Potato chip giant Calbee Inc. celebrated in July the 50th anniversary of the home run it hit when it started including baseball cards in its packages of lightly salted chips.

Since then, a total of 20,000 cards showcasing various NPB ballplayers have been included in packs of Pro Baseball Chips. In all, some 1.8 billion cards have been brought to baseball fans in the half-century following the snack’s release.

Pro Baseball Chips was called Pro Baseball Snack when it hit the market in 1973. More than 100 new baseball player cards are currently produced in March, June and September, and two are included in each package of 22 grams of the lightly salted chips.

“Deciding which players to put on our cards is really tough,” said Takeshi Mitsui, 52, who works in the potato chips team at Calbee. “We must constantly monitor their statistics.”

Mitsui, who has been involved in the development of 4,000 cards since 2009, checks not only news reports about NPB games but also specialized magazines. He alike visits stadiums on his own.

Photos of award-winning and retired ballplayers from last season are marketed as part of the first lineup each year, while highlights from the ongoing season are commonly adopted in the third round.

Most challenging is how to select athletes for the second lineup, which hits store shelves in June.

Future stars need to be selected by late March shortly following the season’s opening, but predicting who will emerge as standouts requires deep insights such as the teams’ management and scouts.

Despite the difficulty, Mitsui successfully added the Yomiuri Giants’ new ace closer, Taisei Ota, who was the team’s first draft pick, and Chiba Lotte Marines catcher Ko Matsukawa, who has just graduated from high school, to the lineup based on his prediction of their performances.

“I am delighted if athletes I chose do as well as I expected,” said Mitsui. “Conversely, seeing them produce poor results makes me feel terrible.”

Asked about the most prominent ballplayer in 2022, Mitsui cited Lotte Marines pitcher Roki Sasaki, who is dubbed the “monster in the Reiwa Era.”

Sasaki was included from the beginning in the list of those starring in the second lineup of Pro Baseball Chips. After Mitsui watched his perfect game against the Orix Buffaloes on April 10 at the stadium, he soon asked the card maker to replace Sasaki’s image with one snapped that day.

This way, a memorial card of Sasaki holding a bunch of flowers with the scoreboard displaying his results for the perfect game in the background was complete.

Celebrating this milestone year, Pro Baseball Chips has come with special offerings to catch the hearts of fans as well.

Cards originally marketed in 1973 to show legendary Yomiuri Giants hitters Shigeo Nagashima and Sadaharu Oh emerged in the first line, and the images of respective teams’ skippers taken when they were active as players were reintroduced in the second round.

The special photos drew considerable attention from baseball fans.

Cards from Pro Baseball Chips have steadily been rising in value among collectors.

Ryota Nakagawa, 41, manager of the Shibuya and Kichijoji outlets of Mint, Japan’s leading trading card shop operator, said Nagashima’s 1973 card has doubled in value from 10 years ago to 40,000 yen ($292) to 50,000 yen if in fine condition.

Some cards were reportedly only offered in specific areas, such as western Japan and the Tokai region, around the time of the product’s release.

Players from the Saitama Seibu Lions’ predecessor, based in Fukuoka Prefecture, and the Chunichi Dragons carry particularly high price tags, because few of them are now available in the collector’s market.

“Showing much-talked-about ballplayers in cards quickly is a good point of the product,” said Nakagawa. “They will be treated as important cultural properties that should be kept at museums in 20 to 30 years from now.”

Pro Baseball Chips has been attracting a lot of attention overseas. Cards of Oh are reportedly apt to bring higher prices than their Nagashima counterparts in the United States, due to Oh’s fame as the world’s all-time home run king with 868. 

Calbee in March this year organized an online opportunity for six fans of Pro Baseball Chips to exchange opinions with Mitsui. Proposals made there are considered for developing new items in the future.

A 49-year-old participant lives in Shizuoka Prefecture and referred to himself only as Wanshiba. The collector was born in 1973 in the same year as Pro Baseball Chips and started collecting baseball cards when he was in elementary school.

Wanshiba is a big fan of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows and pitcher Daisuke Araki. He nostalgically said he remembers many cards from Pro Baseball Chips featuring ballplayers of the popular Yomiuri Giants and that he was happy when he came across cards featuring Araki and other stars of his favorite team.

Speaking about the future of Pro Baseball Chips, Mitsui expressed confidence that marketing approaches using the snack will help raise NPB’s profile and give consumers a chance to become familiar with Calbee products.

“We will be continuously producing cards that can win over fans primarily of elementary school age while testing new technologies in line with the trend of the times,” he said.