Going home

My flight home leaves in about nine hours and I need to finish packing up.  It's been an amazing trip, filled with great baseball and interesting experiences.  I hit 10 different card shops and managed to reduce my single card want list from around 200 cards to 16!  I also managed to pick up a number of sets that I'd been looking for on the super cheap side.  And of course, I bought a lot of cool cards that weren't officially on my want list, but once I saw them, I had to have them.

I'll be writing up stuff about the trip in the next few weeks, but I did want to post a couple quick pictures for something that I did yesterday.  I went to Yokohama for a Baystars-Dragons match up and discovered that this year's Calbees were on sale at the ballpark.  So of course, I bought a bag (only 100 yen) and opened it:

The best part is that in the distance above the card of Motonobu Tanishige, you can see the real Motonobu Tanishige.

Card Of The Week March 10

This is a postcard of Korakuen Stadium, probably from the 1980's.  Obviously the stadium is no longer standing as it was demolished to make way for the Tokyo Dome.

I am likely somewhere in this area right now.  In fact, I think you can see my hotel in this shot or at least where my hotel will be.

In Tokyo

I'm in Tokyo now for the second round of the World BaseballClassic.  I'll also be hitting some card shops this weekend and some open-sen games next week.  I probably won't blog much while I'm here but I'll do a bunch of posts about the trip when I get back.

Card Of The Week March 3

I've talked about this more than a few times in the past, but I have to do yet another post about it.  When Takuro Ishii first broke into NBP back in the late 1980's/early 1990's, he did so as a pitcher and went by his "real" name, Tadanori Ishii.  The pitching thing didn't really work out that well for him and he converted to the infield in 1992, changing his name to Takuro at the same time.

As far as I know, there's only one contemporary card of him as "Tadanori Ishii" and it's from the 1990 Takara Whales set.  I was lucky enough to track it down on eBay recently:

2009 Konami World Baseball Classic

With this year's World Baseball Classic kicking off in a couple hours, I wanted to finally wrap up my discussion of the cards for the 2009 Classic.  I finally completed my 2009 Konami WBC set in the last month or so.  This was a 253 card set featuring 253 individual players for all 16 teams, including all the players on the rosters for the semi-finals and finals for the four teams that made it that far - Japan, Korea, the United States and Venezuela.  Each of the twelve teams that didn't make it to the final round had 12 cards in the set with the exception of Panama, which had only eight.  Japan had 29 players (including all eight players who did not appear in any of Topps' sets) and the other three of the final four had 28 cards each.

I was kind of surprised to discover that despite having many more players represented in their set than Topps did in all of theirs, Topps actually had cards of guys who didn't make it into the Konami set.  Some of that was because Konami apparently made a decision to only show cards of people who actually played in the Classic, so for example, Alex Rodriguez doesn't appear in the set while he had at least three cards in the Topps sets.  (In fairness to Topps, a couple of their sets were released prior to the Classic starting so it was unclear who was actually going to make the teams.)  Another guy who doesn't show up in Konami's set was Dustin Pedroia, who got injured during the Classic and was replaced by Brian Roberts (who is in the set).  But there's a bunch of guys like Yadier Molina, Carlos Lee and Pedro Martinez that for whatever reason don't appear in Konami's set.

Here's some example cards.  The pictures are pretty much all action shots taken during the Classic:

#W09R058

#W09R244

#W09R069

#W09R218

#W09R126

#W09R113

#W09R112

#W09R101

#W09R087

In addition to the regular cards, Konami also did two 12 card insert sets.  One is an All Tournament Team that includes Daisuke Matsuzaka, Hisashi Iwakuma and Norichika Aoki.  The other is simply called "Special Cards" and features Ichiro, Yu Darvish and Shuichi Murata.  I have not picked them up as the regular set was pricey enough.

Konami is a sponsor for the 2013 World Baseball Classic, so I suspect that they will be doing another card set this year.

Yutaka Entasu, Milwaukee Brewer

I've been intrigued for a while about the fact that a 36 year old Yutaka Enatsu went to spring training as a non-roster invitee with the Milwaukee Brewers in 1985, ten years before Hideo Nomo joined the Dodgers.  I was curious if there was anything out there showing him with the Brewers.  Last week, I finally hit the jackpot - an AP photo from March 13, 1985 showing him making his Cactus League debut against the Giants (San Francisco as opposed to Yomiuri):

He had also merited an appearance in the Brewer's Media Guide that spring:

I don't know how many appearances he made for the Brew-Crew that spring, but obviously he didn't make the club and he retired.

I know that Topps did cards of Jose Canseco in their Second Series in both 2001 and 2002 with teams that he went to spring training with but never made a regular season appearance with (IIRC it was the Angels in 2001 and the Expos in 2002).  Too bad Topps couldn't have done an Enatsu card in the 1985 set.

Card Of The Week February 24

It was looking a little grim for Samurai Japan yesterday.  Going into the bottom of the eighth, they were down 2-0 to Team Australia and had been held to only one hit.  But with one out, Sho Nakata and Hirokazu Ibata hit back to back singles and then Ryoji Aikawa stepped to the plate:



Aikawa's home run accounted for all three runs Japan would get and need as Kazuhisa Makita struck out the side in the top of the ninth to preserve the 3-2 win.

Today's game went a little more as expected.

Aikawa actually had just entered the game that inning as starting catcher Shinnosuke Abe had been pinch run for the previous inning.

Aikawa is in his fifth season with the Swallows after spending the previous 14 seasons with Yokohama (although only ten of that at the ichi-gun level).  Here's a card of him from his BayStars days from the 2005 BBM BayStars team set (#YB34):