More Cards From Korean Cardboard

I mentioned in the post I had done about some cards I had bought from Dan Skrezyna - aka Korean Cardboard - that Dan had located some more KBO cards from my want list and I'd bought those as well.  The package made excellent time crossing the Pacific - Dan told me he shipped the cards last Monday and they showed up today.

I was pretty excited about all of the cards but I think I was the most excited about what objectively is the dullest card in the batch - the unnumbered "Title Card" for the 1999 Teleca Premium "Korea Dream Team" insert set.  This was the last card I needed to complete this set.  The front of the card has details about the 1999 Asian Championship, a qualifier to the baseball competition for the 2000 Sydney Olympics:

The back of the card has the scores of all the games in the tournament and shows the standings of the final round and the team's overall finishes (Korea won the tournament which is why Teleca did cards for the team):

The rest of the cards were all from the 2000 Teleca set.  Dan sent me eleven base set cards and two "Rookies" insert cards.  The first of these is arguably the biggest card in the set, at least to MLB fans:

2000 Teleca #72

Here's one of the other base set cards and the two "Rookies" insert cards:

2000 Teleca #107

2000 Teleca #R15

2000 Teleca #R17

The remainder of the cards were all members of the SK Wyverns.  I've written about this in the past - I believe that these are all short printed cards that were included in a second printing of the set, replacing the cards of the defunct Ssangbangwool Raiders from the first printing:

2000 Teleca #195

2000 Teleca #197

2000 Teleca #201

2000 Teleca #202

2000 Teleca #207

2000 Teleca #209

2000 Teleca #210

2000 Teleca #214

2000 Teleca #215

With the exception of Son Cha-hoon, all of these players also appear in the set with Ssangbangwool.

The KBO portion of my want list is now down to just 14 cards - one from the 1999 Teleca set, two from the 2000 Teleca base set, five from the 2000 Teleca "Rookies" insert set and six from the 2000 Teleca "'99 Korea Japan Super Games" insert set.  Thanks, Dan!

Card Of The Week June 29

Interleague play wrapped up this past week with a makeup game on Tuesday between the Giants and the Marines.  The Hawks were the interleague champions for the ninth time (although the first time since 2019).  This was the twentieth season of interleague play - it started in 2005 but they didn't have it in the COVID-shortened 2020 season - and the Hawks have had the best record in almost half of those seasons.  No other team has won it more than twice.

Hawks outfielder Tatsuru Yanagimachi was named Interleague MVP.  Here's a card of him from last year's team issued "2024 Season Vol, 1" set (#24SBH152):

Zapped Again!

I was away from home this past week on a business trip to Alabama.  I managed to do a couple fun things on the trip, like visiting Rickwood Field and having dinner with Jason.  I got home late last night after a bit of an odyssey caused by scattered thunderstorms across the south to learn that I had received yet another envelope full of baseball cards from Kenny, aka Zippy Zappy.

There was a bit of a twist, though.  The envelopes that I had gotten from Kenny over the past few months had contained baseball cards from this year but this envelope had some nine year old cards in it.  What Kenny had sent me was the entire nine card "Enter The Dragon" insert set associated with the 2016 BBM Dragons set.  Most of BBM's team sets have 18 non-premium insert cards split into a handful of sets and there's usually a nine card one featuring the main players of the team.  This was that insert set for the Dragons set that year.  Here's all nine cards:

#ED1

#ED2

#ED3

#ED4

#ED5

#ED6

#ED7

#ED8

#ED9

I've had the base set for the Dragons set since 2016 but, thanks to Kenny, I'm now just six insert cards from a master set.  He'd previously given me the three "Fresh Stars" cards so all I need now are the three "Artful Reliever" cards and the three "Powerhouse" cards - although I'm not sure I'm going to pursue this.  He's also given me six autographed cards from the set.

Once again, thanks for the cards, Kenny!

Card Of The Week June 22

Thursday night in Tokyo, Koki Kitayama of the Fighters came close to making history.  Pitching against the Giants in the ballpark that Nippon-Ham once shared with Yomiuri, Kitayama took a perfect game into the seventh inning before giving up a two out walk.  The no-hitter was still intact but, sadly, both it and his shutout ended with one out in the ninth inning on a solo home run by Takumi Ohshiro.  Kitayama had to settle for a complete game, one-hit victory as the Fighters beat the Giants 4-1.

Here's a card of Kitayama from last year's 2nd Version set (#370):

Kenny Strikes Again

I returned home from running some errands this morning to discover that Kenny (aka Zippy Zappy) had made good on his recent threat promise to send me some more 2025 baseball cards.  I opened the envelope to discover a handful of cards from both the Calbee Series One set (not that there's another Calbee option since the summer solstice has now passed without the release of Series Two for a third straight year) and the new Topps NPB set which came out a few weeks back.

First, let's take a look at the Calbees.  In his last envelope to me, Kenny had sent me six "regular" player cards.  This envelope included four more cards but all of them were either subset or insert cards.  Here they all are:

#T-10

#SO-11

#S-19

#C-06

Sean had mentioned that the Title Holder cards looked a lot better this year and I agree.  I had not realized that the "Strikeout Leader" cards (of which the Miyagi card is one) were issued in the packs this year - I guess Calbee isn't doing the box sets through their Amazon.co.jp store anymore.  The cartoon images of the team mascots on the checklist cards are interesting but it's a shame they come at the expense of what are frequently the more interesting photos of the set.

Kenny had sent me an email a few weeks back, letting me know that he was including some Topps cards in the envelope.  I told him that I was wondering how I was going to get a chance to dump on Topps this year so I really appreciated him sending me the cards.  So without further ado, here's all but one of the Topps cards he sent me:

#63

#186

#84

#69

#198

The other card he sent me was a /150 blue border parallel:

#59

They're fine, I guess.  They use the same design as the 2025 Topps MLB cards although I see that they didn't bother to actually indicate the player's position in the baseball diamond widget in the lower right corner.  It's kind of a bland set of photos but that's not representative of the set - one of the few things I give Topps credit for with their NPB sets is that, for the most part, they feature pretty good photography (with the exception of the 206 sets, obviously).  You can check out the cards for yourself over at Jambalaya.  

My main gripe about the cards is the same as it was for the 2023 and 2024 editions - the photos are all from last year and no player who switched teams over the winter is included in the set.  The rookie photos (like Shoji above) are all posed shots that were probably taken last December.  I do not understand why Topps can't get their act together and put together an up-to-date set when BBM does one that's larger and out a month earlier.  

Oh, yeah, the backs continue to suck as well:

It might not sound like it, but I am, as always, grateful to Kenny for sending me these cards.  I must have been a very nice person in a previous life because I don't think I've done anything in THIS life to have earned being the beneficiary of his generosity.  Thanks again, Kenny!

Cards From Korean Cardboard

Dan Skrezyna - aka Korean Cardboard - is selling his card collection.  He contacted me a few weeks ago about some cards on my KBO want list and we made a deal for nine cards.  He shipped them off and they showed up at my house today.

There are four KBO sets that I'm trying to complete - the 1999 Teleca base set, the 1999 Teleca Premium "Korea Dream Team" insert set, the 2000 Teleca base set and the 2000 Teleca "'99 Korea Japan Super Games" insert set.  The cards from Dan included two of the three "Korea Dream Team" cards I needed and just over half of the "'99 Korea Japan Super Games" cards.

I'll show off the "Korea Dream Team" cards first.  This insert set commemorated the Korean National Team that won the 1999 Asian Championship which was a qualifier for the 2000 Sydney Olympic baseball competition.  As far as I know, this was the first time the Korean National Baseball team was on Korean baseball cards and it didn't happen again until 2021.

1999 Teleca Premium "Korea Dream Team" #D-22

1999 Teleca Premium "Korea Dream Team" #D-15

Once upon a time, NPB and KBO made an agreement that they'd play a post-season All Star series every four years.  They only ended up doing it three times - 1991, 1995 and 1999.  The 1999 games were commemorated in the "'99 Korea Japan Super Games" insert set from the 2000 Teleca set.  There are 46 cards in this subset and I'm down to only needed six more of them - four of which feature Lee Seung-yeop.  Here are the seven cards I got from Dan:

2000 Teleca '99 Korean Japan Super Games #KJ03

2000 Teleca '99 Korean Japan Super Games #KJ13

2000 Teleca '99 Korean Japan Super Games #KJ14

2000 Teleca '99 Korean Japan Super Games #KJ25

2000 Teleca '99 Korean Japan Super Games #KJ31

2000 Teleca '99 Korean Japan Super Games #KJ34

2000 Teleca '99 Korean Japan Super Games #KJ39

I'm curious who the pitchers on the cards of Park and Lee are.  They both appear to be from the Baystars.  According to the Japanese Wikipedia page about the series, there were four Yokohama pitchers who appeared in the games - Daisuke Miura, Kazuo Fukumori, Yukiya Yokoyama and Takeo Kawamura.  All of them are right handed like the players on the cards so that doesn't narrow it down at all.  

The pitcher on Park's card is wearing an away uniform and Fukumori and Yokoyama were the only two who appeared in games where Japan was the visiting team.   The game Fukumori appeared in was in Gifu while Yokoyama's was at Tokyo Dome.  I think that looks like the Dome in the photo so I'm inclined to guess that it's Yokoyama.  It certainly looks like him:

1999 BBM #48

The pitcher on Lee's card is wearing the home uniform and you can probably guess that Miura and Kawamura pitched in games that Japan was the home team in.  Both of those games were inside - Miura was in Fukuoka and Kawamura was in Nagoya - and there's absolutely nothing in the photo that would distinguish one Dome from the other.  If I had to guess, I'd say it's Kawamura but only because I think it looks like him:

1999 BBM #42

Dan discovered that he had some more KBO cards from my want list and those are now on their way to me as well.  So there'll be another post like this in the next few weeks.

Thanks for selling me these cards, Dan!

UPDATE - I forgot to mention that I think that's Hideki Matsui playing center field in the background on Park's card

Card Of The Week June 15

There was kind of an interesting story that came out a couple weeks ago - former MLB player Eric Anthony, who was raised by a single mother and never knew his father, discovered that his father was former Dodgers star Willie Davis.  You can read all the details in the linked story but I just wanted to point out that both Davis and Anthony played in NPB.  Davis played for the Dragons in 1977 and the Crown Lighter Lions in 1978, their final season in Fukuoka before being sold to Seibu and moving to Kanto.  Twenty years later, Anthony spend part of the 1998 season with the Yakult Swallows.

Davis had a number of baseball cards in his two years in Japan.  Engel lists 15 in all including several Calbees and two Yamakatsus.  I only have two of his cards:

1977 NST #14

1978 Yamakatsu JY8 #8

Anthony, on the other hand, has no Japanese cards that I'm aware of.  I did find a picture of him in a Swallows uniform in the 1999 edition of the late Wayne Graczyk's annual "Japan Pro Baseball Fan Handbook & Media Guide":

Happy Father's Day to all you fathers out there!