Friday, August 7, 2009

New and New to me items

A couple new items and something I just learned about...

- I know it's time for Koshien, but BBM this week announced the Tokyo Big 6 Autumn Version set. This is a 37 card box set which features 5 player cards per team, 1 team card for each team and an insert card featuring a star from the Spring season. The set will be out in early September, around the time the Autumn season starts.

- Topps has issued yet another World Baseball Classic insert set. There's a whopping 100 card insert set for the new Topps Chrome set. Each card in the set has various serially number parallels, so there's a boatload of these cards out there on eBay. I think I've identified 17 cards from the Japanese team (this would be a hell of a lot easier if Topps actually published a checklist on their website in a timely manner - I guess I can't complain too much - BBM has never put a checklist on its website...). Anyway, here's the list I came up with:

  • W1 Yu Darvish

  • W4 Ichiro Suzuki

  • W22 Hisashi Iwakuma

  • W24 Daisuke Matsuzaka

  • W28 Michihiro Ogasawara

  • W31 Shunsuke Watanabe

  • W34 Tetsuya Yamaguchi

  • W37 Masahiro Tanaka

  • W39 Yoshiyuki Ishihara

  • W44 Shinnosuke Abe

  • W45 Shuichi Murata

  • W52 Kenji Johjima

  • W61 Kosuke Fukudome

  • W62 Hiroyuki Nakajima

  • W66 Seiichi Uchikawa

  • W78 Norichika Aoka

  • W89 Akinori Iwamura


The cards themselves have a similar design to the Topps 2 WBC inserts, except that most of the pictures actually have backgrounds. Some of the pictures are posed studio shots.

I'd like to know why Topps felt it was necessary to put Alex Rodriguez in the set. I understood his appearance in the box set since they didn't know before the tournament that he wasn't going to be able to play. I think it would have been nice for them to have put a card of someone who actually played in the Classic instead.

- I was reading some old posts on We Love Marines earlier this week and I noticed that the blogger mentioned in this post that he was given a "foil wrapped Hanshin card" at a Marines vs Tigers Interleague game at Koshien earlier this season. I had not previously heard of these cards. Deanna Rubin mentions in the comments for the post that she got a Lew Ford card last year at Koshien, so apparently for the last two years at least the Tigers have given away some sort of team set. I've never seen these sets either on eBay or in Gary Engel's catalogs.

No comments: