Japanese Baseball Cards: Korean National Team

Showing posts with label Korean National Team. Show all posts

Friday, June 20, 2025

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

Tuesday, January 16, 2024

2023 Topps World Baseball Classic Cards

Last month Topps issued yet another and probably their last set for the 2023 World Baseball Classic. The cards were only available in 10 card packs on line for $80-ish and the set had a 100 card base set with parallels, a bunch of inserts, memorabilia and autograph cards.

I was taking a kind of "wait-and-see" attitude on it and now that I've waited and saw, I think I'm mostly going to pass on it. There's only six players from Samurai Japan in the base set - all of whom have been featured in several previous WBC sets last year - and the cards of at least five of the six are selling at much higher prices than I want to pay on Ebay or COMC. I have a lot of Roki Sasaki and Munetaka Murakami cards so I don't really need to be paying $30 or $50 for this one and I see no good reason to spend $10 on another Lars Nootbaar card.

I did decide to pick up a handful of cards from the set though but I concentrated on some low hanging fruit. I bought seven cards from one Ebay seller - each one was less than $2 - and I thought I'd do a quick post about them.

Four of the seven were the Korean players in the set:

#19

#93

#26

#68

Edman, Kim and Park had all appeared in other 2023 WBC sets but Yang had not.

Next up were the cards of two long time NPB foreign players - although one of them no longer qualifies as a foreigner because he played in Japan long enough:

#27

I picked up this last card simply because I like Harry Ford:

#35

The cards themselves look OK. They've got a shiny finish on them that make them a little difficult to scan. One thing I really like about them is the backs have the player's WBC stats and not just for the 2023 WBC. Balentien and Despaigne's cards show their stats for the 2013 and 2017 tournaments as well while Kim and Yang's cards each have their stats for 2017. Ford's card has his stats from the 2022 WBC qualifier as well.

After getting these today, I took a look to see what was available at Sportlots and I ended up ordering four more cards - Yu Chang from Taiwan, Andrelton Simmons from the Netherlands, Robbie Glendinning from Australia and Yu Darvish from Samurai Japan (Darvish being the one of the six Japanese players whose cards aren't more than I want to pay). Not sure if I'm going to get any other cards. I could see myself getting the other two Australian players maybe but that's probably about it.

Friday, March 10, 2023

Random Cards from Ryan

I wanted to pretty much wrap up my posts about the latest package I got from Ryan with one just showing off some random cards that he sent me.

I've mentioned before that I'm down to only needing one card (Yonetoshi Kawamata - #642 from the 1996 set) to have a complete run of the BBM flagship sets from 1991 to the present. I was taking into account nine cards (three from 1995 and six from 1996) that Ryan had for me but that I didn't have in hand. I know have those nine in hand. I won't show all of them but here's two of the three 1995 cards (both shortprints) and two of the six 1996 cards (all "Late Series" Dragons cards - a couple of which I bought from Larry Fuhrmann but had him ship to Ryan to save money):

1995 BBM #355

1995 BBM #392

1996 BBM #615

1996 BBM #645

I'm also now down to only need one card from the 2009 Konami Baseball Heroes WBC set. I already had the complete base set but I'd been trying to complete the inserts. This Lim Chang-Yong card completes the 12 card "special" insert set:

2009 Konami Baseball Heroes WBC "Special" #W09S004

These are two of the three remaining cards I need from the "All Tournament Team" insert set:

2009 Konami Baseball Heroes WBC "All Tournament Team" #W09A004

2009 Konami Baseball Heroes WBC "All Tournament Team" #W09A011

The final card I need is Daisuke Matsuzaka (#W09A01)

One Konami WBC set is almost done while another one is just started. Last year I discovered Konami did an 11 card "Samurai Japan" set for the 2013 WBC team. I asked Ryan to pick up a couple cards from the set that weren't ridiculously overpriced and he passed them along to me:

2013 Konami Samurai Japan #B13SJ004

2013 Konami Samurai Japan #B13SJ001

When I was researching what Calbee had done for their 30th Anniversary in 2002 I came across an auction for all 36 of the "Memorial" cards and asked Ryan to get it for me. I'll just show off one of the cards here:

2002 Calbee #M-26

I also had Ryan pick up this Calbee card because...well, how could I not get this:

2005 Calbee #C-4

BBM did a "Dream Team" insert set with their 1999 set featuring die-cut cards of nine players who'd appeared in the All Star series against MLB in 1998 along with manager Shigeo Nagashima. Nagashima's was the last card I needed to complete the set:

1999 BBM "Dream Team" #D1

I'm kind of half heartedly attempting to complete the "Rising Stars" insert set from the 2000 Upper Deck Ovation set. I've got about two thirds of it now but based on what Twycchang has told me, the remaining cards may be more expensive than I really want to pay for them. In the meantime, though, here's the two latest additions:

2000 Upper Deck Ovation "Rising Stars" #11


2000 Upper Deck Ovation "Rising Stars" #21

I've had a couple instances over the last couple years where I've picked up a "complete" set that ended up being short a card. Since I usually buy cards through proxy companies, it's a little difficult to complain to the original seller so I just ask Ryan to look for the cards for me. These three cards fill in the missing places on those sets:

2021 Epoch NPB #067

2021 BBM Hawks #H20

2022 BBM 2nd Version #344

Ryan tracked down some of the team set cards that I'd been looking for as well (including a couple ikusei players from the Hawks who went on to have very good careers):

2011 BBM Hawks #H78

2011 BBM Hawks #H73

2010 BBM Lions #L08

2012 BBM Baystars #DB21

2012 BBM Giants #G062

A couple years ago Dan sent me a nearly complete 2019 Epoch Giants 85th Anniversary set. It was only missing two cards - Lee Seung-youp and Tatsunori Hara. I had picked up the Lee card a little while back and now I have the Hara card as well:

2019 Epoch Giants 85th Anniversary #24

I had toyed with the idea of trying to complete the 2017 BBM Icons - Japan Pride "Printed Autograph" insert cards for a while but I ultimately decided against it. Before I made that decision, however, I asked Ryan to pick up the Ayumu Ishikawa card:

2017 BBM Icons - Japan Pride #PA05

Finally Ryan and I have had an ongoing joke for the past few years about whether it would be possible to put together an entire Epoch NPB set with the "Promotion Cards" that you generally get in one card packs at card shops. Ryan sent me three more of these for the 2021 set and a whopping 22(!) from the 2022 set. I only need 410 more cards for the 2022 set now! I won't show all of them but here's one each from the 2021 and 2022 cards:

2021 Epoch NPB #234

2022 Epoch NPB #387

Monday, March 6, 2023

South Korea 2023 World Baseball Classic Roster

Following up on yesterday's post featuring the 2023 Japanese WBC roster, today I want to do a post for the Korean team. Again I'm a little short on being able to show all the players on the roster - I don't know if there are any cards of Jeong Cheol-won and my lack of MLB cards means I don't have any cards of Tommy Edman. Like with Samurai Japan, my goal was to try to show the player in a National Team uniform whenever possible. There's a lot fewer National Team cards available for the Korean players though so I was much less successful although the subset in the 2021 SCC Golden Premium set for the Olympic team came in very handy.