- This past week Topps has issued yet another on line World Baseball Classic set called somewhat unimaginatively* the 2023 Topps World Baseball Classic set. Ten card boxes are selling on Topps' website for $79.99 but before you balk too much at the price, I believe each box is guaranteed to contain an autograph or a relic card. The base set contains 100 cards and includes six members of Samurai Japan (Yu Darvish, Munetaka Murakami, Lars Nootbaar, Shohei Ohtani, Roki Sasaki and Masataka Yoshida) and four members of the Korean team (Tommy Edman, Kim Ha-seong, Park Se-woong and Yang Eui-ji). Ohtani, Nootbaar and Yoshida all have relic, autograph and autographed relic cards available. There's some sort of "2006" insert set that includes Ohtani, Darvish, Sasaki, Murakami and Yoshida, "Captains Of The WBC" insert set with Ohtani and an "International Gems" one with Ohtani, Sasaki and Yoshida. The most interesting insert set (to me anyway) is called "Global Grandeur" - the ten card set contains all Samurai Japan players - the six from the base set as well as Kensuke Kondoh, Kazuma Okamoto and Tetsuto Yamada plus a team card. You can see all the checklists for the set over at Cardboard Connection. The one positive thing I'll say about the set is it's the first one Topps has issued for the 2023 tournament that appears to feature at least one player from all 20 teams.
* Says the guy whose blog is called "Japanese Baseball Cards"
- The World Baseball Classic set is a little rich for my blood after dropping several hundred dollars on WBC cards earlier this year but I discovered there's some other WBC cards that may be a little more affordable. Topps released their Japan Edition last month and I pretty much ignored it because it was an MLB issue. However, I just discovered that there's several WBC related items with the set. The most attractive one for me is a 25 card "Japanese National Team Set" featuring most (but not all) of the players on the Samurai Japan roster. There's two cards of Ohtani in the set (because of course there are) but there's cards of other players who've only appeared in the Samurai Japan team set sold on Topps' Japanese website last spring like Hiromi Itoh and Shosei Togo. Of less interest to me are the "WBC Japanese National Team Autographs" and "WBC Japanese National Team Patch Autographs" - both checklists contain Nootbaar, Yoshida and two different Ohtani cards. Finally there are also ten "WBC Japanese National Team Patch" which if I'm not mistaken from what I've seen on Ebay are manufactured relics - they're not really from the WBC. Again, Cardboard Connection has all the checklists.
2 comments:
Saw a box on the Topps website earlier in the week. But for the price, I'd rather just pick up singles.
Yeah, I'm kind of waiting to see what the base set cards start going for. As I said in the post, after dropping several hundred dollars on Topps Now, Global Stars and the Topps 2 WBC inserts back in the spring, I'm not really inclined to spend much more on WBC cards this year.
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