Sunday, September 22, 2019

Card Of The Week September 22

The Europe/Africa Baseball Qualifier for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics took place this past week in Italy.  Team Israel won the tournament and will be playing in Japan next August while the Netherlands finished second and will have another chance to qualify for the Olympics in early 2020.

I was looking through the rosters of the six teams involved (the other teams besides Israel and the Netherlands were Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic and South Africa) and noticed a couple familiar names.  Former Rakuten Eagle Rhiner Cruz was on Spain's roster and former Orix Buffaloes pitcher Alessandro Maestri was on Italy's.

The pitching coach for the Czech Republic (who finished third in the tournament and dealt Israel their only loss) is former Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighter Corey Lee.  Lee spent about 10 years in the minors in the US, mostly in the Rangers' organization but also that of the White Sox and Angels.  He pitched one inning in the majors, taking the loss against the Yankees in an extra inning game on August 24th, 1999 - he gave up a three run home run to Tino Martinez to lose the game.  He joined the Fighters midway through the 2005 season and left partway through the 2006 season due to injury.  He was out of baseball for the next two seasons before spending the 2009 season with the independent Bridgeport Bluefish of the Atlantic League.  According to his Baseball-Reference Bullpen biography he's been a coach for the Czech Republic national team since 2014.

As far as I can tell he only had a handful of Japanese baseball cards.  He never had a card in the flagship sets for BBM or Calbee but he did have two cards in the 2006 BBM Fighters set.  I don't have either of those cards but I do have his card from the 2006 Konami Baseball Heroes 2 White Edition set (#B06W067):


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