Card Of The Week February 12

A couple weeks back I was working on a bunch of retirement posts for various players.  What I'd usually do is identify the cards for maybe three guys who I wanted to posts about, pull the cards for all three players from their binders and then scan them.  This gives me a chance to just sit down and grind out the posts since I already have the cards scanned.  There was one week where I grabbed cards for Tomotaka Sakaguchi, Kenji Akashi and Seichi Uchikawa.  When I started writing the post about Uchikawa, I discovered a small issue.

Uchikawa hasn't retired yet.

I was kind of surprised by this because I clearly remember the Swallows making an announcement last fall that Uchikawa was retiring.  And he did - from NPB.  However, in December he signed a 2023 contract to play for the Oita B-Rings of the independent Kyushu Asia League (Oita is Uchikawa's hometown).  

So I decided not to do the retirement post until he retires from the B-Rings - BBM made the same decision as he is not in their upcoming Retirement set.  But just so that I don't waste the twenty cards I scanned for the post, I thought I'd share a couple of them this week:

2004 Calbee #224

2011 Shukan Baseball Season Memorial