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:
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| 2012 Bandai Owners League 03 #102 |
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| 2001 BBM Nippon Series #S14 |
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| 1989 Lotte #9 |
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| 2001 Upper Deck Victory #047 |
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| 2000 BBM #526 |
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| 1982 Takara Lions #47 |
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| 2010 Giants Winning Game Card #42 |
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| 1977 Yamakatsu JY3 |
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| 1994 Tomy #82 |
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| 1973 Calbee #1 |
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| 2006 Konami Powerful Baseball #P06-138 |
5 comments:
183 Ohs is awesome! I feel when it comes to my Japanese athlete PC, it's a close race between Nomo and Ichiro... although 99% of each PC is made up of cards from this side of the Pacific.
I must say I'm very impressed that you were able to learn a new baseball card collecting related skill through work like that!
My collection isn't anywhere near as organized as it would need to be for me to do a similar post, but I suspect Oh and Nagashima would be at the top of my list. Since my collection skews a bit more vintage I suspect I would have a lot more guys from the 70s and a lot fewer guys from the last 20 years in my top 20.
I was initially kind of surprised that Ichiro didn't make the list, though on thinking it over it makes sense since his playing career in NPB was so short.
I have 114 cards of Ichiro, tied with Alex Ramirez and Kazuhiro Wada for 44th on the list. He's only had three BBM cards since 2001 - all the other cards I have for him since he left for the US are WBC cards. Looks like there's 15 of them between Upper Deck, Topps and Konami.
Both Oh and Nagashima have like 150-200 cards each in "the monster" so you're probably right. I'd bet Koichi Tabuchi and Katsuya Nomura are pretty high up there as well.
Awesome post as always. I'm sure Masaichi Kaneda and Nagashima would be at the top of my Japanese player list.
Thanks, Dan. These counts include my KBO cards as well but none of those players made the top 25. I expect that Korean player I have the most cards of is Lee Seung-Yuop - I have 67 cards of him.
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