Card Of The Week December 13

Elkton, Maryland is a little town in the northeast corner of Maryland whose main claim to fame is having been the "Wedding Capital of the East Coast" back a hundred years ago.  This was due to Maryland having lax laws about how long a couple had to wait for a marriage license and it being the first county seat in Maryland that anyone traveling from New York, Boston, Philadelphia or the rest of the North East United States would encounter - it's right on the Maryland-Delaware border.  It's also not far from where I live.

There have been two Major League Baseball players born in Elkton* - Bob Jones and Dwayne Henry - and there's an odd coincidence about their baseball careers - they both played in Japan for the Chunichi Dragons.  (They also both played for the Texas Rangers - in fact they were teammates from 1984-86 - but that's not quite as interesting.)

*The Wikipedia article about Elkton lists 19th Century pitcher Vic Willis as also being from there but he was born before the hospital in in the town was built (1908).  Obviously this doesn't mean he couldn't have still been born in Elkton but Baseball-Reference lists him as being born in Cecil County, the county where the town is located.  

Jones spent 1979 and 1980 in Nagoya.  He hit .284 with 20 home runs in 174 games over the two seasons before returning to the US.  Henry played in NPB in 1994, going 3-7 with an ERA of 3.48 in 31 games mostly out of the bullpen although he started five games.  Jones has three Japanese cards I know of - #78 in the 1979 TCMA set and #4 in the 1979 and 1980 Takara Dragons sets (which Engel erroneously lists as Clarence Jones).  I know of only two Japanese cards of Henry - 1994 BBM #43 and Takara Dragons #42.  Here are their non-Takara cards:

Two Time First Timer

The perception of time is a funny thing.  I was 27 years old in 1991 and the 18 years between 1973 and 1991 seemed like a long time.  On the other hand, the 30 years from 1991 until now seems like no time at all.

There's a reason I bring this up and you may have a clue about what I'm thinking about because of the two years I'm mentioning here.  It had occurred to me recently that Hiromitsu Kadota was in both the first Calbee set in 1973 and the first BBM set in 1991.  I started wondering if any other players had been in both sets.

I'm pretty sure the answer is "no".  I went through the 1991 BBM set and found six other players who were active in 1973 - Hisao Niura, Yukio Yaegashi, Toru Sugiura, Yasunori Ohshima, Akinobu Mayumi and Yutaro Imae.  None of them have cards in the 1973 Calbee set.

Well, let me correct that.  None of them have cards in the first 1973 Calbee set.  The first Calbee set was a 91 card set that was issued entirely in 1973.  The second Calbee set was a 363 card set that was issued in 1973 and 1974 and is cataloged as the "1973-74" Calbee set.  The first 91 cards of the 1973-74 set are the same as the 91 cards in the 1973 set and have the same fronts although the card backs are different.  Ohshima has two cards in the 1973-74 set but he doesn't have any cards in the 1973 set.

Kadota actually has two cards in the 1973 set - #78 and #83:

1973 Calbee #78

1973 Calbee #83

I'm cheating a little here as I don't have the 1973 Kadota cards - I have the 1973-74 Kadota cards.

Kadota was 25 years old in 1973 and was in his fourth season with the Nankai Hawks.  

1991 BBM #312

In 1991 Kadota was 43 years old.  He was in his first season back with the Hawks after spending two years with the Orix Braves.  Kadota had refused to move to Fukuoka when Nankai sold the Hawks to Daiei after the 1988 season and was traded to Orix so that he could remain in Kansai, apparently so that his kids wouldn't have to change schools.  By 1991 his daughter was in high school so he felt he could rejoin the Hawks in Fukuoka.  His Wikipedia page doesn't say anything about it but I wonder if Orix moving to Kobe for 1991 was a factor in his decision as well.  He retired after the 1992 season.

I limited my search to "players" who appeared in both sets.  I should point out that if we expand the search to include 1973 players who were managers in 1991, we end up with six more names - Shozo Doi, Senichi Hoshino, Masahiko/Masaaki Mori, Katsuya Nomura, Koichi Tabuchi and Koji Yamamoto.

I've no idea how many players I should have expected to find appeared in both sets.  I did a quick look at the 1991 Topps checklist and I could only come up with five players who were also in the 1973 Topps set - Nolan Ryan, Bert Blyleven, Carlton Fisk, Rick Reuschel and Dwight Evans.  (Rich Gossage was in the 1973 set and had 1991 cards but he wasn't in the Topps set.  Rick Dempsey's had cards in 1972 and 1974 as well as 1991 but wasn't in 1973 for some reason.)

Card Of The Week December 6

A while back I learned about a 10 card set that BBM had done back in 2004 for the Marines that was given away with packages of Toppo, a chocolate candy made by Lotte.  The cards were only given away in AM/PM convenience stores in Kanto and are relatively rare.  The original post goes into the detective work that Dan (who had picked up the Seung-Yeop Lee card from the set), Ryan and I went through to find the details about the set.

I recently picked up my own card from this set from a seller on Ebay - it's one of the the six cards in the set for Bobby Valentine.  2004 was the first year of Valentine's second stint as Marines manager so I guess BBM felt they should include a bunch of cards of him (funny - it was Lee's first year with the team as well but they only gave him one card).  Anyway, here's the front and back of the card (#MP3) - the photo on the back looks like it's from his introductory press conference:

Infinity Goes To The Olympics

Infinity, BBM's annual multi-sport set, was released this week.  It's base set contains 94 cards featuring athletes in a number of sports, including baseball, track & field, boxing, swimming, gymnastics, volleyball, table tennis and fencing.  Typically there are more baseball players in the set than any other sport and this year is no exception.  27 of the 94 cards feature baseball players while the next sport with the most cards is swimming with 11.

I've never picked up a complete Infinity set.  I'm just not all that interested in any sports other than baseball so it's not that appealing a set.  And usually the baseball players included in the set are ones that I already have many cards of.  There have been some notable exceptions in the past, however.  In 2017 BBM included three baseball players who were corporate league legends that never played in NPB.  In 2018 they included a card of the JWBL's Yuki Kawabata.  Because BBM does include some interesting players I do make a point of looking at the set each year to see who's in it.

Jambalaya had put all the cards from the set on-line yesterday and I took a look at them last night.  I noticed that there were some reasonably big names in the set (Kenjiro Nomura, Kazuhiro Wada, Tadahito Iguchi, Yoshinobu Takahashi and Daisuke Matsuzaka) but there were a lot of lesser names.  As I looked at the names though, it suddenly dawned on me that there was a connection between all 27 of them - they had all played for the Japan National Team in the Olympics.

I probably wouldn't have noticed this if I hadn't done a series of posts on the Olympic teams earlier this year.  There are 9 players from the 1984 team (Yasuo Yoshida, Kozo Shoda, Katsumi Hirosawa, Shinji Hata, Akimitsu Itoh, Atsunori Itoh, Yoshiaki Nishikawa, Shinichi Furukawa and Yukio Arai), five players from the 1988 squad (Terushi Nakajima, Nomura, Kenji Tomoshino, Shuji Yoshida and Hirofumi Ogawa), four players from the 1992 team (Shinichi Satoh, Koichi Oshima, Masahito Kohiyama, and Takashi Miwa), four players from the 1996 team (Hideaki Okubo, Yoshitomo Tani, Makoto Imaoka and Iguchi), one player from 2000 (Matsuzaka) and six players from 2004 (Wada, Tani, Masahide Kobayashi, Takahashi, Hirotoshi Ishii and Matsuzaka).  While Tani and Matsuzaka appeared in multiple Olympics they each only have one card in the set.  Sadly, the cards all show the players in their NPB uniforms - I would have been much more interested in the cards if they had shown the players in their National Team uniforms.

I should mention that it's a kind of odd selection of players as there are some significant former Olympic players who are missing, starting with Hall Of Famers Atsuya Furuta and Hideo Nomo, from the 1988 team.  OK, Nomo is not a surprise since he hasn't been on an NPB card since 1994 but Furuta appears in OB sets with some regularity.  Hiroki Kokubo, Nobuhiko Matsunaka and Shinnosuke Abe all played in the Olympics as amateurs as well (Matsunaka and Abe also played in the Summer Games as professionals) but aren't included either.

I did some spot checking on the other 67 athletes in the set and it appears that everyone in the set has participated in the Olympics for Japan.  This explains why this is the first Infinity set to not include any sumo wrestlers since sumo is not an Olympic sport.  I think it's a shame that the set does not include judoka Ryoko Tani, five time Olympic medalist and wife of Yoshitomo Tani - how many card sets feature a married couple?

Card Of The Week November 29

The 2020 NPB season ended last Wednesday with the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks sweeping the Yomiuri Giants in four games for the second straight year.  This was the Hawks fourth straight championship, their sixth in the last seven years and their seventh in the last ten years.  It was one of the most lopsided Series in history, with the Hawks outscoring the Giants 26 to 4 and holding Yomiuri to a record lowest batting average of .132.  The Hawks also came within one out of no-hitting the Giants in Game Three on Tuesday.

What I am personally most happy about is that this means now that it will be at least nine years between Giants championships.  They last won the Nippon Series in 2012 and the earliest now they can win another one is 2021.  Believe it or not this is the longest they've ever gone between championships.  The previous longest drought was eight (obviously) which has happened twice - 1973 to 1981 and 1981 to 1989.  I think it's always good to know when we're living in historic times.

I'm continuing my tradition of celebrating the award winners of the Series.  BBM published a box set that featured all the players in each year's Nippon Series from 1991 to 2012 and each box set would include extra cards for all the award winners.

Series MVP Kyoya Kurihara (2015 BBM 1st Version #024)

"Fighting Spirit" Shosei Togoh (2020 Calbee #184)

"Outstanding Player" Matt Moore (2020 BBM 1st Version #033)

"Outstanding Player" Akira Nakamura (2018 Epoch NPB #25)

"Outstanding Player" Yuki Yanagita (2017 BBM 2nd Version #408 "secret" version)

If you feel like you've seen Yanagita and Nakamura in one of these posts before, it's because you have.  This was the second time Nakamura won an "Outstanding Player" award (2018 was the other time) and the fourth time Yanagita did (2014, 2017 and 2018 were the other times).

Additionally, the Korean Series ended a day earlier with the NC Dinos defeating the Doosan Bears in six games to win their first ever championship.  Yang Eui-ji was named Series MVP.  He's the first player to ever win the Series MVP for two different teams.  He also won the award in 2016 when he ironically was a member of the Doosan Bears.  Here's his 2019 SCC KBO Collection 1 card (#SCCR1-19/191):

The End Is Near

The end of 2020 is fast approaching but there are a couple more sets for the year that have been announced recently.  

- SCC is releasing their latest KBO set - their fourth of 2020 - today I think.  It's called "Golden Premium Collection" and, according to this tweet from Dan, a box of it will run you 100,000 won or about $90.50.  Not sure about the details of the set but it looks like each box contains one autograph and one memorabilia card.  I'm sure Dan will eventually post the checklist for the set over at Trading Card DB.

- For the fourth time in the last five years Calbee is issuing a Samurai Japan set.  According to the checklist it has a 27 card base set (26 players plus manager Atsunori Inaba) and there's a 10 card "Starting Lineup" insert set as well.  This set is pretty much last year's Premier 12 roster - the only two players who are missing are Shun Yamaguchi who played ML this past year and Yoshihiro Maru who replaced Shogo Akiyama (who also played MLB this past year) on the roster.  Not sure why Maru wasn't included as there's a number of pitchers included in the set who replaced other pitchers on the original roster due to injury (Hiroshi Kaino, Kan Ohtake, and Shinya Kayama).  The set will be available in convenience stores starting on Monday, November 30th and card shops by December 14th (I think).

- Epoch's latest announcement is for another ultra high-end set with the OB Club called "Holografica".  Boxes of the set will retail for 16,500 yen (about $160) and will contain six cards total.  I'm not positive but I assume each box is guaranteed to contain an autograph card (if not two).  The set has a 44 card base set featuring such retired players as Shigeo Nagashima, Kazuhiro Sasaki, Isao Harimoto, Hideki Kuroda, Tsutomo Wakamatsu and Tomoaki Kanemoto.  Each base set card has a photo variant and both the regular card and photo variant have some sort of parallel issue.  There are five different varieties of autographed cards available - "Authentic Signature", "Tribute To The Past", "Baseball Greats", "Baseball Signatures" and "Baseball Signatures (Sweet Spot)".  I think the last two are signatures on pieces of actual baseballs.  The parallels and the autographed cards are all serially numbered although I don't know what the counts are.  There are parallel versions of the "Authentic Signature", "Tribute To The Past" and "Baseball Greats" autographed cards.  The set will be released on December 19th.

- BBM has announced the first set that will have a "cover date" of 2021.  It's "Glory", their annual ultra high-end set.  Each six card box retails for 18,000 yen or $173 and is guaranteed to include "two or more premium inserts including one or more autographs".  The base set has 36 cards of active players - I'm assuming six cards per team but I don't know that for sure.  There's a parallel version of each base card that I think is limited to 5 each.  There are two insert sets - "MIYABI" which has 36 cards (I assume the same 36 players as the base set) and "Glorious 3D" which has 12.  The "MIYABI" cards are numbered to 50 and there's a "purple foil" parallel version numbered to 5 each available while the "Glorious 3D" cards are numbered to 25.  There are a wide variety of memorabilia cards including jersey, "super patch" and "grip end".  There are also memorabilia cards featuring jersey swatches from two, three or four players.  Besides the normal, one player autograph cards there are also autograph cards featuring two players.  The set will be out in late December.

In a normal year I would expect BBM to have announced a couple of their annual sets for 2021 by now, including the "Time Travel" and "Shining Venus" sets but so far there's been nothing about them.  I don't know if that means anything although to be fair, the "Glory" announcement only came out about a week ago so maybe there'll be announcements in the next week or so.  (It frequently feels like BBM makes announcements right after I do one of these posts so we'll see what happens...)

Players With The Most Cards In My Collection

I got inspired by a post that Night Owl Cards did earlier this week.  This is not the first time I've been inspired by him - I've been doing "Opening Day" posts the past few years that are a ripoff off of tribute to the ones he's been doing for years.  This particular post was a list of the 25 players who he has the most cards of.  I read his post and thought "Hey, I can do that!"

Some years back I created a relational database to keep track of my collection.  I'm a computer programmer in the real world and it was kind of fun to apply those skills to my hobby.  The database is hosted in a PostgreSQL database server running on my computer and I created a web application running in JBoss to be a front end to it so I have a web front end allowing me to search my database by player or set and to enter new cards into the database.  The best part of all this is that I was completing all this around the time I had a long period of downtime between projects at my job and I was able to convince my manager to allow me to use some training hours to learn new skills (specifically doing the web front end) while completing this.  That's right, my company PAID me to finish up my baseball card collection database application.*

*I think it was at most eight hours and I want to be clear they paid me for code development, not the time I spent entering the cards into the database.

I've learned how to do SQL queries on the database to learn all sorts of things like which players appear in BBM's 1st Version set but not Epoch's NPB set in a given year or what rookie cards appear in Calbee sets.  Or create a list of players ordered by how many cards I have of them.

OK, enough geeky technical mumbo-gumbo and on to the geeky Japanese baseball card stuff!  Here's the top 25 in reverse order:

25. Motonobu Tanishige, 130

24. Masahiro Yamamoto, 131

23. Hitoki Iwase, 132

22. Norihiro Nakamura, 133

20 TIE. Hiroki Kokubo, 134

20 TIE. Tadahito Iguchi, 134

18 TIE. Seiichi Uchikawa, 139

18 TIE. Takeya Nakamura, 139

17. Michihiro Ogasawara, 140

16. Kosuke Fukudome, 142

15. Tomoaki Kanemoto, 146

14. Tatsunori Hara, 149

12 TIE. Hayato Sakamoto, 150

12 TIE. Nobuhiko Matsunaka, 150

11. Hideki Matsui, 161

A couple notes before going on to the top 10.  I refer to these as the "players" I have the most cards of but I am counting cards of the players as managers as well.  I'm also including OB cards of the retired players.  The counts also include Topps and Upper Deck World Baseball Classic cards but no MLB cards of players (since I don't have any).  I also don't include any "single player" sets in the counts (I don't put those cards in my database) so for example Hideki Matsui's card count doesn't include either box set BBM did for him (one in 2002 and the other in 2013).

On to the top 10:

2012 Bandai Owners League 03 #102

9 TIE. Yoshinobu Takahashi, 162

2001 BBM Nippon Series #S14

9 TIE. Atsuya Furuta, 162

1989 Lotte #9

8. Koji Akiyama, 165

2001 Upper Deck Victory #047

7. Kazuo Matsui, 167

I was quite surprised I had more Kazuo Matsui cards than Hideki Matsui cards

2000 BBM #526

6. Daisuke Matsuzaka, 173

How many cards would I have of him if he hadn't spent eight years in MLB?

1982 Takara Lions #47

5. Kimiyasu Kudoh, 180

2010 Giants Winning Game Card #42

4. Shinnosuke Abe, 182

1977 Yamakatsu JY3

3. Sadaharu Oh, 189

Somewhat surprised he wasn't either one or two

1994 Tomy #82

2. Kazuhiro Kiyohara, 202

Pretty amazing he ranks this high considering he hasn't shown up in an OB set in five years due to his legal issues. 

1973 Calbee #1

1. Shigeo Nagashima, 210

This shouldn't be a surprise - there are a LOT of Shigeo Nagashima cards.  For example it looks like 2008 is the only year that I don't have at least one BBM card of him in the 30 years BBM has been publishing cards.

Just out of curiosity I looked to see which Westerner I had the most cards of.  It's Alex Ramirez with 114 cards:

2006 Konami Powerful Baseball #P06-138