Card Of The Week February 26

It's a bit of old news now but the Brisbane Bandits swept the Melbourne Aces two games to none to win the Australian Baseball League championship for the 2016-17 season.  The Bandits won their second consecutive Claxton Shield under the leadership of former Milwaukee Brewer Dave Nilsson.  Nilsson spent one season in Japan, playing for the Chunichi Dragons in 2000.  It's kind of interesting why Nilsson ended in Japan that season - the 2000 Olympics were being held in Sydney, Australia and Nilsson wanted to be able to play for his nation's team when they were hosting the event.  While MLB teams were not willing him to let him leave the team during the season to do so, the Dragons were.  He had some injury issues and generally had a poor season with the Dragons, hitting only .180 in 18 games with the ichi-gun Dragons but he ended up leading all batters with a .565 average in the Olympics themselves.

Here's a 2000 Calbee card of Nilsson (whose registered name in NPB was "Dingo") from the "New Face" subset (#N-10):

I used Nilsson's page on SABR's Biography Project for some of the information in this post.