Japanese Baseball Cards

Sunday, April 14, 2024

Card Of The Week April 14

I got a handful of cards from my friend Jason early last week and one of the cards he threw in was kind of interesting. It's a 2023 Topps 206 card of Yuki Yanagita (#188) and it's somehow a three-way parallel! It's a mini card, it has an alternate image (i.e. not a mugshot) and it has the rabbits on it (which makes it a numbered parallel to boot as it's /99). I know that Topps' has some crazy parallels but I didn't know that one card could be part of three of them. Here's the front and back of the card:

I wonder if there's a version of this card with a colored border, just so we could have a four way parallel!

Tuesday, April 9, 2024

MLB Autographs

I frequently say that I don't collect MLB cards but that actually not completely true. I've put together a small collection of certified autographed MLB cards of Japanese players. Now, as I've also frequently mentioned, I'm cheap so I'm not going after Shohei Ohtani, Ichiro, Hideki Matsui or even Daisuke Matsuzaka. Instead I've been concentrating on guys who had stellar NPB careers both before and after their perhaps less-than-stellar MLB stints. It's probably just easier to show you what I mean:

2004 Bowman Chrome Shingo Takatsu

2005 Skybox Autographics Akinori Otsuka /100

2012 Topps Chrome Tsuyoshi Wada /499

2013 Topps Chrome Kyuji Fujikawa

2020 Topps Chrome Shun Yamaguchi

2021 Topps Kohei Arihara

2021 Topps Heritage Kenta Maeda

2021 Topps Stadium Club Shogo Akiyama

2022 Topps Baseball Japan Edition Hirokazu Sawamura

A couple comments:

I paid less than $10 for most of these cards. I think the Maeda might have been $20
I had avoided Sawamura's cards because I thought his autograph was pretty weak. I must not have been alone in that thought as someone threw this card in for free with some cards I bought on Ebay
Don't remember what I paid for the Takatsu but it was pretty cheap considering he's in the Japanese Baseball Hall Of Fame
I had picked up the Otsuka back in 2012 with the thought of taking it with me to Japan to trade at a store. I may still do that.

This collection is not limited to NPB players. I also have autographed cards of a couple of KBO legends:

2016 Topps Chrome Park Byung-ho

2016 Topps Chrome Lee Dae-ho

Sunday, April 7, 2024

Card Of The Week April 7

A while back I noticed something interesting about this card of Takamasa Sukuki from the 1978 Yamakatsu JY10 set:

Do you see it? The batter is a member of the Nippon-Ham Fighters. Since NPB didn't have interleague play until 2005, almost 30 years after this card came out, the photo was most likely taken during a pre-season exhibition game. It COULD have been from an All Star game as well but I think it's unlikely - there's a Dragons' outfielder in the background and a quick look at the All Star game rosters from 1977 and 1978 reveals that there were no Dragons outfielders on them.

Saturday, April 6, 2024

Team Sets And A Flagship

As I get older it seems that time moves faster and faster. I can't believe that it's been almost six weeks since the last time I did a round up of the latest NPB card release announcements. So lets' get caught up...

- BBM has announced three more of their annual "comprehensive" team sets. Each set has a base set of 81 cards, most of which are "regular" player cards featuring the manager and the players on the 70 man roster plus a couple subsets (which may not be fully defined yet) to fill out the set. Each set also has 18 non-premium insert cards split into a variety of sets which also may not be fully defined yet. The Treasure, Esperanza and Magical inserts are all serially numbered. (If it's not obvious, the "Regular Cards", "Treasure", "Esperanza" and "Magical" columns are the total number of those type of cards in each set.) (I'm not sure why the number of "regular" cards plus the subsets for the Lions set adds up to 80 and not 81.)

Release Date	Team	Regular Cards	Subsets	Non-Premium Inserts	Treasure	Esperanza	Magical	Other
Late April	Lions	63	Combination(4), New Forces(4), Starting Pitchers(5), Growing Young Players (4)	Core Players(9), Rising Stars(6), Rookies(3)	19	15		Autograph & memorabilia cards
Mid May	Marines	68	Home Grown(4), Above All(4), Sonic Boom (3), The K's(2)	Brilliant Cut(9), Millennium(4), Velocity(2), Take Off(3)	24	15	24	Autograph & memorabilia cards
Late May	Giants	66	Checklist(1), Rise Again(3), Smile On(3), Twosome(3), New Breeze(3), Grade Up(2)	Giants Pride 2024(15), Looking Forward(3)	24	15		Additional Premium Insets of Cross Foil Signing (15), Combo Cross Foil Signing (2), Triple Cross Foil Signing (1), Triplex (3), Super Metallic Giants (9)

- In addition, BBM and the Lions have once again teamed up to publish a Lions team set called "L Collection Vol 1"*. These cards are sold in 2 cards pack for 500 yen at the Lions' team store at the ballpark as well as their stores at Tokorozawa and Ikebukuro stations and other places. They are also available on the Lions online store although I don't believe they'll ship them overseas. There are 24 "regular" cards, 24 "rare" cards and 13 autographed cards available in the packs. The autographed cards are only for the Lions 2024 rookie class, including the ikusei players.

*It's always called "Vol 1" but I've never seen any "Vol 2" cards

- While I was looking at the Lions online store, I noticed that they're also selling boxes for a Lions "mini colored paper" card set. While it doesn't say who makes them, I assume it's the usual "216 Co/Hits/TLC" outfit that usually does these as the example cards look like all the others. The base set (such as it is) contains 20 cards and I think there's both facsimile and real autographed cards available as well. I am somewhat surprised that I did not see this set listed over at Discount Niki's website - it makes me worry there are other sets I've missed hearing about.

- I did, however, see a listing for a Swallows over at Discount Niki's website. Like the Lions set, it has 20 "normal" cards along with 20 facsimile autographed parallel cards. There are also possible autograph cards although I think only 16 of the 20 players in the set have real autographs. The set will be released on June 15th.

- Epoch has announced two more of their "Premier Edition" team sets. The new announcements are for the Lions and the Tigers. There are 38 cards in the Lions' base set and 39 cards in the Tigers'. Both sets contains a few OB as well as active players. All the base cards have a "holo foil" parallel and both sets have the usual gazillion insert cards that are too numerous to list here. Both sets feature four different types of player autograph cards - "Authentic", "Star", "Rookie" and "Legendary". The Lions set also offers "Combo" autograph cards that as you would assume from the name feature multiple autographs. The Lions set will be out on April 18th while the Tigers won't be released until May 25th.

- Epoch has also announced the seventh edition of their flagship NPB set and there's a big change in store this year - they've cut the size of the set from 444 cards to 348. The 348 cards breaks down to 336 "regular" player cards and 12 "Legendary Player" cards (one OB player from each team). Basically Epoch decided to go from having 36 cards per team to 28, which probably not coincidentally is still one more per team than BBM's 1st Version set. 90 of the cards have parallel versions and there's 24 "Holospectra" insert cards. Additionally there are autographs for 140 players (including the 12 OB players). The set will be released on June 22, about a month later than it usually is.

- I'm kind of hoping that Epoch shrank the size of the set in anticipation of some sort of update set later in the season. If that turns out not to be the case, there's one word that will describe my feelings towards the drop in set size for both Epoch and Calbee's flagships:

A Fish Called Wanda Disappointed GIFfrom A Fish Called Wanda GIFs

Thursday, April 4, 2024

Another Zippy Zapping!

On Monday of this week, I got home from work to discover I had received another large box of goodies from Kenny, better known in the collecting community as Zippy Zappy. Kenny has been downsizing his card collection recently and there's been several other card bloggers who've done posts about the care packages they've received from him. And you need to read Kenny's post about the absolutely incredible way he disposed of his largest player collection.

My box contained a couple binders and 800 count box of cards that was only partly full. I was able to immediately put the binders to good use. It's like Kenny was reading my mind because I was getting ready to order a couple small ones and now I don't have to.

Off hand, I'm not sure how many cards were in the box but it was probably in the neighborhood of 500 or 600. What was amazing was that there were around 110 or so that I didn't already have. I mean, I have a LOT of Japanese baseball cards so it's really hard for someone to gift me cards that I don't already have. But once again, Kenny did it!

I'm not going to go over all the cards he sent but I do want to try to give a pretty good overview of what he sent that I didn't already have. Kenny is a Dragons fan (like me) so a lot of the cards were Dragons related. He is (or was) a fan of Hiroki Kuroda and (to a lesser extent) Masahiro Tanaka so you'll see all that reflected in the cards I'm going to show.

Let's start off with a couple vintage 1970's menko cards:

1975 Pepsi Menko (Osamu Hirose)

1976 Mitsuya Round Menko JRM 12 (Hiroaki Inoue)

There was also some Calbee's from the 20th Century:

1987 Calbee #166 (Sadaaki Yoshimura)

1997 Calbee #141

And a bunch of 21st Century Calbee - heavy on the Kurodas:

2001 Calbee #169

2001 Calbee #091

2002 Calbee #030

2002 Calbee #AS-04

2003 Calbee #OP-03

2004 Calbee #064

2005 Calbee #062

2005 Calbee #IL-17

2006 Calbee #188

2007 Calbee #IL-11

2007 Calbee #T-15

2009 Calbee #239

2009 Calbee #142

2010 Calbee #TP-15

2012 Calbee #S-49

2014 Calbee #S-20

2015 Calbee #S-19

2016 Calbee #L-08

2018 Calbee #S-22

2019 Calbee #S-37

2020 Calbee #S-21

There were a bunch of cards from various BBM Dragons team sets over the years. First up a card from the 1997 set:

1997 BBM Dragons #D36

A couple cards from the 2012 BBM The Master Of Dragons set - that's a /100 "Printed Autograph" card of Yudai Kawai:

2012 BBM The Master Of Dragons #18

A handful of cards from the 2014 Dragons set:

2014 BBM Dragons #D72

2014 BBM Dragons #D75

2014 BBM Dragons #D83

2014 BBM Dragons #D78 (Koji Fukutani)

A bunch of inserts from BBM Dragons sets between 2014 and 2019. Most of these don't scan well and the ones that REALLY don't scan well are serially numbered:

2014 BBM Dragons #KR6

2015 BBM Dragons #RD03

2016 BBM Dragons #FS1

2017 BBM Dragons #AC1

2017 BBM Dragons #SM3

2017 BBM Dragons #HB2

2017 BBM Dragons #NM1

2017 BBM Dragons #TP2

2018 BBM Dragons #UN3

2019 BBM Dragons #BL1

There were some cards from some other BBM team sets as well (the Tigers card is a foil parallel):

2008 BBM Hawks #H18

2008 BBM Tigers #T-021

2007 BBM Card #C94,C95&C96

2007 BBM Carp Koibumi #15

2007 BBm Giants #G049

There were two "Rivals" insert cards from the 1997 BBM set. These were diecut cards that paired two players from each team and could be put together to form a full photo of the team's ballpark: