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!

WANTED: Tuff(y) Stuff or My Tuffy Rhodes Want List

タフィ・ローズ

     I've begun updating this list to include images of as many cards as I can find in hopes that it might help out anyone with access to the Japanese cards, but perhaps not an encyclopedic knowledge of what they all look like.  Many thanks to those that have helped make this list smaller (or longer as the case may be).

Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese and Minor League Baseball Card Checklists (Online)

(click here to skip the wandering preamble and get straight to the important stuff)

     A few years ago, when I seriously got back into collecting baseball cards, I decided to pick up where I left off on my Hensley Meulens collection.  I had mostly stopped collecting and following baseball after the strike in 1994.  Then came school, marriage, the beginnings of a career, and for awhile there, I was more concerned with just keeping the lights on, the rent paid, gas in the car and food on the table, so I had almost no idea what had happened in the intervening 8-9 years I was away from the hobby.  When I got back into it, I found that Dave Winfield had been elected into the Hall of Fame, Matt Williams was named in the Mitchell Report and Meulens had spent three years in Japan (later making a couple of unsuccessful returns to the Majors).

   As I started to jump back into things, I discovered the joys (and pains) of eBay, online trading sites (SportsCardForum and The Bench Trading being the main two I've settled into, later expanding to Freedom Cardboard, mostly for the conversation), the expansive sites based around statistics (Baseball Almanac, Baseball Reference and The Baseball Cube being my most frequented) and all manner of collector's blogs and hobby news sites.  But that only showed me that there were some glaring gaps in my collection and knowledge from outside the mainstream of the North American hobby.

     As I caught up with lots of the Meulens cards I'd missed, I had to find resources for the Japanese cards about which, up to this point, I knew absolutely nothing.  As I hunted for information on them, I encountered great sites like JapaneseBaseball.com, The Japanese Baseball Card Blog, Rob's Japanese Cards and Prestige Collectibles.  Through Rob Fitts' site, I was able to pick up most of Meulens' BBM and Takara cards, but came up short on the Calbee cards.  I only knew those cards existed because Beckett happened to include a few years of Japanese cards in their online price guide.  However, I knew there had to be more, and just in learning about the BBM and Takara sets, I knew Beckett was far from complete or accurate in their listings.  Everyone I encountered or asked for help suggested I pick up a copy of Gary Engel's Japanese Baseball Card Checklist & Price Guide.  So I picked up the 6th edition.  And learned that there was an enormous world of baseball cards in Japan.  And Hensley Meulens had a few more cards that I needed to find. (A 7th edition was released in early 2010 and is available from Prestige Collectibles.)

Random Japanese eBay Haul

     Occasionally, I'll just do random searches on eBay's Sports Cards and Memorabilia section for "japanese" and see what pops up. A few weeks ago I did that, caught a seller unloading a nifty assortment of random Japanese baseball goodness and put in a token minimum $.99 bid (+$4 S&H). About a week later, this is what turned up:

Three 1988 Calbee cards and six 1988 Calbee wrappers:

     The blurry one is card #117 of Rick Lancelotti. Until I saw this card, I don't think I'd ever seen a worse photo on a baseball card. And that includes some of the truly bad photos from some of those Venezuelan stickers I looked through while working on that earlier post. It really looks like a capture from a television screen. Or an actual photo of a television screen.

     The other two are #122, Toru Sugiura of the Yakult Swallows and #134 Shuji Fujimoto of the Nankai Hawks. 1988 Calbee were 2" x 2 5/8" or roughly the size of the Topps Leaders cards from 1986-1990, or your average Topps sticker from 1986-1990.

     Next in the package were three cards from the 1987 Amada Heat Sensitive Yomiuri Giants set, and what I'm assuming were the three packs they came in (mainly because the photo on the back of the pack matches the card of Kuwata, along with his signature):

#7 Sadaaki Yoshimura
#8 Tatsunori Hara
#18 Masumi Kuwata

     According to Gary Engel's Japanese Baseball Card Checklist and Price Guide, 7th Edition, these cards are intended for some sort of combination of baseball and paper/rock/scissors game. Holding a finger on the black boxes at the top reveal the outcome of some sort of play, and the bottom three circles reveal paper/rock/scissors symbols.  If you click on the scan of the back, you can faintly see the results under each heat-sensitive box. He also says there were three different cards of each of 9 players, for a total of 36 cards. The cards are 2 5/16" x 3 3/8", so they're slightly smaller than a standard card. The packaging is about 3 1/8" x 5 1/4", and has a puncture in the top, as if it had been displayed on a pegboard hook, instead of in a box.

     The last few items present something of a puzzle, as I can't find them listed in Mr. Engel's guide, and they are unlikely to be connected due to the large difference in size. There are three small (1 1/4" x 1 9/16") magnets of Yomiuri Giants players. Two of #6 Toshio Shinozuka and one of #45 Kaoru Okazaki. Help identifying these would be much appreciated.

     The remaining packages, I'm guessing, are not what the magnets were packaged in as they are 3 3/4" x 6 5/8", about 4 times the size of the magnets.  Though having said that, I notice the Shinozuka photo from the magnet in the middle is on the lower left of the back of the wrapper.  Who knows? 

     Since measurement numbers don't always correlate to an good visual of size, I scanned each of these cards next to a standard sized card for comparison.

Yahoo! Auction Japan/KuboTEN Tuffy Rhodes mailday

Despite the lack of activity on the KuboTEN website, Craig is apparently still in operation.  I took a stab at a couple of auctions and brought in a lot of three more boxes of 2000 Epoch Pro-Baseball stickers (90 packs, 900 more stickers) plus sticker album, as well as a couple of lots of Tuffy Rhodes cards from joecool0314. 

Among the three boxes of stickers, the first box gave me pretty much every base set sticker I was missing from my previous box, including the elusive:

And apparently Ichiro and Hideki Matsui were collated into the same packs. I got them both in two packs.  The remaining two boxes were spent chasing the Tuffy Rhodes Leading Star insert sticker (and failing miserably).  Looks like that might be another Bernie Brito Diamond Star adventure.

From joecool0314, I picked up a lot of Calbee signature parallels, including these two I needed:

And also 7 new Tuffy cards in one of his lots of 18:


1999 BBM All-Star
 
2004 BBM Yomiuri Giants Shinnosuke Abe/Tuffy Rhodes

2004 Konami Prime Nine VS Edition

2004 BBM Yomiuri Giants 70th Anniversary Edition

2008 Calbee 2007 Team Stats

2008 BBM Orix Buffaloes Heart of the Order

2009 BBM Orix 20th Anniversary

KuboTEN strikes again!

Back in February, I won another Yahoo Auction of 18 Tuffy Rhodes cards from joecool0314 (my 3rd). A couple of weeks later, I also took a shot at ordering from Mitchael-Trading.com via KuboTEN and picked up another 7 Tuffy's I needed (one was sold out, I guess I missed that when I was browsing their online inventory).

Oddly, Tuffy didn't have a card in the 1996 Calbee set. 1996 was his first year in the league, and the set was only 139 cards over two series, and already had a good number of gaijin, but you'd think they could have left Alonzo Powell out of the second series (he was #24 in Series 1) and included Tuffy. I guess it's just frustration on my part as 1996 was Hensley Meulens third year in the league, and he never got a card in a Calbee set! Tuffy did make his Calbee debut in 1997, though:

Also picked up his 1998 BBM Diamond Heroes:

The last of the 2000 BBM 20th Century's Best cards I needed:

A few cards from the 2001-2003 BBM Kintetsu Buffaloes sets:

including a signature insert:

and the Buffaloes winning the 2002 Pacific League Championship:

And the rest...
2003 BBM Touch the Game:

2003 Calbee

2005 BBM Touch the Game (which seems more concerned with the flashy design than the player):

2005 Konami Prime Nine 2nd Edition:

2007 Calbee Inter-League insert:

2008 BBM All Star Card:

The regular 2009 BBM:

2009 BBM Orix Buffaloes "Wild Buffaloes" card
(I don't think I've ever seen anyone else wear their caps and helmets as low as Tuffy, he must rip all the padding out of the top or something):

And his main card from the 2009 BBM Buffaloes Memorial set: