Sunday, February 25, 2024

2023 Pacific League 12 Greatest Set


Last summer the Pacific League issued a twelve card set as a stadium giveaway.  I don't know all the details but at select games fans were handed bags like the one shown above containing a sheet of stickers and a paper sleeve containing a baseball card.  I assume but don't know for sure that you'd only get cards for the home team at the stadium you were visiting, so you wouldn't get cards for the Marines at a Lions home game and vice versa.

The set was called "12 Greatest" which, as you might expect, means there are two cards from each team.  The back of the sleeve lists all the players and, as you also might expect, Yoshinobu Yamamoto is the first player listed.  As you might NOT expect, Roki Sasaki is not included in the set - the Marines representatives are Kazuya Ojima and Kou Matsukawa.  Here's the full list of players - Yamamoto and Hiroya Miyagi (Buffaloes); Takuya Kai and Kensuke Kondoh (Hawks); Kona Takahashi and Sosuke Genda (Lions); Yuki Matsui and Hideto Asamura (Eagles); Ojima and Matsukawa (Marines) and Hiromi Itoh and Go Matsumoto (Fighters).

At my request Ryan picked up the two Lions cards for me off Mercari.  The listing included not just the cards but the bags with the sleeves and stickers.

The cards are larger than the standard size.  They're four inches high and three inches wide.  Here's the two Lions cards:



These are not the only cards I have from this set, however, as a month or so ago I picked this up on Ebay:


Here's what the back of the Yamamoto card looks like:


You can see that the cards are unnumbered - that number on the front of the card is the player's uniform number.

I got curious about the line on the back that said "Produced by doda".  I was wondering if "doda" was some card company I hadn't heard of.  It isn't - they're a company to help people find new jobs and they're owned by Persol, an HR management company that currently has the naming rights for the Pacfic League.

I actually like these cards quite a bit and would consider trying to track down the other nine cards.  The sad thing is that Wrappers, the card shop in Tokyo that would be most likely to carry oddball items like this, has apparently closed.  

Just to round things out, here are scans of the front and back of the sleeve and the sticker sheet:





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