Monday, January 23, 2012

Wei-Yin Chen of the Baltimore Orioles

Former Chunichi Dragons pitcher Wei-Yin Chen signed a contract with the Orioles recently.  Chen is from Taiwan originally, but he never played professionally in his home country (although he did pitch for Taiwan in the 2004 and 2008 Olympics).  He signed with the Dragons in 2004 at age 18.  

Chen pretty much only played for the ni-gun Dragons from 2004 to 2007, only making appearances with the big club in 2005.  He finally made the ichi-gun squad to stay in 2008, so he really only has four years of experience at the top level of NBP.

Due to his odd career path, he's got an odd set of baseball cards.  His first card is #D34 from the 2004 BBM Dragons set.  His first appearance in BBM's main set was card #295 in the 2009 1st Version set.  He does not appear in any BBM All Star sets, but he is in both the 2010 and 2011 Nippon Series sets.  I think his first Calbee card was #078 in the 2009 set.

Looking up his cards in SportsCardForum is kind of problematic as BBM has referred to him as "Wei-Yin Chen", "Wei Yin Chen" and even "Weiyin Chen", so you need to either do multiple searches to find all his cards or search for "Chen" and pick out the relevant cards (some of which are listed as "Wei Ying Chen").

2005 BBM Dragons #D18

2009 BBM 1st Version #295 
2010 BBM 2nd Version #534

2011 BBM Nippon Series #S31

4 comments:

Jason Presley said...

Let me know if you run into any more similar naming issues. We can alter the player indexing to include up to 4 variations of a name. I'm thinking this will be necessary for a lot of the Taiwanese players.

I updated the indexing for Wei-Yin Chen with the variations you mentioned and ended up with 15 cards.

Jason Presley said...

Ok, indexing him as the following resulted in 35 cards:

Wei-Yin Chen
Wei Yin Chen
Wei-Ying Chen
Wei Ying Chen

I didn't see any listed as Weiyin or Weiying.

NPB Card Guy said...

BBM had him as Weiyin Chen in the 2010 Nippon Series set.

Thanks for fixing this. You're probably right that this will happen with a lot of the Taiwanese players.

Jason Presley said...

Ah, I haven't found a complete checklist for the 2010 Nippon Series set, yet. All I've got in the system are the cards you included in your post about it.