I was surprised a few months back to discover that there was a baseball card featuring Japanese Baseball Hall Of Famer Wally Yonamine as a member of the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League.  Yonamine was an American of Japanese descent who was born in Hawaii in 1925.  He was drafted into the Army just before World War II ended and spent most of his time in the service playing sports.  He briefly played football with the San Francisco 49ers after getting out of the Army but was released after getting injured playing baseball.  He was signed by San Francisco Seals ..read more

Today Choi Jeong of the SSG Landers hit his 468th career home run, pushing him past the legendary Lee Seung-yuop to become the all time home run leader in the KBO.  This is Choi's 20th season and he's spent all of them with the SK Wyverns/SSG Landers franchise. His first baseball card is from Japan, not Korea - he's in the 2009 Konami Baseball Heroes WBC set (he played for the Korean team in the 2009, 2013 and 2023 tournaments as well as the 2019 Premier 12).  His first Korean baseball card was from the 2010 KBO Game Set but his first LICENSED Korean baseball card was from the 2014 ..read more

There's been a lot of discussion on-line this past week about an error on the back of Hiromi Itoh's card in the new 2024 Calbee Series One set.  Itoh's height is listed as 176 meters (577-ish feet) rather than 176 centimeters (around 5 foot, 10 inches).  Calbee has issued an apology and is offering to exchange the card for a corrected version "at a later date".   While the error is amusing (Gaijin Baseball on Twitter dubbed it "Kaiju Itoh"), I've been somewhat surprised to see people trying to sell the card for inflated prices on Yahoo! Japan Auctions.  I mean, sure, i ..read more

I wanted to do a quick post about some cards I got in the mail today from my friend Jason.  He'd put a couple interesting memorabilia and autograph cards up on Ebay that I picked up and as usual he threw in a bunch of random cards in the package with what I had bought. First up are the afore mentioned memorabilia and autograph cards: 2022 BBM Genesis /300 2022 BBM Genesis /350 2023 BBM Genesis /200 2023 Epoch Premier Edition #AA-15 /97 The only other card I know was going to be in the package was this 2022 BBM Genesis card of Keita Nakagawa.  ..read more

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