Last month Topps issued yet another and probably their last set for the 2023 World Baseball Classic. The cards were only available in 10 card packs on line for $80-ish and the set had a 100 card base set with parallels, a bunch of inserts, memorabilia and autograph cards.
I was taking a kind of "wait-and-see" attitude on it and now that I've waited and saw, I think I'm mostly going to pass on it. There's only six players from Samurai Japan in the base set - all of whom have been featured in several previous WBC sets last year - and the cards of at least five of the six are selling at much higher prices than I want to pay on Ebay or COMC. I have a lot of Roki Sasaki and Munetaka Murakami cards so I don't really need to be paying $30 or $50 for this one and I see no good reason to spend $10 on another Lars Nootbaar card.
I did decide to pick up a handful of cards from the set though but I concentrated on some low hanging fruit. I bought seven cards from one Ebay seller - each one was less than $2 - and I thought I'd do a quick post about them.
Four of the seven were the Korean players in the set:
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| #19 |
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| #93 |
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| #26 |
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| #68 |
Edman, Kim and Park had all appeared in other 2023 WBC sets but Yang had not.
Next up were the cards of two long time NPB foreign players - although one of them no longer qualifies as a foreigner because he played in Japan long enough:
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| #27 |
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| #7 |
I picked up this last card simply because I like Harry Ford:
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| #35 |
The cards themselves look OK. They've got a shiny finish on them that make them a little difficult to scan. One thing I really like about them is the backs have the player's WBC stats and not just for the 2023 WBC. Balentien and Despaigne's cards show their stats for the 2013 and 2017 tournaments as well while Kim and Yang's cards each have their stats for 2017. Ford's card has his stats from the 2022 WBC qualifier as well.
After getting these today, I took a look to see what was available at Sportlots and I ended up ordering four more cards - Yu Chang from Taiwan, Andrelton Simmons from the Netherlands, Robbie Glendinning from Australia and Yu Darvish from Samurai Japan (Darvish being the one of the six Japanese players whose cards aren't more than I want to pay). Not sure if I'm going to get any other cards. I could see myself getting the other two Australian players maybe but that's probably about it.
4 comments:
I thought about buying a box. Glad I didn't. If anything, I'll grab singles if they're affordable.
I wish the Panini sticker division would handle the WBC like they do the World Cup. I would love a sticker album covering at least the starting lineups of all the teams involved, instead of just the usually 5 or 6 cards per country.
Oh thanks for the reminder to look for an Edman single. And holy cow I was not expecting Topps to make good backs for these.
@Fuji - a big if in some cases
@Jason Presley - the 2009 Konami Baseball Heroes WBC Edition set (or whatever it's called) will always be the standard to beat - a 253 card set with full rosters of the four semi-final teams and 12 cards for each of the remaining teams (except Panama for some reason which only had 8 cards). Every WBC since then I hope for a set like that and every WBC since then I'm disappointed.
@Nick Vossbrink - I was wondering if you'd gotten an Edman single yet. And, yeah, the backs aren't bad.
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