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Yoshihisa Hirano
Yoshihisa Hirano of the Orix Buffaloes notched his 29th save of the season yesterday. It was NPB career save number 242 for him which, when added to the eight saves he had in MLB during his three year...
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Run The Series - BBM Classic
It's been about two years now since Topps announced that they had a license to do NPB baseball cards and pretty much ever since then I've been saying that Topps needs do an Archives or Heritage style...
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Card Of The Week October 8
There were a couple different stories in the news this week that I wanted to quickly mention. First up, on Wednesday Samurai Japan announced that former Dragons and Giants player Hirokazu Ibata was...
View ArticlePodcast Interview
Last Sunday I was interviewed by Tjay and Philly of the Tool Time Podcast and the interview is included in the latest episode which dropped today. (The link is for Spotify but the podcast is available...
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Shukan Baseball Season Memorial Cards
One of my on going projects the past few years has been to try to get all the baseball cards that were included with the "Season Memorial" issue of Shukan (Weekly) Baseball each year. I had originally...
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2023 BBM Lions History 1950-2023
Since 2020, BBM has been doing a series of team "History" sets. The ninth team to get this treatment is the Saitama Seibu Lions and BBM released the "Lions History 1950-2023" set a few weeks ago....
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Card Of The Week October 15
Contrary to what I said last week, there was another another managerial change in NPB last week. With the Eagles' late season drive to make the playoffs coming up short, Rakuten's GM/manager Kazuhisa...
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RIP Toshio Naka
Former Chunich Dragons outfielder, coach and manager Toshio Naka passed away last week from pneumonia at the age of 87. Naka had joined the Dragons in 1955 after graduating from high school and became...
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One For The Ages
I had to do a quick post about today's game between the Marines and the Hawks. If you haven't been following events, today was the third and deciding game of the First Stage of the Pacific League...
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Recent Ebay Order
I wanted to do a post about a recent Ebay order I received the other day. I had seen an autographed card of Norio Tanabe from the 2022 BBM Lions set listed for a fairly reasonable price so I decided...
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Card Of The Week October 22
As pretty much expected, the Hanshin Tigers and Orix Buffaloes won their respective playoff series this week, setting the stage for the first all-Kansai Nippon Series since 1964. If you've ever...
View ArticleThe Infinite Samurai Japan
I've mentioned this before but when it comes to spectator sports I am pretty much only a fan of baseball. I really don't pay a whole lot of attention to any other sports, either here in the US or in...
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2023 NPB Draft
The 2023 NPB draft was held today and for the first time since 2018, I don't have any "pre-rookie" cards of any of the players. For the past four years there were at least three players each year who...
View ArticleSome Pricey Sets Plus Fusion
It's been almost two months since the last time I did a "New Releases" post so I thought it was high time I got caught up on what card sets have been recently announced (or recently released in one...
View ArticleAdolis Garcia
Texas Rangers star Adolis Garcia is having one hell of a post-season. He's currently hitting .357 with eight home runs and 22 RBIs in 13 games so far, including a sayonara home run in Game One of the...
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Card Of The Week October 29
Merrill Kelly of the Diamondbacks had a great pitching performance in Game Two of the World Series last night, going seven innings and striking out nine batters while only giving up three hits (one a...
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RIP Frank Howard
Frank Howard, famed slugger for the Dodgers and Senators in the 1960's and manager for the Padres and Mets in the 1980's, has passed away at age 87. You may be asking yourself "what has that got to do...
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2019 & 2020 Panini USA Baseball Stars & Stripes Collegiate Samurai Japan Inserts
For the past several years Panini has issued an annual set for USA Baseball called "Stars & Stripes". In both 2019 and 2020, the set included autographed memorabilia cards for members of the...
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Card Of The Week November 5
The Hanshin Tigers defeated the Orix Buffaloes in Game 7 of the 2023 Nippon Series today, winning the game 7-1 and the series 4 games to 3. The Tigers won their first championship since 1985 and only...
View Article2023 Stragglers
I was thinking the other day that since there was only about seven weeks left in the year, we'd probably heard the last of the 2023 set announcements. But surprisingly there've been two sets announced...
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