Saturday, February 3, 2024

More Panini Suganos

Last summer I discovered that Panini had included two cards of Tomoyuki Sugano of "Yomiuri" in their Prizm set - a base card and an insert card.  I recently realized that they had included him in at least three more sets - Select, Chronicles Revolution and Chronicles Spectra.  At least I THINK that's three sets - I'm not entirely sure Revolution and Spectra are two separate sets or parts of one set called Chronicles.  (And to be honest, I'm not sure I really care one way or another.)  I THINK these are all his Panini cards - base or insert - but it's difficult to tell from TCDB's listings*.  There's apparently 26 different parallels for his Prizm base card, three different ones for the "Future Supers" insert card from that set, 22 different ones of his Select card, nine for his Chronicles Revolution card and ten for his Chronicles Spectra card.

*It'd be kind of nice to be able to filter on "Panini" for "brand name" in TCDB's website but instead of having "Panini" be one of the options, they've got "Panini Chronicles", "Panini Prizm" and "Panini Select" which I would have thought were set names, not brands.  It'd also be really nice to be able to easily filter out all the freakin' parallels.

I picked up one of each non-parallel card.  Here's the front and back of each one, including the Prizm ones that I showed off last summer.  Keep in mind that all the cards are shiny so they don't scan real well - some are worse than others:











That's five cards but only three pictures.  Looks to me that the Prizm base card and the Chronicles Spectra card use the same photo and the "Future Supers" and Select card also share the same photo.

The Yomiuri Giants don't allow their players to have authenticated autographed cards in any of BBM or Epoch's sets so it's somewhat significant that Panini has issued a number of autographed Sugano cards.  There were three different versions of an autographed card issued with the Prizm set - a /10 version, a /2 version and a /1 version.  There are eight different versions of an autographed card of him with Masataka Yoshida in the Three And Two set - /25, /15, /10, /8, /5, /3, /2 and /1.  I don't have any of these but I swiped this image from Ebay:

The Three And Two cards were available as a redemption but I'm not sure about the Prizm cards.  He had one other Panini autographed card - the "1990 Donruss" - that was only available as a redemption but I'm not sure what set it was from.  I had picked up a redemption card for this last summer and was somewhat amazed that Panini fulfilled it a few weeks ago.  I haven't taken it out of the sleeve Panini sent it in so the scan might not be super clear:


It's using the same photo as the Prizm and Chronicles Spectra cards.  The Three And Two card is at least using a different photo from the other cards.

I'm making plans for a return trip to Japan in a few months and I'm toying with the idea of bringing this one over to trade or sell.  With no Sugano autographs in NPB issues, I might be able to get a decent price for it.

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