Bullet Points

(This post's title is offered with apologies to Maximo Nelson...)

- Jason told me about an interesting blog called The Infinite Baseball Card Set whose author is has designed and illustrated his own set of virtual baseball cards. Card #4 is of Eiji Sawamura.

- A friend of mine at work alerted me to an episode of a show on the Travel Channel called Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations in which Mr. Bourdain visits Osaka. Among other things, he joins an Oendan group for the Tigers at both a bar and later in the episode at a game. I was a little disappointed that instead of being at Koshien, the game he attended was at the Osaka Dome, but it was still pretty cool to get a chance to see a little of what it's like to go to a ballgame in Japan. Actually, the whole episode is pretty interesting, even the non-baseball related parts.

- This shouldn't have surprised me. I'm pretty sure that the only legitimate card of Eri Yoshida was a special card produced by BBM late in 2008 or early in 2009 - it may have been an insert in BBM's baseball card magazine. I saw it up on eBay once but didn't try to get it. As far as I know, none of the independent teams in Japan have had baseball card sets (at least I haven't seen them on kuboTen). And as far as I can tell, the Yuma Scorpions have not had a recent baseball card set (and the winter league version of the team probably has never had one). As the eBay listing says, this is a "custom" card - i.e. an unlicensed fake one. To his credit, the seller is not trying to claim that it is anything else (and he's not selling any graded versions of the card either - at least not yet).