In 2000 and 2001, an outfit called DigiCube issued sets for the Chunichi Dragons. These sets were somewhat mysterious to me as they were not listed in Engel although they did appear in the Sports Card Magazine (SCM) listings for non-BBM baseball card sets. According to SCM, the cards were only sold through Circle-K convenience stores in the Tokai region (which is an unofficial region in Japan that's not strictly defined but contains Aichi, Gifu, Mie and Shizuoka prefectures). I should note that this "Circle K" was not the same one that's in the US - they were a separate company that licensed the store name from the North American firm. They've since merged with FamilyMart and all the stores have been rebranded.
I had never seen many of these cards anywhere although I finally tracked down two cards from each set at Wrappers during my 2019 trip to Japan. I used to see unopened boxes for sale on Yahoo! Japan Auctions some 10 or 15 years ago - in fact that was where I first learned of their existence - but I hadn't seen any for sale for a while until some time over this past winter. I saw a box of the 2001 set for 1800 yen or about $13. I asked Ryan to grab it and it's yet another item that was in the box he sent me in July.
I hadn't done a box break in quite a while so it was a lot of fun opening all the packs one evening a few weeks back. As you can see from the box top above, the box contained 15 packs which each contained 8 cards which means that the box contained 120 cards in all.
One side of the box contains information on the breakdown of the set checklist:
The checklist of the set is a little confusing. There's 108 numbered cards in it but, according to both the box and SCM, the base set only contains 72 cards. I guess that the other 36 cards should be considered either insert cards or short printed cards, but as we'll see in a minute, they don't seem to be all that rare. There are two varieties of these cards - 16 "The Memorabilia" cards which is a very misleading way to label a bunch of cards that commemorate significant events for the Dragons between Opening Day of 2000 and Opening Day of 2001 and 20 "Premium Players" cards (to be completely accurate, the "Premium Players" cards are labeled as being "Silver"). There are two possible parallel versions of the "Premium Players" cards - "Gold" which were limited to 570 apiece (but NOT serially numbered) and "Foil Autograph" which were limited to 300 each (and also not serially numbered). I think only 12 of the "Premium Players" cards had the facsimile autograph parallel.
Actually, looking at the information from the box again, I think the only things that should be considered short prints or inserts are the parallel cards - the ones that are listed in the section marked "SP INSERT".
After opening all the packs, I found that I had the following:
78 base set cards (54 unique)
20 "The Memorabilia" cards (15 unique)
19 "Premium Players" cards (18 unique)
3 "Premium Players" gold parallel cards (3 unique)
There were at least two of the "The Memorabilia" and "Premium Player" cards in every pack which means that while they may be more rare than the base set cards, I still got most of them. But I only ended up with three of the parallels, the actual short printed cards.
According to SCM, there are also two unnumbered checklist cards but I did not get either of them and I'm not sure they actually exist - the information on the box side doesn't mention them.
If you count up unique cards, you'll see that I ended up with 88 of the 108 (or 110 if you include the checklists) cards. Or you will if I pass along one more piece of information - one of the "Premium Players" parallel cards I got was one of the ones I was missing from the regular ones so I actually have 19 of the cards from the subset. That leaves me with either 20 or 22 cards left to get if I want to get the complete set. Which, of course, I've decided that I do.
It turns out that I'm already one card on my way to completing the set because one of the two cards I picked up at Wrappers six years ago - Senichi Hoshino - was not one of the cards in this box. So now I only need 19 (or 21) cards!
Let's dig into the set itself. Those 72 base set cards are essentially a "comprehensive" team set for the Dragons with cards for manager Hoshino and the 67 players - everyone on the team's 70 man roster. That accounts for 68 of the 72 cards with the other four being kind of oddball cards that I'll talk about in a minute.
The big names in the set are obviously the players who were big names on the Dragons in 2001 including Masahiro Yamamoto, Hitoki Iwase, Kosuke Fukudome, Kazuyoshi Tatsunami, Kenshin Kawakami, Masahiro Araki, and Masahiko Morino. There's seven foreign players - four from Western countries - Melvin Bunch, Eddie Gaillard, Ozie Timmons and Tim Unroe - and three from Asian countries - Lee Jong-beom (Korea), Lu Jian-gang (China) and Soh Chun-yang (Taiwan). This is the first NPB card I've seen of Lu, a member of the Chinese National Team for the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2009 and 2013 WBCs. I suspect that he's also in the 2000 DigiCube set - those would be the only NPB cards he ever had, along with any team issued cards.
I've mentioned numerous times in the past that I prefer borderless card designs that feature full bleed photos. These are kind of odd in that they both have and don't have borders. The background of the photo is tinted and there's some sort of graphic behind the player that includes a border, but the background image can be seen through the border. The photo selection is good - there's a lot of "pitchers pitching, batters batting" poses but there's a number of other poses as well. I think I'd really like the cards if they didn't have the tinted backgrounds. Here's some examples:
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| #046 |
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| #002 |
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| #063 |
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| #067 |
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| #035 |
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| ##039 |
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| #052 |
I really like how Yamasaki is up on his toes, probably jumping as he's hit a home run.
I mentioned that there were four oddball cards in the base set. Before I delve into them, I need to explain how the set's checklist is laid out. It's done by uniform number and position, the same way that Japanese publications list a team's roster. The first card in the set is for manager Senichi Hoshino. The next section of the checklist is for the pitchers, with Kenshin Kawakami (uniform #11) being listed first, followed by Shinya Okamoto (#12), Hitoshi Iwase (#13), Shinji Imanaka (#14), etc, all the way up to Yoshitaka Nagata (#94). Next are the catchers, starting with Yuichi Yanagisawa (#00) and ending with Keiji Miwa (#67), followed by the infielders (#1 Kosuke Fukudome* to #66 Mitsunobu Takahashi) and the outfielders (#0 Shogo Mori to #99 Kazuki Inoue). This is pretty much the way that BBM and Epoch do the checklists for their "comprehensive" team sets.
*He was the Dragons' Opening Day third baseman that season
The location of two of these odd ball cards in the checklist made kind of obvious sense somewhat. This card is #037 and separates the pitchers in the checklist from the position players:
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| #037 |
Team photos are pretty rare in Japanese baseball cards - off hand this is the only one I think I've seen other than the ones for the champions in BBM's Nippon Series box sets (and some of the flagship sets). The back of the card lists the coaching staff for both the top team and the farm team.
This card is #072, the last card in the base set, which is kind of where you'd expect a card like this:
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| #072 |
The other two cards made me scratch my head for a bit though. They're labelled "Illustration Cards" on the back and feature drawings of Kosuke Fukudome and Takeshi Yamasaki:
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| #006 |
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| #055 |
I was a little baffled about why these two cards were kind of randomly added to the checklist but I eventually realized that it wasn't random. I was comparing the cards I had to the team's roster on Japanese Wikipedia to try to figure out whose cards I was missing*. One of the things I had to think about was when the set went to press because that would determine who I should expect to be in the set. As I mentioned above, the "The Memorabilia" subset cards contained a card for the Dragons' victory on Opening Day of 2001 (which was on March 31st), so obviously it couldn't have been before then. Lee Jong-beom left the team in May, so the set must have gone to press before that (since it's very unusual for an NPB set to include a player on a team that he no longer plays for), probably in April.
* Of course, I could have just looked at the list of players on the front of the box but what fun would that have been?
There were three transactions that affected the Dragons' 70 man roster that April. They traded pitcher Hiroshi Yamada and infielder Hitoshi Taneda to the Baystars for outfielder Toshio Haru; they sold outfielder Masahiko Harada to the Fighters and they re-signed infielder Leo Gomez. None of these five players appear in the set and I don't know when the transactions occurred. But what I found interesting is that Yamada's uniform number with the Dragons was 16 which would have put him in between Shinji Imanaka (#14) and Kazuhiro Takeda (#17) on the roster. Imanaka's card in the set is #005 and Takeda's is #007 so Yamada's card would have been #006, the same as the "Illustration Card" for Fukudome. Similarly, Taneda's uniform number was 49 which would have put him in between Hirokazu Ibata (#48 and card #054) and Kazuhito Yoshimura (#50 and card #056). Taneda's card would have been #055, the same as the "Illustration Card" for Yamasaki. So the two cards are replacement cards for the two players who had been traded.
There is no gap in the checklist for Harada. I suspect that his transaction was earlier than the Yamada and Taneda's so DigiCube had time to adjust the checklist before printing the cards but I don't know that for sure.
OK, so that was quite a digression into the weeds of checklist construction and player transactions. Let's get back to talking about the cards.
As I mentioned previously, the misleadingly named "The Memorabilia" subset contains 16 cards that commemorate "significant" events for the Dragons starting with Melvin Bunch's no-hitter on April 7th, 2000 and going to Masahiro Yamamoto's victory on Opening Day 2001 (March 31st). Most of the intervening events are career milestones being reached (Kazuyoshi Tatsunami's 1500th hit, Senichi Hoshino's 700th win, Yamamoto's 2000th inning pitched, etc). Some of the others are the Dragons' farm team winning their league title, the team's 2000 draft picks, and several players winning post-season awards. Here's a couple of these cards:
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| #073 |
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| #082 |
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| #088 |
The 20 "Premium Player" cards are basically shiny cards for the top players on the team. They remind me a little of Calbee's "Star" cards and don't scan very well. Here's Fukudome's card:
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| #096 |
The backs have a different photo on them. In some cases, it's a more interesting photo:
Fukudome's card is the "Silver" version of these cards. Here's one of the rarer "Gold" parallels:
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| #092 |
The lighter color scans a little better.
There's one more card from this set that I want to talk about and it's a card that isn't mentioned on the side of the box or the SCM checklist. There was a loose card in with the unopened packs in the box:
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| #PRO3 |
From the back of the card, it looks like there were four possible cards that could have been in the box:
I'm very curious about something. If you look at the box top image at the top of the post, you'll notice a grey circle that says "Special Present!! Player's Bat, Grove[sic], Uniform and More!!" which implies that there are memorabilia cards associated with this set (and not the "The Memorabilia" subset). But as we've seen, there's no indication on the breakdown of the cards in the set on the side of the box that there are any such cards. SCM doesn't mention them either. I wonder if they were inserted into the boxes of packs like this card was. The box does mention a "Secret Insert!!" so maybe these cards and the memorabilia cards were it. On the other hand, the packs also mention both the "Special Present!!" and "Secret Insert!!" so maybe not.
