Monday, May 22, 2023

Five For Five

I was on Ebay recently and I noticed something odd about some Epoch NPB cards of Masataka Yoshida that someone had for sale.  Let me show every Yoshida card from the NPB sets - there's only five as Epoch started doing the sets in 2018 - and see if you can pick it out:

2018 Epoch NPB #134

2019 Epoch NPB #134

2020 Epoch NPB #208

2021 Epoch NPB #208

2022 Epoch NPB #241

When I complain about Japanese baseball card companies getting monotonous in their photo selection, this is the kind of thing I mean.  

6 comments:

Zippy Zappy said...

Yoshida's stance is so consistent.

Ryan G said...

I can’t sign in with Google. Ugh.

Obviously the photos are completely different and not similar in any way. First, there’s a guy standing on the dugout steps. Then a red sign on the right. Then guys sitting in the dugout. Then a red sign in the right and blue sign on the left. And finally the blue sign is gone and replaced by a cameraman! Completely different photos! Nothing similar at all! (Insert sarcasm emoji here.)

NPB Card Guy said...

@Zippy Zappy - Obviously :-)

@Ryan G - Not to mention the 2020 card looks like it was taken in Kobe (or at least outside) instead of the Osaka Dome

Brady DiCarlo said...

They do the exact same thing with Aroldis Chapman on his cards to use an American example.

NPB Card Guy said...

That's interesting. I've seen it with a couple of NPB players - Alfredo Despaigne being the main one - but I didn't know it happened with MLB players too.

Sean said...

In addition to using photos of the exact same point in his swing, they also cropped the photo the exact same way - in all of them the top half of his bat is out of the frame.