1993 Teleca Korean Cards

I've been meaning to get around to this forever - a couple months back I bought a bunch of Korean baseball cards from 1993-94 from Robert Shadlow, another of the "pioneers" of the Asian baseball card hobby in the US.  Robert was actually kind enough to scan all the cards he had and make the scans available to me via dropbox.  I've been feeling very guilty that I have not gotten around to doing any posts on these cards since he had done all that hard and tedious work for me.

I'm going to start with a post on the 1993 cards.  These cards were made by Teleca, who later put out some pack based sets in 1999 and 2000.  The cards are the size and shape (with rounded corners) of phone cards (which Teleca also did in 1993 and 1997).  Instead of being sold in packs or boxes sets, they apparently were sold one card at a time in a "hanging sleeve".  The card would be inserted in the sleeve by having two corners slipped under tabs on the sleeve.  The sleeves themselves would generally have the team's logo under the card and usually a blank back (other than some information about Teleca) although Robert did send me a sleeve for a 1994 LG Twins card that had the Twins schedule on the back side.

I've set up an account on Flickr to show Robert's scans.  The 1993 cards can be seen here.  It's unclear how many cards actually exist in the set and how many teams had cards.  Robert only has five 1993 cards and they are only for the Haitai Tigers and the OB Bears.  Here's a list of the cards he has and links to the fronts, backs and "in sleeve" pictures:

Number	Player	Team	Front	Back	Sleeve
1	Sun Dong-yeol	Haitai Tigers	scan	scan	scan
9	Kim Kyeong-won	OB Bears	scan	scan	scan
10	Kim Hyeong-seok	OB Bears	scan	scan	scan
11	Chang Ho-yeon	OB Bears	scan	scan	scan
12	Lee Myeong-soo	OB Bears	scan	scan	scan

Robert also scanned empty sleeves for both the Tigers and the Bears.  The cards shown on the Tigers' sleeve are phone cards that Teleca did in 1991.

You'll probably notice that it looks like there are two numbering systems with the cards.  The OB Bear cards have a number in the form "O.9308XX" where "XX" is the player's uniform number.  Many of the 1994 cards have a similar numbering scheme but since several players in the 1994 set have multiple cards, these numbers aren't unique.

Robert suspects that there are actually only 12 cards for 1993 and that the 1994 Teleca set is a continuation of it as the lowest numbered card he has for the 1994 set is #13.

Robert has 70+ 1994 cards scanned as well - I'll be doing posts on them in the future, probably on a team by team basis.

Since Robert has been so helpful to me I will plug the fact that he is currently selling many of these cards on eBay under his handle bpi6tzt.