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Study Abroad - The Swallows and Hawks in Salinas
During the 1987-88 offseason, the California League team in Fresno had a problem. Two problems, actually, but one of them was the direct cause of the other one. The city had condemned the grandstand...
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Card Of The Week September 20
The Swallows hit back-to-back-to-back home runs to start their game today against the Carp. Taiki Hamada led off the bottom of the first with his second home run of the year and Norichika Aoki...
View ArticleMore Fall Releases
A quick round up of some upcoming sets that were recently announced:- Calbee's Series Three set will be released in mid October (officially it will be in stores on October 19th but it's usually...
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Independent Study Abroad - 1993-94 San Bernardino Spirit
This is kind of a quick addendum to my recent post about the 1989-92 Salinas Spurs. I was originally going to include this with that post but it was already way too long so I decided to do it...
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Card Of The Week September 27
Former Chunichi Dragon, Baltimore Oriole and Miami Marlin Wei-Yin Chen is returning to Japan. He signed a deal with the Chiba Lotte Marines last week. He'll be joining the team after he clears...
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NPB Managers Who Have Played In North America
I was doing some research on the next couple of "Study Abroad" posts that I want to do and I discovered that one of the players that the Dragons sent to play in the US minors in the mid-1990's was...
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Card Of The Week October 4
With the first round of the expanded MLB post season completed, I thought it'd be interesting to take a look at who could possibly become the 12th player to win a championship in both NPB and MLB. If...
View ArticleNews From Noppin
I got a message last week from Noppin, the proxy bidding company that I use to buy most of my new baseball card sets off of Yahoo! Japan Auctions. They are going to temporarily shut down for three...
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Card Of The Week October 11
Last week's episode of the Baseball.com.aupodcast featured a long interview with Michael Nakamura who played for the Twins and Blue Jays in MLB and the Fighters, Giants and Lions in MLB. It was a...
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2020 Konami Baseball Collection
For the third straight year Konami has issued a collectible card game set called Baseball Collection. The cards are somehow used in an arcade game - I think you get them as rewards for playing the...
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Study Abroad - Tigers On Two Continents
By 1992 most NPB teams had ended their partnerships with either Major League organizations or independent minor league teams that had resulted in young Japanese players seeing action in the North...
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Other Stuff
From time to time I have been asked if I have any other Japanese baseball memorabilia other than cards. The answer is yes. I decided to do a post showing some of them.My sister and her husband spent...
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Card Of The Week October 18
I did a post a couple weeks ago talking about which current MLB players on playoff teams had been on a Nippon Series winning NPB team and therefore could be the latest player to win both a World...
View ArticleLast 2020 Sets?
BBM has recently announced what I expect will be there final three sets of the year - or at least the final three sets that will say "2020" on them. All three are sets that BBM publishes every year...
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Another White Whale Speared
A few weeks back I saw an auction on Yahoo! Japan Auctions for a lot of about 150 Hanshin Tigers cards, mostly from BBM but there was a handful of cards from other companies. The only card I was...
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Card Of The Week October 25
Lightning struck twice last week in Tokorozawa. On Tuesday night, the Lions and Marines were tied at one with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. Kakeru Yamanobe was batting for the Lions against...
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2020 BBM 30th Anniversary Set
Thursday was Christmas morning for me. In addition to getting the Yamakatsu Tabuchi card in the mail from Larry, I received a package containing several sets from Noppin. I had picked up four sets...
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2020 NPB Draft
The NPB draft was held today and as usual Deanna live blogged it. With cards for the Japanese Collegiate All Star teams from 2018 and 2019 being included as an insert in both the 2019 and 2020...
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2020 BBM Giants History 1934-2020
Earlier this year BBM issued an OB team set for the Carp called "Carp History 1950-2020". It was a very attractive set and apparently was popular enough that BBM issued a similar set for the Yomiuri...
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Card Of The Week November 1
The Yomiuri Giants clinched the Central League pennant this past week. Because there will be no Climax Series in the Central League they will be the league's representative in this year's Nippon...
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