Card Of The Week August 16

You have probably heard that Mike Hessman of the Toledo Mud Hens broke Buzz Arlett's record for most home runs in the minor leagues a few weeks ago (and if you haven't, here's a great piece by Joe Posnanski about it).  Hessman would have broken the record sooner but he spent 2011 in Japan with the Orix Buffaloes.  He got into 48 games at the ichi-gun level, hitting .192 with six home runs.  He fared only a little better with the Buffaloe's ni-gun team, hitting .243 with 8 home runs in 36 games.

He had two Japanese baseball cards that I'm aware of and I only have one of them - #124 from BBM's 1st Version set (the other card is from BBM's Buffaloes team set):

I was looking over his career stats and I realized that I probably saw him in 1998 when he was with the Danville 97's in the Carolina League.  I went to a lot of Wilmington Blue Rocks games that year as well as the Carolina League All Star game (which was held in Wilmington).  I couldn't find my scorecards from that year in my office to confirm it but I did find this:

1998 Choice Carolina League All Stars #40