Trade With Ralph

As I mentioned yesterday I made a trade with Ralph Pearce in August.  I sent him 60 or 70 of KBO cards and he sent me around 25 vintage Japanese cards.  Once again I think I got the better part of the deal - Ralph was very generous in what he sent me.  It took me a couple of days to figure out what everything was and there's a couple that I still haven't quite figured out.

Ralph sent me a bunch of old menko cards plus some more recent Lotte and Calbee cards (well, "recent" is kind of relative as the cards are from between 1975 and 1990).  I'll start with the more "recent" stuff:

1975/76 Calbee #345 (John Sipin)

1987 Calbee #280 (Hiromi Makihara)

1989 Calbee #1989 (Kimiyasu Kudoh)

1989 Calbee #30 (Hiromi Makihara)

1989 Lotte #45 (Hiroshi Yugamidani)

1990 Lotte #112

1990 Lotte #72

1990 Lotte #68

1990 Lotte #94

The bulk of the menko cards were from the sets known as "tobacco" menko due to their resemblance to the American tobacco sets from the early 1900's, especially the T206 set.

1957 Yamakatsu JCM 27 Tatsuro Hirooka & Tetsuharu Kawakami

1957 Yamakatsu JCM 27 Kazuhisa Inao

1958 Yamakatsu JCM 33e Tadashi Sugiura & Katsuya Nomura

1959 Marusho JCM 38b Kazuhisa Inao

1959 Marusho JCM 38b Motoshi Fujita

1959 Marusho JCM 38b Yoji Tamadukuri

1959 Marusho JCM 39 Masuho Maeda

1960 Marukami JCM 14c Yoshimi Moritaki

1961 Marusan JCM 12c Minoru Kakimoto

1962 Marukami JCM 14e Mamoru Zaitsu

1962 Doyusha JCM 55 Shigeo Nagashima

I'm not positive I've identified all of these cards correctly.  The Tamadukuri card is not listed as being part of JCM 38b in Engel but it's the only set that it appears to fit into.  I'm a bit amused that the card with Sugiuchi and Nomura on it doesn't identify the player on the far right.

There was also a round menko card that I was able to easily identify:

1950 JRM 14 Kaoru Bettoh

The remaining cards were a bit more of a challenge.  First up is this rectangular menko card of a Stars player.  This appears to be from an uncataloged set.  I eventually figured out it was of Makoto Kozuru ("figure out" is making it sound harder than it was - his name's in the lower right of the card) which made it easy to figure out when the card was made as Kozuru only played for the Stars in 1949:

Next up are two round blank backed menko cards that I think are from the same uncataloged set.  Both players are from the San Francisco Seals.  The Seals did a tour of Japan in late 1949 that was valuable in helping baseball reestablish its popularity in Japan after the war.  There were a number of menko and bromide sets that were issued to commemorate the tour.  I don't know who either of these players are although Ralph mentioned that one of them might be Lefty O'Doul which would be really cool.

The final card is a bit frustrating.  It's a 1960 Tachibana Seika card showing a Dragons player.  But there's nothing on the card to identify the player so I have no idea who it is.  There was a bit when I was thinking it could be Don Newcombe who played for the Dragons in 1962 but the time frame is off (and if it was Newcombe I'd be sending the card back to Ralph because that would be just a little TOO generous - Engel has a value of $2500 for the 1962 Tachibana Seika Newcombe card).  That "8" in the upper right of the card is a point value that could be used to redeem prizes.

So thanks Ralph!  I had a lot of fun identifying the cards.  It was a great way to spend time when I was recovering from my back surgery.

Trade With Dan

I made trades with two other collectors back in August and naturally I got both of their trade packages in the mail the day before I went in for surgery so I've been understandably slow at getting these new cards "ingested" into my collection.  I'll do a post on my trade with Ralph Pearce in the next few days - today I want to concentrate on the cards I got from Dan Skrezyna of Korean Cardboard.

Dan was amazingly generous to me.  I sent him three parallel cards that he was looking for from the Forever Ace set from last year.  He sent me a whopping 45 cards back!  Here's what he sent me:

One of the more impossible sets that I'm trying to complete is the "99 Korea-Japan Super Games" subset from the 2000 Teleca set.  Dan sent me this card of Dong-Soo Kim of the LG Twins.  I'm pretty sure that the pitcher is Hideki Okajima of the Yomiuri Giants (he's the only left handed pitcher from the Giants who was on the Japan roster) and the photo is from the game on November 9th, 1999 in Fukuoka Dome.

2000 Teleca #KJ38

The first of the Superstar Baseball sets put out in 2014 had 126 cards in it but 54 of those cards were short prints.  I've got the complete "non-short print" set of 72 cards but I've been trying to pick up all the short prints as well when I can.  Dan sent me two of the ones I needed:

2014 Superstar Baseball Season One #SBC01-068 (Dae-Hyun Chung)

2014 Superstar Baseball Season One #SBC01-081 (Jung-Bae Park)

The remaining 42 cards that Dan sent me was the bulk of the "All Star" subset from last winters' Black Edition set.  The subset doesn't actually reflect last year's All Star games rosters but instead showcases League Leaders in several statistical categories.  The subset has the top 10 finishers in "ERA & Win" and "AVG" and the top 5 finishers in Saves, Holds, Home Runs, Hits and Stolen Bases.  Note that since the set (like all the other "Superstar Baseball" sets) does not include foreign players, it's really the top 5 or 10 Korean finishers in each category.  Several players placed in multiple categories so there's only 37 players represented in the 42 cards I have.  For example, Hyoung-Woo Choi of Samsung has a card in the AVG, Home Run and Hits categories.  I'm not going to show all 42 cards but here's an example from each category:

2016-17 Superstar Baseball Black Edition #SBCBK-019-AS (Won-Jun Jang)

2016-17 Superstar Baseball Black Edition #SBCBK-031-AS (Chang-Min Lim)

2016-17 Superstar Baseball Black Edition #SBCBK-034-AS (Bo-Geun Lee)

2016-17 Superstar Baseball Black Edition #SBCBK-039-AS (Hyoung-Woo Lee)

2016-17 Superstar Baseball Black Edition #SBCBK-051-AS (Bum-Ho Lee)

2016-17 Superstar Baseball Black Edition #SBCBK-055-AS (Tae-Gyun Kim)

2016-17 Superstar Baseball Black Edition #SBCBK-061-AS (Dae-Hyung Lee)

So thanks for the trade Dan and let me know if I owe you anything more!

2017 World Baseball Classic Roundup

Topps still has a couple of products that are expected to be published this year but I have a hunch that they're done with whatever World Baseball Classic cards they are going to have.  And what they did isn't a whole lot.  There were only the following sets/subsets that I've seen:

- 6 "Throwback Thursday" cards
- 64 Topps Now World Baseball Classic cards
- a 10 card Topps Now Team Japan set
- a 10 card Topps Now Team Netherlands set
- a 10 card Topps Now Team Puerto Rico set
- a 10 card Topps Now Team USA set
- 5 cards in the "Paper Prospects" insert set for the Bowman set

That's a total of just 115 cards (at the moment I'm only counting "regular" cards, not memorabilia cards).  This is the same number of cards Topps did in 2013 - a 15 card insert set from the Topps 2 set and the 100 card Topps Tribute WBC Edition base set.

22 of these 115 cards feature members of Samurai Japan.  Here's a breakdown of all the members of the team who had cards - I've added the memorabilia cards in the Museum Collection and Allen & Ginter sets as well (UPDATE - I've also added in the Triple Threads memorabilia cards)

Player	Cards
Akiyama, Shogo	Topps Now Team Japan #JPN-7
Aoki, Norichika	Throwback Thursday #32, Topps Now Team Japan #JPN-9, Museum Collection Patch Relic
Fujinami, Shintaro	Topps Now Team Japan #JPN-10, Museum Collection Quad Relic, Allen & Ginter WBC Relic
Kikuchi, Ryosuke	Topps Now Team Japan #JPN-8
Kobayashi, Seiji	Topps Now #W-14, Topps Now Team Japan #JPN-3
Matsuda, Nobuhiro	Topps Now #W-6, Topps Now #W-39, Topps Now Team Japan #JPN-6
Matsui, Yuki	Museum Collection Patch Relic
Nakata, Sho	Topps Now #W-9, Topps Now #W-14, Topps Now #W-25, Topps Now Team Japan #JPN-2
Norimoto, Takahiro	Bowman #BP97, Museum Collection Quad Relic, Allen & Ginter WBC Relic
Sakamoto, Hayato	Topps Now Team Japan #JPN-5, Museum Collection Patch Relic, Triple Threads Relic, Triple Threads Relic Combo
Senga, Kodai	Topps Now #W-62
Sugano, Tomoyuki	Bowman #BP98, Museum Collection Quad Relic, Allen & Ginter WBC Relic
Suzuki, Seiya	Museum Collection Patch Relic
Takeda, Shota	Museum Collection Patch Relic
Tanaka, Kosuke	Museum Collection Patch Relic, Triple Threads Relic
Tsutsugoh, Yoshitomo	Topps Now Team Japan #JPN-4, Bowman #BP62, Museum Collection Quad Relic, Allen & Ginter WBC Relic, Allen & Ginter Mini WBC Framed Relic, Triple Threads Relic, Triple Threads Relic Combo
Yamada, Tetsuto	Topps Now #W-35, Topps Now Team Japan #JPN-1, Bowman #BP56, Museum Collection Quad Relic, Allen & Ginter WBC Relic, Allen & Ginter Mini WBC Framed Relic,  Triple Threads Relic, Triple Threads Relic Combo

Note that Topps Now #W-14 features both Kobayashi and Nakata and Topps Now #W-39 features Matsuda on the front but does not actually identify him.  Also note that the Triple Threads Relic Combo card has Sakamoto, Tsutsugoh and Yamada on it.

There are only 17 players from the Samurai Japan roster who have cards and four of them (Matsui, Suzuki, Takeda and Tanaka) only have memorabilia cards.  There are no cards for Ryo Akiyoshi, Yoshihisa Hirano, Ryosuke Hirata, Ayumu Ishikawa, Kazuhisa Makita, Hirotoshi Masui, Naoki Miyanishi, Shota Ohno, Toshiya Okada, Ginjiro Sumitani and Seiichi Uchikawa.

As far as I've been able to tell there are no Japanese cards for the WBC team.

Here's some example cards:

2017 Topps Throwback Thursday #32

2017 Topps Now WBC #W-14

2017 Topps Now Team Japan #JPN-7

2017 Bowman Paper Prospects #BP56

2017 Topps Museum Collection #WBCQR-TN

2017 Topps Allen & Ginter #WBCR-YT

I have left out the Bowman Shohei Ohtani card from this discussion simply because Ohtani was not on the Samurai Japan roster for the WBC.

While I'm disappointed that there are so few cards for Samurai Japan, it could be worse.  As far as I can tell there were only two cards for Team Korea - a Topps Now card for Tae-Kyun Kim (#W-12) and a Bowman Paper Prospects card for Hyeon-Jong Yang (#BP141).

New BBM And Epoch Sets Announced

BBM and Epoch have announced a handful of new sets in the past few weeks:

- The last few years BBM has issued a box set for one of the team's cheerleader/dance team.  It was the Hawks in 2014, the Dragons in 2015 and the Giants last year.  This year the set is for the Fighters' squad - Fighters Girl.  The set actually also highlights the team's mascots so it's official title is something like "Fighters Girl & B * B Family". Each box contains 60 cards - a 58 card base set plus two "special" cards which could be either autographed "cheki" cards.  Each box also contains a "raw photograph".  The base set contains 24 cards of the cheerleaders in their costumes, 24 cards of the cheerleaders in their street clothes, 1 card with a group photo and nine cards of the team's mascots.  The set will be out in mid September.

- Keeping with a Fighters theme, BBM's latest "Authentic Edition" box set is called "Young Fighters" and features Fighter players who were born after April 1990.  The box contains 30 cards - a 29 card base set plus one "special" card which could be either a jersey card or an autograph card.  I think that like the Carp and Tigers sets that were previously announced, the autograph card could be from a player who isn't in the base set - so you could pull an autograph of say Sho Nakata even though he was born prior to 1990.  There are nine players who have jersey cards available including (of course) Shohei Ohtani.  The set will be out in late September.

- Epoch is continuing to get back into the high end card sets after issuing a bunch of reasonably priced sets earlier this year.  Their next release is called "Pacific League Premier Edition" and is sold in a box of (I think) 8 cards for 16,200 yen (although Discount Niki is selling each box for 14,900 yen).  I'm not sure how many of those 8 cards are base set cards and how many are the "special" cards.  The base set contains 54 cards (which may be the same 54 players as their other Pacific League set from earlier this year).  The possible "special" cards include hologram, silk embossed, autographed and jersey cards.  The jersey cards include possible "shadowbox" and combination jersey and letter patch cards.  The set will be released on September 30th.

- Epoch will be releasing the "Swallows Premier Edition" or "Luxury Version" on September 30th as well.  At 12,000 yen per box this is slightly less expensive than the PL set but I think you only get six cards per box.  The base set contains 33 cards (three more than Epoch's Swallows team set from earlier this summer) and there is a parallel version of each card available.  There are apparently three different types of autographed cards available for each player and a bat & jersey memorabilia card is available for Tetsuto Yamada.  There's at least one multi-player autographed card available as well.

- Epoch is releasing yet another high end team set on October 8, this one is for the Orix Buffaloes (who Epoch did not do a reasonably priced set for earlier this summer).  I'm not completely sure of the title of the set - it's either "Premier Edition" or "Luxury Version".  Either way it's 12,000 yen for a box of six cards although it's guaranteed that three of those six cards are autographed.  The base set has 25 cards and I believe all of them are "holospectra" cards.  There's a veritable cornucopia of possible autograph cards including "Record Breaker", "Rookie" and "Star" ones.

Card Of The Week September 10

On Friday Takashi Toritani got his 2000th career hit, becoming the fourth player to do so this year (following Masahiro Araki, Norichika Aoki and Shinnosuke Abe).  I'll hopefully get around to doing a post on Toritani later this week but I wanted to mention that there are two other players who are "close" to 2000.  One of them is Seiichi Uchikawa of the Hawks who has been stuck at 1970 hits since breaking his thumb in late July.  Uchikawa might be able to play some more this season but obviously it's not likely that he'll get 30 hits in the handful of games he'll get into.  The other player is Kazuya Fukuura of the Marines who as of today is at 1959 hits.  I've found it kind of odd that folks have been treating Fukuura reaching 2000 hits as being imminent - there's a "Fuku-Meter" countdown on Pacific League TV's home page and the Marines were giving away a Fukuura bobblehead with a countdown counter on it a few weeks back.  He came into this season needing 67 hits to reach 2000 and he's only had 26 hits since then.  It's going to be next year at the earliest that he's going to reach the milestone and maybe not even then.  He'll be 42 next year and you wonder if some point either he or the Marines are going to decide it's not worth the effort.

Fukuura has been with the Marines since the 1994 season (he was their 7th round pick in the fall 1993 draft) but he was originally a pitcher - I'm not positive but I don't think he switched to being a batter until 1997.  He apparently had some shoulder issues that prevented him from continuing as pitcher.  He debuted with the top team in 1997 and was pretty much a regular starting the following season.  He lead the Pacific League in batting in 2001 - the first player to lead the PL in batting other than Ichiro since 1993 (of course that might only be because Ichiro was in Seattle in 2001).  Here's his rookie card from the 1994 BBM set (#529) when he was still a pitcher:

One quick note - you may have noticed that I haven't been posting as much as usual over the last few months.  I hurt my back again in mid-June and it was difficult to sit at my computer much.  I had surgery on my back about a week and a half ago and my ability to sit at the computer was pretty much non-existent until late last week.  I've been improving a lot in the past few days so I'm hoping that I'll be able to pick up the pace again this week.

Card Of The Week September 3

Here's a trivia question for you - who was the pitcher who gave up Sadaharu Oh's 756th home run?  It was Yasujiro Suzuki of the Yakult Swallows.

Suzuki had a couple good years as a starter with the Swallows in the late 70's going 14-9 in 1977 and 13-3 in the Swallows championship year of 1978 (although he lost both his starts in the 1978 Nippon Series).  He made the All Star team both of those seasons.  He was originally drafted by Yakult from Nikko Hitachi of the corporate leagues in the fifth round of the 1972 draft.  He spent 10 years with the Swallows (although his first two seasons were spent exclusively with the farm team) before they traded him to Kintetsu in the 1982-83 offseason.  He worked out of the Buffaloes bullpen for four seasons (making the All Star team again in 1984) before retiring after the 1986 season.   He apparently is also known as Kojiro Suzuki - I think it has something to do with different ways of reading the kanji for his name but I'm not sure I'm getting that right.

There were a fair number of cards of Suzuki from his playing days - mostly Takara cards but a handful of Yamakatsu.  It looks like he only ever had one Calbee card - it's in the 1982 set and he's under the name Kojiro on it.  Oddly enough he doesn't appear to have any cards since his retirement - he doesn't show up in any of BBM's or Epoch's OB sets.

Here's one of his Yamakatsu cards - #127 from the 1979 JY8 set:

September 3, 1977 - Sadaharu Oh Hits Home Run #756

40 years ago today Sadaharu Oh hit his 756th home run to pass Hank Aaron as the "World Home Run" rccord holder.  It's kind of funny - Aaron hit his last home run on July 20, 1976 so he only held the record for about 13 and a half months. (UPDATE - Yeah, I'm an idiot.  Aaron would have become the record holder when he passed Ruth in April of 1974 so he held the record for roughly three years and five months.)

Here's a clip of Oh's entire at bat that ended with the home run:



As you might expect there have been baseball cards dedicated to this event over the years.  Calbee actually issued a 95 card series for Oh in 1977 that gave his career history and covered the actual home run - there's a card of Oh and Aaron in the series that is quite valuable.  I don't have any of the cards from this series but I swiped some images from Yahoo! Japan Auctions:

1977 Calbee Oh #36

1977 Calbee Oh #42

1977 Calbee Oh #54

I don't know if there were any cards celebrating the event in the other card manufacturers at the time - NST, Yamakatsu and Nippon Ham.  NST had a set dedicated to Oh (although it showed other players as well) in 1977 but I don't know if it came out before or after September 3rd.  The event has shown up in a number of OB sets and cards in the "modern" card era however.

The first BBM card I know of that explicitly shows home run #756 is this one from the "Untouchable Records" subset in the 1995 set:

1995 BBM #319

BBM's 2009 biographical set for Oh surprisingly only included two cards for #756 although one of the cards had different photos on each side:

09 BBM Sadaharu Oh #01

09 BBM Sadaharu Oh #01 (Back)

09 BBM Sadaharu Oh #46

Epoch did a set back in 2010 that was dedicated to the 1977 season.  There were five cards in the set dedicated to home run #756:

2010 Epoch 1977 #53

2010 Epoch 1977 #54

2010 Epoch 1977 #55

2010 Epoch 1977 #56

2010 Epoch 1977 #57

That photo on the third card (#55) of the Epoch set of Oh with his arms raised in triumph is iconic.  It has made at least nine baseball cards that I know of (including the Epoch one):

2000 BBM O-N #ON-B24

2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 #S-04

2004 BBM Giants 70th Anniversary #GB3

2008 BBM Home Run Chronicle #01

2013 BBM Giants Legends #95

2014 BBM NPB 80th Anniversary Batters Edition #94

2014 BBM Giants 80th Anniversary #93

2016 BBM The Ballpark Stories #005

There may be other cards for home run #756 but I think that these are the only ones that I have in my collection.