Checklist Translations: 1998 Diamond 1997 Chinese Pro-Baseball (CPBL) [COMPLETE]

    For 1998, yet another company, Golden International Corp. (國堡國際股份有限公司), was enlisted to produce the yearly cards for CPBL.  Looking at the company's website today, I get the impression that the CPBL was basically price shopping each year, looking for the best deal from whichever printing company they could get, similar to how minor league teams tend to switch between Grandstand, MultiAd/Brandt and Choice Marketing or just printing the sets locally.  As such, until TSC came along, it doesn't seem like there were actually any real "sports card companies" in Taiwan, just marketing companies contracted to produce the sets.

    The company produced two different sets, C&C and Diamond, that represented different price points in the hobby, similar to how Score issued both Select and Pinnacle or how Fleer issued Ultra and Flair.  Neither set was big on presenting statistics or biographical information, instead focusing on the photography, offering quality color photos on both sides of the card.  The Diamond set was the cheaper of the two offerings, selling in 1998 for 30 yuan (Taiwan New Dollars), which was roughly $1 U.S.  Production was reported at 8,000 boxes of 24 packs each.  Not sure exactly how many cards came per pack, and I have been unable to find any images of the packaging.

     The Diamond set consisted of 228 base cards, organized by team in the order of the standings for the 1997 season.  There were two unnumbered checklists covering all of the base and insert cards. The insert sets were all serial numbered and covered the usual subjects:

Hot Rookies (11 cards) limited to 4500 cards
HR Hitters (11 cards) limited to 4500 cards
Power Pitcher (7 cards) limited to 3500 cards
Record Breaker (7 cards) limited to 3500 cards
The Franchise (7 cards) limited to 2400 cards
Career 100 HRs (3 cards) limited to 3200 cards
Autographs (3 cards) limited to 100 cards

The set is described in this blog post, from which almost all of the information in this post was derived:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/blog/post/28105481

The base cards can be seen in this album:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/album/set/16814924

The standard base card front and back:

Ted Wood

Feng-An Tsai

Checklist Translations: 1999 T-Point 1998 Chinese Pro-Baseball [COMPLETE]

    The license for producing the official CPBL set changed hands for the league's 9th season.  The new set was produced as "T-Point 1998 CPBL Traditional Card" and came in foil packs of 8 cards.  The base set contains 188 cards, distributed unevenly between the six teams present in the 1998 season.  There were seven limited print run insert sets.  These sets covered 1998's crop of rookies, monthly MVPs, yearly award winners and league leaders, Best Nine, Golden Gloves, game used jersey cards and autograph cards.  There was also a redemption set for autographed versions of the jersey cards.

The set is described, with examples of the packs, all card types and much more detail, in this blog post:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/blog/post/28111594

The base cards can be seen in the accompanying album:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/album/set/16814950

The Award Winner set is shown here:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/blog/post/41528921

The Gold Glove set is shown here:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/blog/post/41865766

The standard base card:

024 front

166 back

     Below is the complete checklist as I've managed to construct with much assistance from jackli7751.  The scans in the album cover only the base cards through #001-188. I'm updating the insert sets as I find them. Thanks to Mr. Westbay over at JapaneseBaseball.com, I have been able to complete the base set checklist with player data from one KT Chiu of the mostly defunct TWBaseball.info to translate the names.

Checklist Translations: Smart '99 Chinese Pro-Baseball

     The primary set (issued in 2000) covering the 1999 CPBL season was issued by a new company, Sunrich Cards, Inc.  Each card had a foil logo featuring a pitcher and the word "SMART" written vertically, accompanied by "'99 CHINESE PRO-BASEBALL" sideways down the right side of each base card.  A special logo in the lower corner of each card marked the 10th anniversary of the CPBL.  The set was limited to 2000 copies (each card showing 1/2000 on the back), but only cards 183-226 were actually stamped with serial numbers.  While I haven't been able to tell for sure, based on the collections of like-numbered serial stamped cards I've seen on auction sites, I suspect this set may have only been issued in complete sets.

     The set contained 228 cards covering all of the teams (1-172), team logos (173-178), '99 post season (179-182), monthly MVP winners (183-196), the league's Best 9 (197-205), Glod Glove winners (206-214), '99 award winners and statistical leaders (215-226) and two unnumbered checklists.

The set is described in this blog post:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/blog/post/28149093

Cards 1-172 can be seen in this album:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/album/set/16814966

The Award Winner subset is shown here:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/blog/post/41548325

The Gold Glove subset is shown here:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/blog/post/41883136

The standard base card front and back:

Chien-Fu Kuo Lee

Checklist Translations: 2007 CPBL 18th Chinese Professional Baseball League

     I'm skipping ahead a bit because I ran across this checklist poster for the official 2008 2007 CPBL set (I recently realized this set was the 2007 set.  Apparently there was no full league set for 2008, so there is a gap before the league launched the Player of the Year set in 2009).  Being a graphic, the checklist was a little tougher to compile as I had to do all the translations by sight and comparisons, rather than getting to use any existing text-based resource.  Still, I've been able to work out names for almost everything except some of the players from the "Rookies" subset.  The new album site I found enabled the completion of the checklist. 

      The CPBL issued 3,600 boxes, each containing 24 packs of 6 cards each.  The CPBL had worked out a partnership with the 7-ELEVEn chain of stores for exclusive distribution.  The set is comprised of 395 base cards.  Cards 001-223 contain the main player cards, organized by team.  Cards 223-229 are dedicated to team photos, 230-253 cover new rookies for the 2007 season, 254-267 cover the 2007 statistical leaders and award winners.

      Cards 268-277 depict the 2007 Best Ten.  The Best Ten, similar to the Best Nine in Nippon Pro Baseball, covers the top players for each position, but the CPBL also includes an award for the designated hitter, as well.  I'm not sure why this isn't done in MLB.  MLB has the Silver Slugger, but that's just for the best hitters at each position, and neither the CPBL nor NPB has an equivilent award strictly for offense.

     After the Best Ten, cards 278-286 depict the 2007 Golden Glove winners for each fielding position.  Monthly MVP award winners are cards 287-302.  The next six cards (303-308) are dedicated to the post season teams and award winners.  A variety of season highlights, awards and milestones are described on cards 309-333.  Three major offensive records were set in the 2007 season; Tilson Brito set the new mark for home runs in a single season with 33 and there is a card for each home run.  Kuo-Ching Kao set the single season record for hits with 152 and gets his own 17 card subset to document the feat.  The last 12 cards of the base set are dedicated to Tilson Brito's breaking the single-season record for runs batted in with 107.

     Randomly inserted into packs were a variety of autographed and memorabilia sets including a 7-card single autograph set, 13-card dual-autograph set, 6-card authentic game worn jersey set and a 14-card set of autographed cards dedicated to the Chinese Taipei National Baseball Team.

     This was the last set issued by the CPBL that featured Chinese-only text on the card fronts.  Since 2009, the yearly CPBL Player of the Year sets have included the players' names in English on the front of all cards in the sets. 

Checklist Translations: 2005 CPBL 16th Chinese Professional Baseball League

     By 2005, more than 10 years had passed since the CPBL had issued its own set of baseball cards (and about 6 years since anyone had issued cards for the CPBL), and the league jumped back into the arena with a fairly nice offering.  The oddly numbered 231-card set was issued in packs of 6 cards, 24 packs per box.  I was extremely fortunate to discover this website (http://mypage.pchome.com.tw/card/super0825), and accompanying photo album site (http://photo.pchome.com.tw/super0825/), that covers almost all of the CPBL sets released since the revival of baseball cards in Taiwan.  As this set represents the 16th season of the CPBL, it is most often listed as CPBL 16.  In fact, most of the sets are now found on auction sites with the season number in the title.

     As with most CPBL sets, it is broken on to several distinct subsets: main player cards, sorted by team; 2005 award winners; golden glove winners, monthly MVPs and rookies for the 2005 season.

Photo Album for 2005 CPBL 16 set:

http://photo.pchome.com.tw/super0825/04/

Base card front and back:

Jui-Chang Chen (front)

Jui-Chang Chen (back)