When Hideki Matsui was a rookie back in 1993, there were some major expectations laid on him. He was given uniform number 55, for the number of home runs he was expected to hit in one season which of course would tie the existing record shared by Sadaharu Oh, Tuffy Rhodes and Alex Cabrera (although it was held solely by Oh in 1993). He was also expected someday to break Oh's career home run record. To this end, Nippon TV started a card set featuring a card for each home run Matsui hit.
This set has continued to the present day, including the home runs he's hit for the Yankees. Nippon TV is now looking into whether or not they can get recognition from Guiness for longest running baseball card set.
Jason had a post about this set last month and a link to a gallery of his collection of these cards. The Yakyu Baka story I linked to above has a link to the Offical Matsui Home Run Card club website.
3 comments:
Great post!- I love sets like this; kind of like the Upper Deck 'every game at Yankee Stadium' set.
-AB
http://noboruaota.blogspot.com/
Where this set leaves Upper Deck in the dust is detail. The ONLY details Upper Deck gave related to the game was the box score. None of the photos were relevant aside from the player. Out of some 4000 games, they only included about 80 different players, and only about 4-5 different photos of each player spanning 70+ years of Yankee Stadium. That's pathetic!
Every card in the Matsui set includes a photo from the actual home run, which is awesome!
I just noticed that since Upper Deck lost their MLB license, Topps produced the Matsui cards for the 2010 season.
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