A couple months back Ryanposted what I thought was a very interesting card that he'd found in a shop in Nagoya - a card of 2000 Japanese Olympic Baseball Team member Yoshikazu Doi. This card was apparently from a larger set that Upper Deck did for the entire Japanese delegation to the Sydney games.
I am a sucker for National Team sets but I had never heard of this one so I was very intrigued. Unlike the previous Olympic teams that were mostly made up of college and/or industrial league players and later Olympic teams that were exclusively NBP players, the 2000 Japanese Olympic baseball team was a hybrid of 10 NBP players, 13 industrial league players and one college player. Several of the industrial league players have since gone on to NBP and become stars, including Norihiro Akahoshi, Toshiya Sugiuchi and especially Shinnosuke Abe. Up to now, the only cards I knew of for this team were an eight card subset in the 2001 Calbee set that didn't even include all of the NBP players.
Ryan had only seen the one baseball player along with a bunch of other sports. Doi's card was #222 but he had no idea how many other baseball cards there were (or even if there were any others). I started looking around. I found a lot of 100 or so cards from the set on Yahoo! Auctions Japan that I picked up via kuboTEN. I also found singles from the set at Wrappers in Tokyo. (I don't know if other stores had singles or not because I didn't think to look until I was at Wrappers.) Between these two sources, I've managed to locate 14 cards for the team. What I don't know is how many cards there are and if there are actually cards for all 24 team members.
The cards I have so far are numbered between 214 and 230. So that's 17 cards right there. But obviously there could be cards before 214 and after 230, couldn't there? I took a look at the lot of cards I got from the auction and saw that the last number I have before the baseball cards is #207 and the first number after the baseball cards is #232. So the entire subset COULD start at #208 and go to #231. And that would give us 24 cards, enough for the entire team.
If only the lot I won had included the checklist card for that part of the set...
So here's what I do know exists:
214 Tomohiro Kuroki
215 Nobuhiko Matsunaka
216 So Taguchi
217 Yukio Tanaka
218 Norihiro Nakamura
219 Masato Kawano
220 ?
221 Toshiya Sugiuchi
222 Yoshikazu Doi
223 ?
224 Kosuke Noda
225 Yoshinori Okihara
226 Jun Heima
227 Osamu Nogami
228 Yoshihiko Kajiyama
229 ?
230 Tomohiro Iizuka
I am a sucker for National Team sets but I had never heard of this one so I was very intrigued. Unlike the previous Olympic teams that were mostly made up of college and/or industrial league players and later Olympic teams that were exclusively NBP players, the 2000 Japanese Olympic baseball team was a hybrid of 10 NBP players, 13 industrial league players and one college player. Several of the industrial league players have since gone on to NBP and become stars, including Norihiro Akahoshi, Toshiya Sugiuchi and especially Shinnosuke Abe. Up to now, the only cards I knew of for this team were an eight card subset in the 2001 Calbee set that didn't even include all of the NBP players.
Ryan had only seen the one baseball player along with a bunch of other sports. Doi's card was #222 but he had no idea how many other baseball cards there were (or even if there were any others). I started looking around. I found a lot of 100 or so cards from the set on Yahoo! Auctions Japan that I picked up via kuboTEN. I also found singles from the set at Wrappers in Tokyo. (I don't know if other stores had singles or not because I didn't think to look until I was at Wrappers.) Between these two sources, I've managed to locate 14 cards for the team. What I don't know is how many cards there are and if there are actually cards for all 24 team members.
The cards I have so far are numbered between 214 and 230. So that's 17 cards right there. But obviously there could be cards before 214 and after 230, couldn't there? I took a look at the lot of cards I got from the auction and saw that the last number I have before the baseball cards is #207 and the first number after the baseball cards is #232. So the entire subset COULD start at #208 and go to #231. And that would give us 24 cards, enough for the entire team.
If only the lot I won had included the checklist card for that part of the set...
So here's what I do know exists:
214 Tomohiro Kuroki
215 Nobuhiko Matsunaka
216 So Taguchi
217 Yukio Tanaka
218 Norihiro Nakamura
219 Masato Kawano
220 ?
221 Toshiya Sugiuchi
222 Yoshikazu Doi
223 ?
224 Kosuke Noda
225 Yoshinori Okihara
226 Jun Heima
227 Osamu Nogami
228 Yoshihiko Kajiyama
229 ?
230 Tomohiro Iizuka
And here's the list of guys on the roster who are not accounted for so far:
Shinnosuke Abe
Norihiro Akahoshi
Jun Hirose
Masanori Ishikawa
Daisuke Matsuzaka
Masanori Sugiura
Fumihiro Suzuki
Shunsuke Watanabe
Akichika Yamada
Yuji Yoshima
Here's a couple sample cards. Upper Deck reused their design from the 1999 Victory set for these:
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| #215 |
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| #221 |
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| #217 |
It's very hard to find any "pre-rookie" cards of any NBP players (unless they went to one of the Tokyo Big Six schools since 2008) so the idea of being able to find an Abe card from before he was drafted by the Giants is pretty cool.