Card Of The Week October 7

Chipper Jones played the last game of his career on Friday night (which didn't end the way he wanted).      Obviously there's not a huge connection between this and Japanese baseball cards, but I thought I'd use this as an excuse to show off his 2009 Konami World Baseball Classic card (#W09R220):

Konami did a 253 card "regular" set for the 2009 World Baseball Classic featuring (obviously) much more players than any (and all) of the sets Topps did in the US.  Just giving it a quick eyeball, it looks like they had 29 members of the Japanese team and 28 each for the US, Korea and Venezuelan teams.  Each of the other teams had 12 cards except for Panama which only had 8.  There were also two 12 card "insert" sets - an All-Tournament team, and a "special card" set.

So far I've only picked up the US team set.  It's taken me 3 years to decide that I do want to collect this set as it's a little pricier than usual for me.  I think I'm going to attempt to put it together team set by team set over the next six months or so.