Card Of The Week January 24

I wanted to share two recent Ebay wins I received this past week.

BBM used to occasionally do a kind of update to their flagship set back in the days before they switched to issuing the flagship set as two sets (1st & 2nd Versions) in 2002.  They'd essentially do a second printing of the set but pull all the cards for a team (or two) and replace them with new photos and card numbers.  The new cards are referred to as "Late Series".  BBM did this six out of the eight years between 1994 and 2001.  With the exception of 1994, the "Late Series" cards are less common than the regular cards.

In 1995 BBM not only replaced all the cards of the Chiba Lotte Marines with ones that showed the Marines new uniforms but they also added five additional cards.  Three of these were for Americans who had signed with NPB teams late enough that they didn't make the regular set - Kevin Mitchell, Terry Bross and Rich Monteleone.  The other two cards were for a pair of players who had been traded for each other - Masato Yoshii and Tatsuji Nishimura.  While the updated Marines cards aren't super rare, for some reason these other five cards are.  I had never seen any of them.

Until a couple weeks ago.

I discovered that an Ebay seller in Taiwan had the Mitchell card up for sale at a very reasonable "Buy-It-Now" price and I snapped it up.  I was pleasantly surprised that it arrived relatively quickly.

Mitchell is one of the poster children for dame gaijin or "bad foreigner".  He'd signed a 400 million yen contract with the Hawks in early 1995.  It was the most expensive contract in NPB history at that point.  Things started out well when he hit a grand slam in his first at bat on Opening Day against the Lions, becoming just the second player ever to do so in their first NPB at bat (Norihiro Komada was the first).  But he complained of a knee injury and left the team without their permission to return to the US in May for treatment.  He later returned to Japan but left again in August while still suffering knee injuries.  The Hawks released him after this second unauthorized trip to the US.  He ended up getting into just 37 games, hitting .300 with 8 home runs and 28 RBIs.

1995 BBM #648

The other card I received this past week isn't really related to Japanese baseball - although the player in question did spend a season with the Kochi Fighting Dogs of the Shikoku Island League in 2017.  The Sydney Blue Sox of the Australian Baseball League made a splash a few months back when they announced that 48 year old Manny Ramirez would be playing for them this season.

Unfortunately, it never ended up coming together.  Ramirez traveled to Sydney and trained with the team but he suffered some unspecified medical issue that prevented him from playing in the Blue Sox' first couple games of the season.  Then new restrictions on travel after a COVID-19 outbreak on Sydney's North Shore required the Blue Sox season to be suspended for about a month.  The team announced that they had released him a couple of weeks ago. 

The Blue Sox had given away or sold a team set during their opening series against Melbourne the weekend of December 18th and the Ramirez card for the set made its way to Ebay where I grabbed it.  Here's the front and back of it:

UPDATE - My friend Steve Smith in Australia sent me a DM on Twitter with more details about the distribution of the Blue Sox cards:  "The Blue Sox sold the cards, in packs, $7 for 5 cards. They went on sale on the opening night (Thursday) [December 17th] of the series against Melbourne. The teams only played the first two games before a Covid outbreak in Sydney forced Melbourne to drive the 9hrs back immediately to ensure they were not forced into 14 days compulsory quarantine when returning to Melbourne and the closing of the interstate borders.  The Blue Sox then put the packs for sale on line, and they sold out inside the first week."  Thanks for the information, Steve!