Bam Bam White Whale Landed!

      We interrupt the regularly scheduled mail day series with breaking news...

OBSCURE JAPANESE HENSLEY MEULENS
WHITE WHALE LANDED!

       My weekly searches on Yahoo! Auctions Japan finally paid off and, with the services of Kuboten.com, I have just won the 1994 Chiba Lotte Marines stadium giveaway menko/karuta set I never thought I'd get. Bam Bam is on the third row, second from the left.  Once it arrives in a few weeks, I'll post a scan of the whole sheet, front and back.

Tiny, Tuffy and Taiwanese Cards: Part II

        Thanks to the greatness that is the Internet, NPB Card Guy went on vacation to Japan and I got souvenirs!  He'd asked me before he left if there was any thing special (aside from the elusive 1994 Chiba Lotte Marines menko set) he could look track down for me, so I just said anything from my Tuffy Rhodes want list.  Well, somewhere in the dozen or so card shops he hit while in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area, he and Ryan (from This Card is Cool and Chaos and Kanji) tracked down 13 hits from my list!  Thanks guys!

Tiny, Tuffy and Taiwanese Cards: Part I (and semi-evenly spread thanks)

      A couple of big thanks (of appropriately varying size) to NPB Card Guy of the Japanese Baseball Card Blog and Ryan G of This Card is Cool (among others) for all of the cards you are about to see here (some cards not for use with some sets).  Freshly back from his WBC-watching tour of Japan, the Guru of Eastern Cardboard flung this batch of goodies at me via the USPS.  I'll take them in the order implied in the title and start with The Tiny.

Checklist Translations: 1996/97 ProCard Notable Players (CPBL) Series Two

      Considered the second series of ProCard's 1996/97 effort, 1997 NP (Notable Players) is numbered as its own set and released in June of 1997.  The Notable Players set includes, presumably, the best 15 or so players from each team, 1996 award winners, each pitcher with 10 wins, each hitter with 100 hits, highly touted rookies, and a "key player" from each team.  This set also included a couple of autographs, one limited to 300 cards for Taiwanese pitching legend Yuen-Chih Kuo, better known in Japan as Genji Kaku of the Chunichi Dragons, and the other limited to 500 cards of 1996 CPBL Rookie of the Year (and current all-time CPBL home run leader) Tai-Shan Chang.

The set is described in this blog post:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/blog/post/28009363


Base card front: