Dennis Sarfate

Hawks closer Dennis Sarfate broke the NPB single season record for saves a couple weeks back when he notched his 46th save this season, breaking the record of 45 held jointly by Hitoki Iwase and Kyuji Fujikawa.  He has since extended the record to 51.  Now that the Hawks have clinched he's going to take some time off but he'll get some more chances to add to the record starting this coming weekend.

I don't do retrospectives on gaijin players very often so I thought I'd take the opportunity to do one on Sarfate.  He originally came to Japan in 2011 to join the Carp.  After two years in Hiroshima he moved to the Saitama Seibu Lions for one season.  He then moved to Fukuoka in 2014 and has been there ever since.  He's been a closer every season except for 2012 when he was the set up man for Kam Mickolio with the Carp.  Here's a card of his from each year he's been in NPB:

2011 Bandai Owners League 02 #128

2012 Front Runner Carp Starting Lineup #11

2013 BBM 2nd Version #577

2014 BBM 2nd Version #506

2015 BBM Hawks #H32

2016 Calbee #150

2017 BBM 1st Version #039

Card Of The Week September 17

From time to time over the years Calbee offers cards that are only available as part of some sort of mail in redemption process.  A couple of times the cards available have been oversized cards.  The first time they offered the oversized cards was in 1973 and I don't have any of those cards (they are extremely scarce).  They did it again in 1990 and 1991 and I have a couple examples of those.

The 1990 Calbee Big cards were issued in two series.  The first series contained 16 cards while the second series contained 28.  The cards in both series were 3 1/2 inches by 5 inches.  The photos on the first series cards had a border and also had the player's name in English, the team logo and the player's uniform number.  The backs of the card had the usual information that Calbee was putting on the backs of the cards at the time:

The cards also came with a little frame that could be folded to display the card like a picture frame:

The fronts of the second series cards (which I don't have) simply showed a full bleed photo of the player along with a facsimile autograph.  The backs were blank.  According to Engel (where I'm getting most of the background information for these cards from) the cards were issued with a plastic holder of some sort.

At 3 3/16 inches by 4 19/32 inches the 1991 cards were slightly smaller in size than those of the previous year.  The fronts had a full bleed photo of the player along with the player's name in English - very similar to the design of the regular Calbee cards that year.  There were 24 cards in the set and each card had player info on the back that was similar to the info on the back of the regular cards.  These cards were also issued with a plastic holder.

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).