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RIP Shigeru Sugishita
Hall Of Fame pitcher Shigeru Sugishita has passed away at age 97. Born in Tokyo, Sugishita attended Teikyo Shogyo High School where he played baseball under coach Shunichi Amachi, a future Hall Of...
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Card Of The Week June 18
 Saw some chatter on Twitter recently discussing today's matchup between Hamburg and Bonn in Germany's Bundesliga. Kubo played in NPB for the Marines (2005-08), Tigers (2009-13) and Baystars (2014-17)...
View ArticleNews From Calbee
If you're like me and you mark each change of seasons* with the expectation of a new release of Calbee baseball cards, you've probably been wondering where the announcement of this year's Series Two...
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RIP Manabu Kitabeppu
Manabu Kitabeppu, the Hall Of Fame pitcher from the Hiroshima Toyo Carp, passed away last week at age 65 after a lengthy battle with leukemia. Kitabeppu was the team's first round pick in 1975 out of...
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KBO Stars In NPB
A couple weeks ago, Yakyu Cosmopolitan tweeted the following regarding Lee Jung-hoo's future:If we were still in the 2000s, it’s pretty likely Lee Jung-hoo would come to NPB like his father.KBO...
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Card of The Week June 25
Interleague play wrapped up last week with the Baystars being dubbed the champs - they tied for best record (11-7) with the Giants, Hawks and Buffaloes and won via the tiebreaker rules. Somewhat...
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2023 Topps Global Stars
In addition to the Topps Now cards, Topps issued another set for the World Baseball Classic back in March. Well, they had them on sale on line back in March but the physical cards did not get mailed...
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2023 Topps WBC Stars
The latest Topps offering of World Baseball Classic cards is the WBC Stars set. This is actually a 60 card insert set distributed with the Topps Series 2 set that came out earlier this month. So far...
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Another Suruga-ya Order
Last week I placed another order with the online store Suruga-ya. I'd found some stuff I was interested in but I was balking at paying $20-ish for shipping for just a handful of cards. But then I...
View ArticleMore Summer Sets
I've been putting off doing a "new releases" post for over two weeks now and it seems like every time I delay it, there's news of yet another new set. So let's get caught up before there's another...
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Orimen and Ikemen
A word of warning before I start this post - I'm not entirely sure of what I'm talking about here. Well, that's probably the case with more of my posts than I'd care to admit but this one in...
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Card Of The Week July 2
All eyes were on Osaka last Tuesday when the Marines took on the Buffaloes with Roki Sasaki facing off against his friend and Samurai Japan teammate Hiroya Miyagi. Both pitchers did well. Sasaki went...
View ArticlePlayers Missing Regular Calbee Cards
For years now I've been noticing an odd phenomenon in Calbee's annual baseball card sets - there will be several players each year who appear in one of the subsets but don't have a "regular" player...
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Cartoon Menko From 1962
I've been meaning for a while to do a post about a menko set that I really like - the 1962 Marukami "Cartoon Menko" set (JCM 139). The twenty cards in this set all featured "player drawings with...
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Card Of The Week July 9
Hall Of Fame pitcher and former Fukuoka Softbank Hawks manager Kimiyasu Kudoh was recently named to be the new manager for Samurai Japan, replacing the recently retired Hideki Kuriyama. (Actually it's...
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ZenMarket Order
I've had a busy couple of days lately. We had some family in town and I've been running around doing local touristy things. Today I did a tour of the Herr's Potato Chip factory which was a lot of fun...
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2007 BBM Weekly Baseball Opening Game Promos
I've been saying for a while now that one of the great unknowns of Japanese baseball cards are the cards that were issued with magazines. While I think I've got a good handle on the ones issued with...
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Card Of The Week July 17
Takeya Nakamura of the Saitama Seibu Lions had a pretty good weekend.Yesterday he came up in the bottom of the ninth in a scoreless game against the Fighters with Sosuke Genda (who had gotten on with...
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2023 Topps NPB Set
Topps' third "flagship" NPB set was released about two months ago and I received my set last week in my latest shipment from ZenMarket. I vented my spleen about the set when it came out and seeing the...
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US Cards Of (Limited) Interest
I've learned about a couple US card releases that may be of some interest to Japanese card collectors. Then again, maybe not...- Topps released the 2023 edition of their high end shiny card set called...
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