2013 Topps Tribute WBC

I picked up the base set from what looks to be Topps' major World Baseball Classic set for the year - Topps Tribute WBC.  Topps Tribute is a high end set that I normally wouldn't be caught dead near but since Topps didn't really do anything else for a World Baseball Classic set, it was this or nothing.

The prices for unopened material for Topps Tribute is driven by the high number of memorabilia cards available.  I was hoping that this would mean that I'd be able to pick up the 100 card base set for something reasonable.  This turned out to be hopelessly optimistic.  I won't say how much I actually spent, but it was more than I've paid for a BBM 1st Version set.

I have to say that while I frequently find the high end sets to be very unattractive, I was surprised to find that I actually liked the appearance of these cards (and considering their price, that's a good thing).  There's a chrome sheen to them that is not overpowering and most of the pictures are nice action shots, with only a handful of the "mug shots" that littered several of Topps' 2009 WBC sets.  (I realize there's probably a term for this chrome sheen that's well known to anyone who follows the US card market closely but I am ignorant of it.)  The cards are quite thick, being about the the thickness of four normal cards.

There are 15 cards of players from the Japanese team - Shinnosuke Abe, Yuichi Honda, Takeru Imamura, Atsunori Inaba, Kenta Maeda, Nobuhiro Matsuda, Kazuo Matsui, Atsushi Nohmi, Kenji Ohtonari, Hayato Sakamoto, Tadashi Settsu, Toshiya Sugiuchi, Masahiro Tanaka, Tetsuya Utsumi and Hideaki Wakui.  I thought the player selection was a little odd - why would you include Imamura and Ohtonari at the expense of guys like Seiichi Uchikawa, Hirokazu Ibata, Yoshio Itoi, Sho Nakata or Takashi Toritani?

Only 12 teams other than Japan are included in the set - Australia, China and Spain were left out.  There's 1 card for Brazil, 5 for Canada, 5 for Chinese Taipei, 8 for Cuba, 12 for the Dominican Republic, 1 for Italy, 3 for Korea (including Dae Ho Lee), 4 for Mexico, 6 for the Netherlands (including Andruw Jones but not Wladimir Balentien), 7 for Puerto Rico, 20 for the United States and 13 for Venezuela.

I was reading some of the backs of the cards and I thought they were a little odd.  Robinson Cano's card makes no mention of the fact that he was named MVP of the WBC.  Toshiya Sugiuchi's mentions a no-hitter that he threw at Koshien in 1998 (well, it says "the 1998 national high school tourney", not Koshien) but not the no-hitter he threw last year (although Kenta Maeda's mentions the one he threw last year).

Here's a couple sample cards:

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#29

#57

#45

#49

#94

#11

Card Of The Week July 14

Last week, I bought an app that Konami put out a few months back - PowerPros 2013 World Baseball Classic.  It's a little video game that allows you to play this past spring's World Baseball Classic tournament.  So far I've been playing as Japan at the easiest levels and I've been winning a lot of the games by big scores.  Shinnosuke Abe has been hitting particularly well - I think he's been averaging two home runs a game.  Here's a card of Abe that was made by Konami - his 2005 Prime Nine Team Pack card (#PN05TE-047):

What'd I Say?

This is odd.  This post was the first post I ever titled using katakana rather than roman letters.  Normally my posts get around 20-30 views within a few days.  This one has gotten over 300 and counting.  Looking at my audience stats, I suspect that all of a sudden, I'm getting a bunch of folks in China looking at that post.

While I don't want anyone to not feel welcome here, I'm kind of curious why that particular post has attracted so much attention.  Did I somehow title the post "Kate Middleton Sex Tape" in Chinese?

ダメ 外人

I think I titled this post "dame gaijin" which I hope means "useless foreigner".  I remember learning that phrase while reading Robert Whiting's "You Gotta Have Wa" (but as usual I can't find it in the book when I'm looking for it...)

I was checking out Niki's website the other day to see what new sets BBM had coming out but had not announced on their website yet.  I came across something called Deep Impact which apparently is a sequel to the Legendary Foreigner set from last winter.  Like the earlier set, this one will have 81 cards - 72 player cards and 9 "Off Shot" cards.

It's the player list that made me think of the phrase "dame gaijin".  Some of the guys included...did not acquit themselves well in Japan.  Just in the sample cards shown on the image are Mike Greenwell (quit after playing just 7 games for the Tigers in 1997), Kevin Mitchell (only played 37 games for the Hawks in 1995 after being paid 400 million yen for the season) and Joe Pepitone (both Robert Whiting's "The Chrysanthemum And The Bat" and Robert Obojski's "The Rise Of Japanese Baseball Power" include stories about Pepitone's 1973 season with Yakult - Whiting includes it in a chapter  called "Ugly Americans").  I'm not sure who else will be included (there's a list in katakana on the website but I didn't try to translate it myself).

Greenwell and Mitchell had BBM cards back when they played in Japan.  The Mitchell card is a "Late Series" card from the 1995 set and is actually pretty rare but the Greenwell card from the 1997 set shows up on Ebay fairly often (as well as his "Diamond Heroes" card).  Here's the Greenwell:

1997 BBM #440

I'll write more about this set when BBM makes their official announcement.  The set is due to be released in the end of August.

Card Of The Week July 7

The MLB All Star rosters were announced yesterday and two Japanese players made the AL squad - Yu Darvish of the Rangers and Hisashi Iwakuma of the Mariners.  Here's their cards from their first appearances in BBM's All Star sets in Japan - Iwakuma's is from 2003 (#A49) and Darvish's is from 2007 (#A07):

2013 BBM Hawks 75th Anniversary Set

I apologize for the lack of posts lately but I'm currently in the middle of software integration hell on my project at work.  Actually "middle" is optimistic - it's probably more like the beginning.  Anyway, I didn't have to work the holiday so I thought I'd get caught up on the sets I got a few weeks ago - the last one is the Hawks 75th Anniversary set from BBM.

Like the preceding 70th Anniversary set back in 2008 (and almost every other BBM Anniversary set), there are 99 cards in the base set.  They are divided up among four different subsets - "Memories Of Hawks" (5 cards), former Hawk players (67 cards), current Hawks players (18 cards) and the "Osaka Classic" subset (9 cards) which features current players in retro uniforms.  (This is almost exactly the same breakdown as the 2008 set - that set had a six card "History Of Hawks" subset, 66 cards for former Hawks, 18 cards for current Hawks and nine cards for current Hawks wearing "Turn-Back-The-Clock" uniforms.)

This set fixes the biggest problem that the 2008 set had - the absence of Katsuya Nomura.  Not only does Nomura have a "former Hawk" card but he's on at least two if not three of the "Memories Of Hawks" cards.  The "Memories Of Hawks" cards feature significant groups of Hawks teammates over the years.  One card is labelled "400 Ft Row" which I have been unable to find any information on - the card shows eight Hawks players (I think one is Nomura) from the late 50's/early 60's.  The other cards show Mutsuo Minagawa, Tadashia Sugiura and Nomura; Sugiura and Nomura; "Trio The Yamauchi" (Kazuhiro, Takanori and Shinichi Yamauchi, three pitchers with the Hawks in the early 1980's with the same last name but unrelated) and "Young Hawks Starters" (Nagisa Arakaki, Toshiya Sugiuchi, Hayato Terahara and Tsuyoshi Wada from the early '00's).

#01

The "former Hawks" cards feature OB players as well as active players playing for other teams either in NBP (Tadahito Iguchi, Sugiuchi and Hitoshi Tamura) or the US (Munenori Kawasaki and Wada).  I'm not really seeing any major omissions in the set - maybe the biggest is Yutaka Enatsu who only played two seasons for the Hawks but was featured in the 2008 set.  The star players in addition to the ones already mentioned include Hiromitsu Kadota, Hiroki Kokubo, Kenji Johjima, Kimiyasu Kudoh, Koji Akiyama and Yoshinori Hirose.  As usual there's an over abundance of recent (post 1950's players) but there's a couple earlier ones (Akira Bessho, Tokuji Iida).  For once there doesn't seem to be a lot of black and white photos used.  Also prominent in the set are former managers like Sadaharu Oh and Kazuto Tsuruoka and several foreigners like Clarence Jones, Julio Zuleta, Joe Stanka, Tony Bernazard and Don Blasingame (who is NOT labeled as Don Blazer in this set).

#48

#20

#15

#58

#13

#69

Since current manager Koji Akiyama is included with the former Hawks, he doesn't have a card in either the subset for the current team or the "Osaka Classic" subset.  The "Osaka Classic" was a three game set the Hawks played against the Buffaloes to celebrate the days when the Hawks shared Osaka with the Buffaloes.  The Hawks wore the Nankai Hawks uniforms used from 1984 to 1988, the last five years the Hawks played in Osaka.

#87

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All the cards can be seen here.

Card Of The Week June 30

On Wednesday of last week, Takuya Furuya of the Marines took a no-hitter into the ninth against Orix before surrendering a hit with two outs.  This was just about four weeks after he threw a no-hitter against the Baystars at the ni-gun level.   Had he completed the no-hitter against the Buffaloes I suspect he would have been the first pitcher to ever throw a no-hitter in the minors and a no-hitter in the majors in the same season.

But since he didn't, this week I'm going to showcase the pitcher who did throw a no-hitter last week.  On Friday, Daisuke Yamai of the Dragons no-hit the Baystars at the ichi-gun level.  Yamai of course famously had a perfect game going through eight innings in a Nippon Series game in 2007 against the Fighters when he was lifted for closer Hitoki Iwase in the ninth inning.  Iwase got three quick outs to clinch the perfect game (and not incidentally the Dragon's first Nippon Series champsionship since 1954).  This time around since the score was 9-0 rather than 1-0 and 53 years of frustration in Nagoya was not riding on the game, Yamai was allowed to complete the no-hitter.

I will be curious to see if BBM issues a card in Sports Card Magazine in the design of last year's No-hitter set to commemorate Yamai's no-hitter (like they did for Yuki Nishi's no-hitter last fall).  In the meantime, here's Yamai's card from the 2007 BBM Nippon Series set (#S08) showing him pitching his part of the perfect game:

And just so you know - I know this is from Yamai's perfect game because that's the only game that he appeared in during the 2007 Series.