Sunday, January 17, 2010
Card Of The Week January 17
Last weekend, my family and I went to Walt Disney World. Among other things, we checked out the Magic Of Disney Animation show at Hollywood Studios. During the show, Mushu the Dragon (from Mulan) gave a quick history of Dragons and, to my surprise, mentioned the Chunichi Dragons. At this point, a picture of the team celebrating briefly appeared on the screen. From what I could see, it looked like someone was being thrown up in the air, so I figure it was a do-age for the manager. Since it looked like the team was wearing the uniforms similar to the Dodgers that they wore from 1987 to 2003, I'm guessing that it was either the 1988 or 1999 Central League pennant being celebrated, which means that Senichi Hoshino would be the manager in question. Here's a card showing the 1988 celebration (2006 BBM Dragons 70th Anniversary #06):
2010 BBM 1st Version
BBM's website announced this year's 1st version set the other day. The set, which will not be out until mid-April will contain 549 "regular" cards that break down as follows:
- 36 player/manager cards for each team (432 in all)
- 33 2009 League Leader cards
- 2 Rookie Of The Year candidate cards per team (24 in all)
- 12 cards for retiring players/managers
- team checklists (12 in all)
- 3 20th Anniversary Commemoration cards for each team (36 in all)
There will also be the usual 19 card Best 9 and 18 card Gold Glove insert sets, along with a 12 card (one for each team) "Lightning 2010" set. Plus the usual batch of autograph/memorabilia cards.
It looks like BBM is doing something interesting with their "20th Anniverary Commemoration" cards. The subset is going to be spread throughout the 1st and 2nd Version sets as well as the Touch The Game set and the individual team sets. Each team will have 3 cards in the 1st Version, 2nd Version and Touch The Game sets plus six cards in their team set for a total of 15 cards per team.
- 36 player/manager cards for each team (432 in all)
- 33 2009 League Leader cards
- 2 Rookie Of The Year candidate cards per team (24 in all)
- 12 cards for retiring players/managers
- team checklists (12 in all)
- 3 20th Anniversary Commemoration cards for each team (36 in all)
There will also be the usual 19 card Best 9 and 18 card Gold Glove insert sets, along with a 12 card (one for each team) "Lightning 2010" set. Plus the usual batch of autograph/memorabilia cards.
It looks like BBM is doing something interesting with their "20th Anniverary Commemoration" cards. The subset is going to be spread throughout the 1st and 2nd Version sets as well as the Touch The Game set and the individual team sets. Each team will have 3 cards in the 1st Version, 2nd Version and Touch The Game sets plus six cards in their team set for a total of 15 cards per team.
2010 Hall Of Fame class
This past week the Japanese Baseball Hall Of Fame announced its latest inductees - Shinichi Etoh and Osamu Higashio were the two professional players inducted (amateur player and former college teammate of Shigeo Nagashime Masayuki Furuta was also inducted).
Shinichi Etoh had an 18 year career from 1959 to 1976 with the Dragons, Orions, Whales and Lions. He also managed the Lions (as player-manager in 1975, his sole year with the team). He was the first player to ever lead win the batting crown in both leagues and finished his career with 367 home runs and a .287 batting average.
1964 Marusan Menko:
2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 #219:
2008 BBM Lotte 40th Anniversary #21:
Osamu Higashio had a 20 year career from 1969 to 1988, all with the Lions (Nishitetsu, Taiheiyo Club, Crown Lighter, and Seibu). He also managed the Lions from 1995 to 2001, winning the Pacific League pennant twice. He had a career record of 251-247 and an ERA of 3.50.
1987 Calbee #369:
1996 BBM #540:
2009 Premium Malts #05:
Shinichi Etoh had an 18 year career from 1959 to 1976 with the Dragons, Orions, Whales and Lions. He also managed the Lions (as player-manager in 1975, his sole year with the team). He was the first player to ever lead win the batting crown in both leagues and finished his career with 367 home runs and a .287 batting average.
1964 Marusan Menko:
2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 #219:
2008 BBM Lotte 40th Anniversary #21:
Osamu Higashio had a 20 year career from 1969 to 1988, all with the Lions (Nishitetsu, Taiheiyo Club, Crown Lighter, and Seibu). He also managed the Lions from 1995 to 2001, winning the Pacific League pennant twice. He had a career record of 251-247 and an ERA of 3.50.
1987 Calbee #369:
1996 BBM #540:
2009 Premium Malts #05:
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
2010 Rookie Edition
BBM's website this week announced the 2010 Rookie Edition set. This set features players taken in last fall's draft which despite occurring in 2009 is referred to as the 2010 NPB draft. The set will contain 114 cards of which 81 are newly drafted players (including the first card of Yusei Kikuchi), 24 are cards featuring current players as they looked when they were first drafted, 5 cards for the new 2010 managers - Norifumi Nishimura (Marines), Kenjiro Nomura (Carp), Marty Brown (Eagles), Takao Obana (BayStars) and Akinobu Okada (Buffaloes) and 4 cards that I am not sure about but I think are traded players. There will also be the usual collection of insert/memorabilia cards. The set will be released in early March.
Card Of The Week January 10
A little late this week. Deanna had a post up last week where she talked about going to the Pro Yakyu OB All-Star Athletes Cup game at the Tokyo Dome (which is replacing the Masters League this years). At the game, she was impressed by 60 year old Choji Murata, who was still reaching 83 miles per hour on his pitches. She had some pictures up of him and I thought it would be instructive to put up a card of him showing him from his playing days as a comparision. Here's his 2002 BBM All Time Heroes card (#181):
Looks pretty much the same to me!
Like Katsuya Nomura, Murata is curiously absent from recent OB sets. He doesn't appear in either the 2008 "Back To The 70's" or 2009 "Back To The 80's" sets or the Lotte 40th Anniversary set, although he was in the 2004 "Golden Arms" set.
Looks pretty much the same to me!
Like Katsuya Nomura, Murata is curiously absent from recent OB sets. He doesn't appear in either the 2008 "Back To The 70's" or 2009 "Back To The 80's" sets or the Lotte 40th Anniversary set, although he was in the 2004 "Golden Arms" set.
Monday, January 4, 2010
A Lesson From The Past
I used to rule the world
Seas would rise when I gave the word
Now in the morning I sleep alone
Sweep the streets that I used to own
-- Coldplay, Viva La Vida
Before this sends anyone off on a wild spending spree, buying up rookie cards, there's some history to be examined. The fifth edition of Gary Engel's Japanese Baseball Card Checklist and Price Guide lists the above Kazuo Matsui 1994 BBM rookie card (#506) with a value of $70. The book was published in 2002, roughly a year and a half before Little Matsui signed with the Mets. I had actually seen the card go for more than that on eBay. This card once ranked among the most valuable "regular" BBM cards out there, along with Ichiro and Hideki Matsui's rookie cards. The latest version of the Checklist and Price Guide (the seventh edition) lists the card at $40. I've seen it (and actually bought one) for MUCH less than that on eBay.
I'm not making any statement on whether or not I think Darvish is serious about asking to be posted or whether or not he'd be successful in the majors. I'm just saying I've seen something like this before and it didn't go the way everyone expected it would.
Seas would rise when I gave the word
Now in the morning I sleep alone
Sweep the streets that I used to own
-- Coldplay, Viva La Vida
Before this sends anyone off on a wild spending spree, buying up rookie cards, there's some history to be examined. The fifth edition of Gary Engel's Japanese Baseball Card Checklist and Price Guide lists the above Kazuo Matsui 1994 BBM rookie card (#506) with a value of $70. The book was published in 2002, roughly a year and a half before Little Matsui signed with the Mets. I had actually seen the card go for more than that on eBay. This card once ranked among the most valuable "regular" BBM cards out there, along with Ichiro and Hideki Matsui's rookie cards. The latest version of the Checklist and Price Guide (the seventh edition) lists the card at $40. I've seen it (and actually bought one) for MUCH less than that on eBay.
I'm not making any statement on whether or not I think Darvish is serious about asking to be posted or whether or not he'd be successful in the majors. I'm just saying I've seen something like this before and it didn't go the way everyone expected it would.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Stuff I've been meaning to get to
There's been a couple things I've learned about in the last couple weeks that I've been meaning to pass on but I just haven't around to until now...
- Jason told me about a website that will do proxy bidding on Yahoo! Japan Auctions for you called kuboTEN. Here's how it works - first you register with kuboTEN. Then you browse the Yahoo! Japan auctions looking for whatever you're interested in. You can browse from kuboTEN directly (they run the pages through a translator) but you don't have to. Once you've located something, you tell kuboTEN what it is and how much you want to bid. It may take several hours for them to post your bid, so it would be difficult to bid on something at the last minute. The seller then ships your item to kuboTEN's office in Fukuoka, who will then ship the item to you. It's all very slick, but as you might expect, it doesn't come free. When you win an auction, you need to pay kuboTEN not only the cost of the item plus whatever shipping cost from the seller to their office, but also 10% of the sales price plus $10. You'll also have to pay the shipping charge from Japan for your item, but you can combine shipping on multiple items. So far, I've won a group of cards from an auction and paid kuboTEN for them, but I haven't arranged shipping for them yet. I'm going to probably end up paying around $7 a card for the five cards I'm getting - a bit steep, but I've not been able to find the cards anywhere else. I'll talk about it more when I get the cards. I know Jason's been pretty pleased with them.
- One of the things I discovered while browsing Yahoo! Japan auctions is that there is a set that commemorates the 15th Anniversary of the Japan Baseball Foundation. I don't know anything about the Foundation, but the set is a boxed set containing 77 cards - 76 cards of OB players and a single memorabilia/autograph card. Not sure who's in the set off hand, although it looks like Sadaharu Oh and Hiromitsu Ochiai are on the box (and Masumi Kuwata and Choji Murata are the cards in the picture from the auction). I haven't seen anything on BBM's website for this set, so I'm assuming that it's not them (that copyright line on the box for them is probably simply for the pictures). I think that they may be done by Epoch, who did a bunch of stickers back in 2000, but I'm not sure they've done anything else since.
- There's a couple cool card galleries out there - Jason has posted his Hideki Matsui Home Run cards and A Noburo Aota Fan's Notes had a post a few weeks back linking to a nice collection of old bromide cards from the late 1940's.
- Jason told me about a website that will do proxy bidding on Yahoo! Japan Auctions for you called kuboTEN. Here's how it works - first you register with kuboTEN. Then you browse the Yahoo! Japan auctions looking for whatever you're interested in. You can browse from kuboTEN directly (they run the pages through a translator) but you don't have to. Once you've located something, you tell kuboTEN what it is and how much you want to bid. It may take several hours for them to post your bid, so it would be difficult to bid on something at the last minute. The seller then ships your item to kuboTEN's office in Fukuoka, who will then ship the item to you. It's all very slick, but as you might expect, it doesn't come free. When you win an auction, you need to pay kuboTEN not only the cost of the item plus whatever shipping cost from the seller to their office, but also 10% of the sales price plus $10. You'll also have to pay the shipping charge from Japan for your item, but you can combine shipping on multiple items. So far, I've won a group of cards from an auction and paid kuboTEN for them, but I haven't arranged shipping for them yet. I'm going to probably end up paying around $7 a card for the five cards I'm getting - a bit steep, but I've not been able to find the cards anywhere else. I'll talk about it more when I get the cards. I know Jason's been pretty pleased with them.
- One of the things I discovered while browsing Yahoo! Japan auctions is that there is a set that commemorates the 15th Anniversary of the Japan Baseball Foundation. I don't know anything about the Foundation, but the set is a boxed set containing 77 cards - 76 cards of OB players and a single memorabilia/autograph card. Not sure who's in the set off hand, although it looks like Sadaharu Oh and Hiromitsu Ochiai are on the box (and Masumi Kuwata and Choji Murata are the cards in the picture from the auction). I haven't seen anything on BBM's website for this set, so I'm assuming that it's not them (that copyright line on the box for them is probably simply for the pictures). I think that they may be done by Epoch, who did a bunch of stickers back in 2000, but I'm not sure they've done anything else since.
- There's a couple cool card galleries out there - Jason has posted his Hideki Matsui Home Run cards and A Noburo Aota Fan's Notes had a post a few weeks back linking to a nice collection of old bromide cards from the late 1940's.
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