Players With The Most Cards In My Collection

I got inspired by a post that Night Owl Cards did earlier this week.  This is not the first time I've been inspired by him - I've been doing "Opening Day" posts the past few years that are a ripoff off of tribute to the ones he's been doing for years.  This particular post was a list of the 25 players who he has the most cards of.  I read his post and thought "Hey, I can do that!"

Some years back I created a relational database to keep track of my collection.  I'm a computer programmer in the real world and it was kind of fun to apply those skills to my hobby.  The database is hosted in a PostgreSQL database server running on my computer and I created a web application running in JBoss to be a front end to it so I have a web front end allowing me to search my database by player or set and to enter new cards into the database.  The best part of all this is that I was completing all this around the time I had a long period of downtime between projects at my job and I was able to convince my manager to allow me to use some training hours to learn new skills (specifically doing the web front end) while completing this.  That's right, my company PAID me to finish up my baseball card collection database application.*

*I think it was at most eight hours and I want to be clear they paid me for code development, not the time I spent entering the cards into the database.

I've learned how to do SQL queries on the database to learn all sorts of things like which players appear in BBM's 1st Version set but not Epoch's NPB set in a given year or what rookie cards appear in Calbee sets.  Or create a list of players ordered by how many cards I have of them.

OK, enough geeky technical mumbo-gumbo and on to the geeky Japanese baseball card stuff!  Here's the top 25 in reverse order:

25. Motonobu Tanishige, 130

24. Masahiro Yamamoto, 131

23. Hitoki Iwase, 132

22. Norihiro Nakamura, 133

20 TIE. Hiroki Kokubo, 134

20 TIE. Tadahito Iguchi, 134

18 TIE. Seiichi Uchikawa, 139

18 TIE. Takeya Nakamura, 139

17. Michihiro Ogasawara, 140

16. Kosuke Fukudome, 142

15. Tomoaki Kanemoto, 146

14. Tatsunori Hara, 149

12 TIE. Hayato Sakamoto, 150

12 TIE. Nobuhiko Matsunaka, 150

11. Hideki Matsui, 161

A couple notes before going on to the top 10.  I refer to these as the "players" I have the most cards of but I am counting cards of the players as managers as well.  I'm also including OB cards of the retired players.  The counts also include Topps and Upper Deck World Baseball Classic cards but no MLB cards of players (since I don't have any).  I also don't include any "single player" sets in the counts (I don't put those cards in my database) so for example Hideki Matsui's card count doesn't include either box set BBM did for him (one in 2002 and the other in 2013).

On to the top 10:

2012 Bandai Owners League 03 #102

9 TIE. Yoshinobu Takahashi, 162

2001 BBM Nippon Series #S14

9 TIE. Atsuya Furuta, 162

1989 Lotte #9

8. Koji Akiyama, 165

2001 Upper Deck Victory #047

7. Kazuo Matsui, 167

I was quite surprised I had more Kazuo Matsui cards than Hideki Matsui cards

2000 BBM #526

6. Daisuke Matsuzaka, 173

How many cards would I have of him if he hadn't spent eight years in MLB?

1982 Takara Lions #47

5. Kimiyasu Kudoh, 180

2010 Giants Winning Game Card #42

4. Shinnosuke Abe, 182

1977 Yamakatsu JY3

3. Sadaharu Oh, 189

Somewhat surprised he wasn't either one or two

1994 Tomy #82

2. Kazuhiro Kiyohara, 202

Pretty amazing he ranks this high considering he hasn't shown up in an OB set in five years due to his legal issues. 

1973 Calbee #1

1. Shigeo Nagashima, 210

This shouldn't be a surprise - there are a LOT of Shigeo Nagashima cards.  For example it looks like 2008 is the only year that I don't have at least one BBM card of him in the 30 years BBM has been publishing cards.

Just out of curiosity I looked to see which Westerner I had the most cards of.  It's Alex Ramirez with 114 cards:

2006 Konami Powerful Baseball #P06-138