Game Cards From Dan

A couple weeks ago I got a package of cards from Dan of Korean Cardboard fame.  I was still getting through the package I had received from Ryan a few weeks earlier so it wasn't really until this past week that I was able to pay the stuff from Dan the proper attention.

Dan's got a PC for Lee Seung-Yeop, the great Samsung Lion slugger who spent eight years in NPB with the Marines, Giants and Buffaloes, and I have greatly benefited from it - occasionally Dan will pick up a set or a bunch of cards from a set and he'll pass on the non-Lee cards to me.  I've kind of lost track but he's sent me cards from several Giants team-issued sets as well a nearly complete 2019 Epoch Giants 85th Anniversary set.  This package included three sets that were each missing a card or two - playing card sets for the 2005 Marines and the 2007 Giants and the 1988 Takara Lotte Orions set.

I'm not positive, but I suspect that the 2005 Marines set was issued in November or December of the year, perhaps as a giveaway at the team's fan festival.  The obvious clue that it was issued late in the year (as opposed to late in the season) is the Nippon Series championship logo on the backs on the cards.

It's a deck of cards, so the complete set has 52 cards plus two Jokers.  The Jokers show the team's mascots while all the playing cards show players.  There are a total of 68 players represented in the set so it's a "comprehensive" team set - there are 14 cards that have either two or three players on them while the other 38 show only one player.  There are no cards for manager Bobby Valentine but he's on the back of every card (which reminds me of a similar playing card set for the Fighters in 2015).  There are two "extra" cards that aren't Jokers or playing cards - they each show a bunch of photos from the season.  Here's a bunch of example cards:

Card Back

"Extra" card

I wonder if Hatsushiba's photo was taken at Game One of the Nippon Series that year when the fog rolled off Tokyo Bay into Chiba Marine Stadium and caused the game to be called after seven innings with Lotte winning 10-1.

Dan actually sent me two of the Marines set.  Both of them were missing the Lee card and one of them was also missing Shunsuke Watanabe which I assume he sent to Ryan for Ryan's type collection.

The 2007 Giants set is arranged differently than the Marines set.  There's still 52 playing cards (plus the two Jokers which in this case are team logos) but there's only 26 players in the set.  Each player has two cards - a "red" suit card (either hearts or diamonds) and a "black" suit card (either clubs or spades).  I noticed that all the "red" suit cards show the players in their home uniforms while all the "black" suit ones show them in their away uniforms.  Each card for a player has the same "rank" - for example the two Lee cards in the set are the 5 of clubs and the 5 of diamonds.  I was kind of amused to notice that several players had their "rank" match their uniform number - Shinnosuke Abe (#10), Luis Gonzalez (#5), Makoto Kosaka (#6), Tomohiro Nioka (#7), Michihiro Ogasawara (#2), Takayuki Shimizu (#9) and Yoshitomo Tani (#8).  Manager Tatsunori Hara does not appear in the set, even on the card backs.  Here's some examples:

Card Back

The set Dan sent me was obviously missing the two Lee cards as well as one of the Koji Uehara cards that I'm pretty sure he sent to Ryan.

The 1988 Takara Lotte Orions set was not one Dan picked up because of Lee since Lee was only 12 years old then.  Instead Dan got it because it has Hideki Irabu's rookie card.  The Takara card was the only card of Irabu issued in 1988, his first season.

I'm not a big fan of Takara sets, especially the ones from what I've dubbed the "mugshot years" (pre-1991) but there were a couple good things in this one, even without the Irabu card.  For one, I'm always happy to get a new Choji Murata card:

The other highlight of the set is a card of an American player who was a three time NL All Star and a four time NL batting champion.  Bill Madlock spent the last year of his playing career with Lotte, hitting .263 with 19 home runs.  I had a couple cards of him from BBM's Deep Impact set from 2013 but this is the first card of him I have from his playing days:

Someone wrote on the front of all the cards, filling in the little white squares in the line of text on the bottom with either "A","B" or "C".  A couple of the card backs have annotations as well.  I know Dan likes to get his cards graded so I hope this doesn't affect the grade of the Irabu card too much.

Thanks again for the cards, Dan!