Another White Whale Speared

A few weeks back I saw an auction on Yahoo! Japan Auctions for a lot of about 150 Hanshin Tigers cards, mostly from BBM but there was a handful of cards from other companies.  The only card I was interested in was a 1978 Yamakatsu JY 6 card of Koichi Tabuchi, the final card I needed to complete that set.  I was on the fence if I wanted to spend the $35 or so the auction would have cost just to get the one card.  But suddenly I realized that I knew the seller of the auction!  It was Larry Fuhrmann, who with Marty Kuehnert helped start the modern Japanese Baseball Card Hobby.  I sent Larry an email asking about the card and he ended up selling me one for $10 including shipping.  The card showed up in the mail today and it's a beautiful thing:

 I've been down to needing just one card for this set for several years so it's nice to finally have it finished.  Frankly I should have asked Larry about it years ago.  It felt really good sliding it into the empty spot in the sheet that had been waiting for it for a while:

 Thanks Larry!

White Whale Finally Defeated

Well, it took almost 16 years but I was able to finally defeat my white whale - the 2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 set.  While I had finished the base set almost two years ago, there was one final insert card that had eluded me until recently.  I finally got it off of Yahoo! Japan Auctions almost two months ago and it was delivered today with a couple other items in a shipment from the auction proxy company.

So here's the last card I needed - from "The Scene" insert set that commemorated famous moments in NPB history.  This shows Sadaharu Oh hitting his 756th home run to pass Henry Aaron:

2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 "The Scene" #S-04

I kind of feel like Oh must of in this picture.  And it almost took me as long to get all the cards in this set as it did for him to hit all those home runs!