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Card Of The Week November 30
This is a 1957 Maruya menko card (from the set designated JCM 65) showing (from left to right) Motoshi Fujita (#21), Shigeru Fujio (#9) and Sho Horiuchi (#10) (not to be confused with Tsuneo Horiuchi...
View ArticleLast 2014 Sets?
There are two more sets for this year that I haven't mentioned - one of them actually was released last week and the other will come out in late December.- The set that was released last week was from...
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Front Runner Rookie & Young Star Sets
November has been a busy month for me - between packages from Ryan, Hiro and some other stuff I ordered from various places I've had quite an influx of cards this month. I think it's somewhat...
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2014 Award Winners
The 2014 MVPs and Rookies Of The Year were announced last week. All the award winners were pitchers. Chihiro Kaneko of the Buffaloes and Tomoyuki Sugano of the Giants were the MVPs and Ayumu Ishikawa...
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80th Anniversary Best 9
NPB last week unveiled their 80th Anniversary Best 9 team. The selection process for this team was very simplistic - who are the nine guys who've gotten the most Best 9 selections at each position?...
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Kevin Youkilis
Kevin Youkilis announced his retirement a few weeks back (I've gotten way behind on doing posts for retiring players but now that I'm caught up on sets for the moment maybe I can get back to them). I...
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Card Of The Week December 7
I did a post the other day on the 80th Anniversary Best 9 team that NPB announced a few weeks back. That Best 9 team did not include a DH even though the PL has been picking a DH for their annual Best...
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My White Whale - The 2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 Set
I started seriously collecting Japanese baseball cards in the fall of 2000. One of my first sources for cards was the online store YakyuShop.com (which has been gone now for a number of years). I...
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More Unknown Menkos
I've picked up some more menko cards in the past few months that appear to not be cataloged in Gary Engel's "Japanese Baseball Cards Checklist And Price Guide".**I do need to mention that Gary Engel...
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Card Of The Week December 14
I was thinking recently that Hall of Fame pitcher Shigeru Sugishita had only played for the Dragons during his career. This turns out not to be the case - he spent the 1961 season (his last) with the...
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Rare Sighting
I was doing some looking around on Yahoo! Japan Auctions the other day and I came across something I've never seen before - an empty bag for Calbee's Yakyu chips from 1973, the first year Calbee did...
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Card Of The Week December 21
2001 was Ichiro Suzuki's first season in the major leagues and Calbee decided to commemorate it by printing up a reprint of one of their first cards of him and including it with their second (of two)...
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BBM Greatest Games series
Between fall of 2012 and the end of 2013, BBM issued four box sets in a series they called "Greatest Games". I've written briefly about the first three sets in the series but now that it seems pretty...
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Cuban Players
One of the most interesting events of the 2014 NPB season to me was the Cuban government allowing four of the nation's baseball players to play in Japan. I thought I'd do a quick summary of the...
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Card Of The Week December 28
After seven seasons in MLB, Hiroki Kuroda is returning to Japan and the Hiroshima Toyo Carp.2000 BBM #236
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2014 BBM Braves Achievement
BBM has started a new series of OB team box sets. The official name for the sets appears to be "Achievement" but it looks like BBM is also marketing them as "Memories Of...". The first two sets came...
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Mitsuhiro Adachi
I was going through the cards in the Braves Achievement set and it hit me that the Mitsuhiro Adachi card looked awfully familiar...2014 BBM Braves Achievement #06I've only got five other cards of...
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2014 BBM Lions Legends
Back in October BBM released the fourth in their series of pack based OB team sets called "Legends". This one (I'd say the latest but they just released one for the Carp a few weeks back) is dedicated...
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2015 BBM Memories Of Uniform
I thought it would be somewhat appropriate to do my first post of 2015 on the first BBM set for 2015. In November of each year since 2001, BBM issues an "Historic Collection" set, the first set for the...
View Article2014 In Review - BBM
BBM published 48 sets for 2014, down slightly from the 50 they did in 2013 but still a pretty impressive number. The sets were all released in a 13 month period from November 2013 through (and...
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