Some WBC news items of note:
- "Samurai Japan"'s final roster has been set. The opening games are a week from Thursday (March 5).
- Topps will be releasing a 55 card box set for World Baseball Classic on March 13 (at least that's what I think from what I see on eBay - Topps hasn't bothered mentioning the set on their website). From the player list that I found with the item listing in the Washington Nationals' shop (but oddly enough not in MLB's WBC shop - go figure), it looks like there are five Japanese players - Yu Darvish, Ichiro, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Akinori Iwamura and Kosuke Fukudome. So, there's five more cards total in Topps box set than there were in Upper Deck's crummy box set in 2006, but there's still only five Japanese players in the set. Damn, I wonder how few there'd be if they hadn't won the thing in 2006.
- I saw an article on Beckett.com that gave a preview of the 2009 Bowman set. There will be a 20 card WBC subset that will include Yu Darvish and Shinnosuke Abe. It's unclear to me if they will only be chrome or if there will be "normal" cards as well. So I guess my hope that Topps would do a better job than Upper Deck is not looking too good right now.
3 comments:
Remember that's a 55-card set that Topps is trying to sell to a primarily U.S. audience. I'm surprised that any non-U.S. major league players were included.
That's a good point and I do keep that in mind. I guess what frustrates me the most is that Topps has the exclusive rights to produce cards associated with a world wide event, but produces a set that aims to appeal to a single country (although admittedly the biggest market). I'd complain less if Topps allowed BBM to do a Japanese team set. Or if Topps produced a set with the Japanese audience in mind for distribution in Japan.
What I'd really like is to see a 500 card set with cards of all the players with all the teams plus managers and coaches but that's just not going to happen.
Hey NPB, I like what you've got here, this is awesome! Thanks for the Federal League Info!
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