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Card Of The Week February 9
I found out a couple interesting pieces of trivia a while back while I was researching my post about BBM's cards for the previous year's Best 9 and Golden Glove award winners. The first was that the...
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Mystery Solved?
I picked up a 1975 NST card recently that I hadn't actually been looking for, breaking my new rule of not buying anything that wasn't already on my want list, but, if you'll indulge me for a minute,...
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Card Of The Week February 16
Ever since Masayuki Kakefu was elected to the Hall Of Fame last month, I've been wondering if the Tigers would retire his uniform number. The Tigers currently have retired three uniform numbers - 10...
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BBM Updates
I mentioned a while back that I had gotten curious about how often a player appeared with two different teams in BBM's flagship sets for a given year. So basically, I wanted to know how many players...
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RIP Tsubakuro
A very sad story released by the Tokyo Yakult Swallows today - apparently the person who's worn the costume for their mascot Tsubakuro has passed away suddenly.  It appears that this person - who's...
View ArticleBBM And Bushiroad Get Rolling
BBM's announced five new sets in the past few weeks and Bushiroad's announced some new DreamOrder sets so I figured it was past time for a post about all of them.- BBM puts out a box set called Icons...
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Card Of The Week February 23
I received a surprise envelope in the mail last week from Kenny - aka Zippy Zappy. It was nowhere near the volume of cards that his previous package - which I had gotten only two weeks earlier - had...
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Epoch One Draft Pick Cards
Epoch started doing their on-demand Epoch One cards in 2018 and for several years after that, they included cards of that year's draft picks for a few teams. What's significant about this is that...
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Card Of The Week March 2
We're in the middle of the qualifiers for the 2026 World Baseball Classic. Last weekend saw Nicaragua and Taiwan finish first and second in the qualifying round held in Taiwan and this afternoon...
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Great Records
The Great Records insert set has been a staple of BBM's annual Fusion set since its debut in 2016. Each year, this has been a 24 card set that features two players from each team reaching some sort of...
View ArticleEpoch One Cards For Samurai Japan
It appears that my suspicion that Epoch now has the license to do cards for Samurai Japan has proven correct. Epoch announced last week that they would be publishing their on-demand Epoch One cards...
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Card Of The Week March 9
Samurai Japan played two friendlies against the Netherlands this past week at Osaka Dome and it went very well for them. On Wednesday, they shut out the Dutch 5-0 with starter Hiroya Miyagi pitching...
View ArticleSome News From Calbee
I've gotten a little concerned lately about Calbee. Their Series One set is normally released in late March but we're almost halfway through the month and there's been no announcement about the set...
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2000 Upper Deck Ovation Rising Stars
I had mentioned a few months back that, thanks to Scott Kaneko, I had completed the "Rising Stars" subset from the 2000 Upper Deck Ovation set. Now that I have the full subset, I decided to take a...
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Card Of The Week March 16
The Dodgers and Cubs are in Tokyo right now, preparing for their regular season games on Tuesday and Wednesday this week. They spent this weekend playing exhibition games against the Hanshin Tigers...
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Cracking The Code - Konami's Baseball Collection Card Numbers Explained?
I've been involved in a discussion on Reddit over the past week or so regarding a 2021 Konami Baseball Collection "SR" (super rare) card of Roki Sasaki. I won't rehash the discussion here - you can...
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Wei-Yin Chen
Taiwanese pitcher Wei-Yin Chen announced his retirement a few weeks back (H/T NPB on reddit). You'd be forgiven for thinking he had already retired as it's been three years since his last appearance...
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Card Of The Week March 23
About a week or so ago, the Tokyo Yakult Swallows announced that Masanori Ishikawa would be the starting pitcher for their home opener on April 1st. At 45 years old, Ishikawa is the oldest active...
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Upcoming Milestones
With Opening Day 2025 arriving in less than a day and a half, I thought I'd roll out my now-traditional post about which players are approaching the career milestones that will ensure them admission to...
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Play Ball (2025)
I'm continuing my Opening Day tradition of doing a post showing a baseball card from the last year that each of the 12 NPB teams won the Nippon Series which was inspired by (or stolen from)Â the series...
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