Tiny, Tuffy and Taiwanese Cards: Part IIIa

       When last we left our heroes (NPB Card Guy & Ryan G), what began as a tiny look into the world of cleverly encapsulated pro yakyu goodness had grown into a much Tuffer expedition into a larger world.  Now we rejoin our story, at an earlier jucture when the intrepid Ryan G had ventured solo into the uncharted back alleys of Taichung in search of cardboard curios.  He did a good job detailing his haul in his series of posts, so if you've read those, most of these cards will look familiar.

      Ever a stickler for some semblance of order, I present these in (roughly) chronological order.

1992 Chinese Professional Baseball League

Chong-Long Yo

Chi-Feng Chen

      In a great bit of synergistic marketing, when the CPBL was launched in 1990, the league made sure to
immortalize the season with a yearly set of baseball cards.  Rather than issuing them on cardboard, the first few seasons worth of sets were issued on plastic, very likely by a company that produced phone cards.  This was likely due to phone cards being very popular around the world in the early to mid-1990s, not so much in the USA as nearly everywhere else in the world.  Having done some research on these and posted about the set earlier, it's nice to have a couple in-hand.

1992 Chiclets Chinese Professional Baseball League

Chi-Chen Tseng

      As Ryan mentions on his blog, Chiclets, probably the world's largest chewing gum company (again, like the phone cards...popular nearly everywhere except the USA), issued sets for the CPBL starting that inaugural season.  The first couple of sets were limited in scope to team leaders or monthly mvp award winners.  In 1992, the company apparently expanded their efforts and introduced what is probably the first "traditional" set of baseball cards for the CPBL, in that this was the first major, pack-issued set issued on standard, baseball card-sized cardboard.  I have yet to do a post on the Chiclets sets as this 1992 set has been a bit elusive in my searches.  For a set with upwards of 276 cards, I would expect them to show up more on the major Taiwanese auction and marketplace sites.  At some point, I'll spend a week or so just on those and see if I can find some major resource that doesn't force me to work out the checklists one card at a time from a dozen different sources.

1994 CPBL Professional Baseball Player Cards

Toshihide Yamane, Manager

George Hinshaw

     It took four seasons to come and go, but by 1994, the CPBL had finally come up with their own league logo, as seen here in the corners of these cards from the official 1994 league-issued set.  I covered these awhile back in a post for the set.  The copies Ryan sent represent the two of the three major divisions of the set, the regular roster cards, and the Game Winning RBI cards.

1995 A Plus Card CPBL (Silver Parallel)

Shien-Jong Chen

Yao-Teng Chang

      Next up are a couple of cards from the silver parallel of the 1995 A Plus Card set.  The silver cards differ from the base in two main ways.  First, they are "limited" to 5000 each, and the lower border has a slightly silver/gray tinge where as on the base cards, the front is just as bright and colorful as the back. Initially, I had assumed the entire set was paralleled in silver, but now that I have these in hand, I find that the players don't line up with the base set.  Presumably, that means the silver parallel set is much smaller.  Now I have yet another checklist to compile.  Thanks for that, Ryan.

     As the next cards represent a 10+ year leap, I'll break here and pick up again with part IIIb.  Stay tuned, and hopefully it won't take me another three or four weeks to get there.