The Wyverns, the Raiders and the 2000 Teleca Set

I'm going to take a quick break from posting about the box of cards I got from Ryan last week because the SK Wyverns of the KBO are no more.  SK has sold the team to a company called Shinsegae and the team will now be called the SSG Landers.  I thought this might be an appropriate time to bring up something that I've suspected about the 2000 Teleca KBO card set.

The SK Wyverns joined the KBO in February of 2000 as a replacement for the Ssangbangwool Raiders who had folded a month earlier as a result of their parent company going bankrupt.  They were an entirely new franchise - SK did not buy the Raiders.  The Wyverns did end up with a somewhat large group of former Raiders players however.  With the Wyverns replacing the Raiders, the number of teams in the KBO remained at eight.

The 2000 Teleca set, however, contains cards for NINE teams as it contains cards for both the Raiders and the Wyverns.  I don't have any firm proof of this but I strongly suspect that Teleca issued this set in two printings in the same manner that BBM issued several of their flagship sets in between 1994 and 2001.  I think that there was an initial printing of the set that included the Raiders players but not the Wyverns players and then a second printing that was the other way around.

My main evidence for this is the wrapper from one pack of cards I bought from this set almost 20 years ago.  Notice on the front of the wrapper there are the logos of only eight teams - I'm pretty sure that the Wyverns logo is on the lower row, second from the left (between the LG Twins and Hanwha Eagles):

The back of the pack has some details about what's in the set:

You'll notice that it says that the "basic set" contains 200 cards.  However, if you look at the checklist for the set over at Trading Card DB, you'll see it lists a base set of 225 cards.  There were 24 cards for the Raiders and 25 cards for the Wyverns so removing either team gets you to 200 or 201 cards in the set.

The rest of my evidence for this is more circumstantial.  I have 198 cards of the 225 cards from this set.  Seven of those cards I got out of this pack while the rest I got from either Rob Fitts or Takashi, a Chiba Lotte Marines fan in Japan.  Of those 198 cards, I have exactly ONE SK Wyverns card which came out of the pack.  The lots I got from Rob and Takashi included all 24 of the Raiders cards and ZERO Wyverns cards.  I suspect that the two of them got their cards from the first printing of the set while my pack came from the second printing (i.e. the "Late Series").

There are 14 players who have two cards in the set - one with the Raiders and one with the Wyverns.  Here's the list of them - the first number is their card number with the Raiders and the second is the one with the SK: Pak Joung-Hyun (170/194), Kim Won-Hyong (172/195),  Kim Ki-Deok (173/197), Oh Sang-Min (176/201), Yang Yong-Mo (177/202), Kim Seong-Rae (179/205), Kim Ho (180/206), Choi Tae-Won (181/207), Lee Min-Ho (182/208), Lee Dong-Soo (183/210), Park Jae-Yong (188/212), Cho Won-Woo (189/213), Shim Sung-Bo (190/214) and Yoon Jae-Kuk (191/215).

Now normally when I do a post like this, I'd show a couple of these pairs of cards but as I said - I only have one Wyvern card and it's not one of those 14 players.  So I'll leave you with the one Wyvern card and the Raider card of one of those 14 players - Lee Min-Ho:

#199

#182

UPDATE: I forgot to mention one thing that's a bit of a counter-argument - the way the cards are numbered.  All the player cards (including both the Raiders and Wyverns) are numbered from 1 to 216.  The Raiders players are between #170 and #192 while the Wyverns players are between #193 and #216.  The final nine cards in the checklist are the team checklist cards with the Raiders card being #224 and the Wyverns card being #225.  If there was a first printing that didn't include the Wyverns cards, the cards available in the packs would have been skip numbered, 1 to 192 and 217 to 224 while the second printing cards would have been 1 to 169, 193 to 223 and 225.  This implies that including the Wyvern cards was not an afterthought for Teleca - they planned for it.