I wanted to do a follow up post about the Topps Now NPB cards I wrote about the other day along with some other Topps Now related news: - I had asked mr friend Ryan to pick up one of the Topps Now NPB cards - Natsuki Takeuchi - for me.  He was willing to do it but pointed out that not only did the card cost 1243 yen but there was a 550 yen shipping fee as well!  I told him the webpage for the card said there was "free economy shipping".  He said, yeah, it says that but when he went to check out, it told him shipping was 550 yen for a total of almost 1800 yen.  We deci ..read more

I got my 2024 Calbee Series One set in the mail last week in the same shipment that I got my 2024 BBM Rookie Edition set in.  The set is the first of what I hope will be three Series this year but fear will only be two. The base set contains 84 cards - 60 "regular" player cards (5 per team), 18 "Title Holder" cards and six checklist cards.  The 60 player cards is the same that last year's sets had so it looks like the days of 72 player cards (which was most of the last 10-12 years) are over.  Since it's an even numbered year, the player's names are in Japanese on the front of th ..read more

You know, I make fun of Calbee for issuing pretty much the same flagship set year after year.  I should probably make fun of BBM more for doing essentially the same thing with the Rookie Edition set every year. Rookie Edition is BBM's annual draft pick set, featuring all the players who were taken in the NPB draft last fall.  Or to be more accurate - all the players who were taken in the draft and came to terms.  It should probably go without saying that if the player didn't sign with the team that drafted him, he's not in the set.  It's a lot less common for an NPB draftee ..read more

Topps Japan is now offering Topps Now cards for NPB.  They've got seven cards currently up on their website featuring events from the first couple weeks of the season.  The cards are 1243 yen a piece (about $8) although there are volume discounts if you're buying multiple copies of the same card (although there is no bundle for all seven cards available).  Unlike the MLB version of Topps Now, the NPB cards are on sale for a week.  I guess we'll see if Topps will offer new cards every day or if it'll be a weekly offering (or some other interval). It appears that Topps will n ..read more

I did a post a few weeks back about a bunch of magazine issued cards that I'd gotten from Ryan.  I mentioned in the post that I had nearly completed my goal of getting all the baseball related cards that were issued by BBM in Sports Card Magazine (SCM).  In a comment to that post, Sean asked how many cards were actually issued in the magazine over the years.  The answer is 467 over the slightly more than 20 year run (October 1996 to January 2017) that the magazine was published - I have a list of all the cards here. Sean's question prompted me to do a little more research thoug ..read more

I got a handful of cards from my friend Jason early last week and one of the cards he threw in was kind of interesting.  It's a 2023 Topps 206 card of Yuki Yanagita (#188) and it's somehow a three-way parallel!  It's a mini card, it has an alternate image (i.e. not a mugshot) and it has the rabbits on it (which makes it a numbered parallel to boot as it's /99).  I know that Topps' has some crazy parallels but I didn't know that one card could be part of three of them.  Here's the front and back of the card: I wonder if there's a version of this card with a colored bord ..read more

I frequently say that I don't collect MLB cards but that actually not completely true.  I've put together a small collection of certified autographed MLB cards of Japanese players.  Now, as I've also frequently mentioned, I'm cheap so I'm not going after Shohei Ohtani, Ichiro, Hideki Matsui or even Daisuke Matsuzaka.  Instead I've been concentrating on guys who had stellar NPB careers both before and after their perhaps less-than-stellar MLB stints.  It's probably just easier to show you what I mean: 2004 Bowman Chrome Shingo Takatsu 2005 Skybox Autographics ..read more

A while back I noticed something interesting about this card of Takamasa Sukuki from the 1978 Yamakatsu JY10 set: Do you see it?  The batter is a member of the Nippon-Ham Fighters.  Since NPB didn't have interleague play until 2005, almost 30 years after this card came out, the photo was most likely taken during a pre-season exhibition game.  It COULD have been from an All Star game as well but I think it's unlikely - there's a Dragons' outfielder in the background and a quick look at the All Star game rosters from 1977 and 1978 reveals that there were no Dragons outfield ..read more

As I get older it seems that time moves faster and faster.  I can't believe that it's been almost six weeks since the last time I did a round up of the latest NPB card release announcements.  So lets' get caught up... - BBM has announced three more of their annual "comprehensive" team sets.  Each set has a base set of 81 cards, most of which are "regular" player cards featuring the manager and the players on the 70 man roster plus a couple subsets (which may not be fully defined yet) to fill out the set.  Each set also has 18 non-premium insert cards split into a variety o ..read more

On Monday of this week, I got home from work to discover I had received another large box of goodies from Kenny, better known in the collecting community as Zippy Zappy.  Kenny has been downsizing his card collection recently and there's been several other card bloggers who've done posts about the care packages they've received from him.  And you need to read Kenny's post about the absolutely incredible way he disposed of his largest player collection. My box contained a couple binders and 800 count box of cards that was only partly full.  I was able to immediately put the binde ..read more