regular cards and photography he remembered from that period. That comparison left the current release feeling small and less satisfying as a set-building project.

A family ritual kept the cards fun

Yet Calbee was also the year’s bright spot. The collector’s daughter enjoys opening the bags with him, so they made a habit of sitting together after dinner, eating chips and checking the checklist to see whether they had found a card they still needed. The pleasure came from the shared ritual as much as from filling spaces in the set.

That small scene captures a side of collecting that can outlast a disappointing season: the cards give family members something to open, compare and track together. The checklist turns each pack into a quick bit of progress, while the time spent together makes the routine matter even when the set itself isn’t a favorite.

His 10-year-old son was less interested than he had been a couple of years earlier. The collector suspects that interest may return later, as it did for him. For now, the daughter’s enthusiasm has been enough to preserve a little of the pleasure that had gone missing elsewhere in the hobby.

Waiting for baseball to feel exciting again

Outside those Calbee evenings, collecting stayed largely dormant. Spare time went to other hobbies instead of the usual search for older Calbee cards missing from the collection. That shift is a reminder that a collecting habit can ebb without ending: sometimes the search simply gives way to other interests until the right reason to return arrives.

One source of hope is that Tatsunami will no longer manage the Dragons in 2025. The collector doesn’t place all responsibility for the club’s poor results on him, but notes that the team finished last in each of his three consecutive seasons in charge. A new approach could make the next season feel different and help bring back some enthusiasm.

He expects the current “bleh” mood to pass. As a former Montreal Expos fan during the club’s final years, he has lived through a more difficult stretch and knows that his anticipation for baseball tends to return when spring comes around.

His hopes for 2025 are straightforward: a Dragons team that doesn’t struggle quite so much, Calbee returning to three series with a healthy number of cards, and card makers releasing their sets at a more sensible point in the year. If two of those three changes come through, he expects to collect and write more than he did in 2024. The Calbee checklist and a daughter happy to open another pack offer a good place to start.