Card Of The Week October 29

Merrill Kelly of the Diamondbacks had a great pitching performance in Game Two of the World Series last night, going seven innings and striking out nine batters while only giving up three hits (one a solo home run by Mitch Garver) and walking none.  He got the win in Arizona's 9-1 victory over Texas which tied the Series at one game apiece.

Kelly spent four seasons in South Korea, playing for the SK Wyverns of the KBO from 2015 to 2018.  He helped SK win the championship in 2018 before he returned to the US and signed with the Diamondbacks.  I've heard a number of comments on-line that Kelly is the first pitcher to record a win in both the Korean Series and the World Series and I think he could possibly become the first player to ever win both a Korean and World Series championship should Arizona win although I certainly could be wrong about that.

So as this is a baseball card blog, the obvious thing you'd be expecting me to do is to talk about Kelly's Korean baseball cards.  But there's a problem with that.  All of the licensed Korean baseball cards released in the past ten years have excluded any foreign players.  So there are no official KBO cards of Kelly available.

However.

Dan Skrezyna of Korean Cardboard created sets featuring all the foreign KBO players for each of the five seasons between 2015 and 2019.  The sets were called "Foreign Attack" and Dan labeled his card company "Vittum" (I believe named after the park in Chicago he played Little League baseball in).  Mind you, none of them came out the year they cover - the "2015" set was released in 2019, the "2016" set was released in 2017, the "2017" set was released in 2018, the "2018" set was released in 2020 and the "2019" set was released in 2021.  I know Dan has been working on some later sets but I don't know when or if he's going to release them.

Anyway, the point of all this is that Dan's sets are the only ones where you'll find cards of Kelly in his Wyvern uniform.  Dan issued sets for all four years Kelly was in Korea so there are four cards of him:

"2015" Vittum Foreign Attack #16

"2016" Vittum Foreign Attack #39

"2017" Vittum Foreign Attack #35

"2018" Vittum Foreign Attack #16

The print runs for these sets were very low - only 20 sets for each with the exception of the "2017" set which had a print run of 25.  I do not know if Dan has any unsold sets - if you're interested in trying to find one, I would recommend contacting him either through his blog or his Twitter account.