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!

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

2000 Epoch Pro Baseball stickers box break (pack 30)

Doubles: Sohji, Jefferson, S. Noguchi, H. Takahashi, T. Itoh, K. Kobayashi

The final numbers after 30 packs and 300 stickers:

185 of 384 total possible unique stickers for just under half of the set (48.1%).

152/204 base (74.5% complete)
25/108 puzzle pieces (23.1% complete)
5/24 Leading Players (20.8% comlpete)
3/12 Star Players (25% complete)
115 doubles

View the entire gallery here.

Not bad on the base set, but an annoying amount of doubles amongst the puzzle pieces. Only the Seibu Lions puzzle ended up with more than 3 of 9 pieces for completion. On the whole, this was something of an educational experience. But in 300 stickers, there was no trace of Tuffy Rhodes, or even Ichiro or Hideki Matsui as a consolation. And as was stated in the first post, everything is up for trade or sale. And since Sportlots.com has their pre-2006 moratorium and CheckOutMyCards.com is locked into following Beckett's catalog (and Beckett seems to have their own moratorium on including or updating Japanese sets), I really don't have another convenient outlet for these.

Next post will be back to the player collections. I think I may stagger the future box breaks a bit with player posts to keep it from getting too monotonous. I definitely got a little burned out around pack 15, and there are the glaring posts with no commentary. I've got a couple more boxes of 2000 Japanese stuff to post, but I'll take my time with them.

2000 Epoch Pro Baseball stickers box break (pack 29)

Doubles: Y. Ohshima, Arias, Nagashima, Nilsson, M. Nashida, Ohgi, K. Yoshinaga

2000 Epoch Pro Baseball stickers box break (pack 28)

Echoes of pack 25, only the single puzzle card is new, all the rest are dupes, with two packs remaining.

Doubles: S. Ohtomo, K. Nomura, N. Matsunaka, M. Tatsukawa, S. Miyamoto, T. Ide (hasn't he been in 3 of the last 4-5 packs?), Oh (again!), T. Nioka, A. Inaba

2000 Epoch Pro Baseball stickers box break (pack 27)

Total bust! Pack #27 is 100% doubles, and of that, only Takahashi and Yabu (and maybe Jefferson) qualify as half decent cards using either price or star power as a gauge.

Doubles: N. Matsunaka, O. Higashio, S. Ohtomo, Jefferson, Yuhki, T. Shindoh, K. Yabu, T. Kuji, Y. Takahashi, Hoshino puzzle piece

2000 Epoch Pro Baseball stickers box break (pack 26)

Doubles, T. Ishii, A. Iwamura, M. Yamamoto, T. Iwamoto, S. Murata

2000 Epoch Pro Baseball stickers box break (pack 25)

Wow, you know the end of the pack is near when 9 out of 10 are doubles :/



Doubles: Oh (2nd straight dupe of Oh!), T. Takagi, M. Shimizu, T. Ide, S. Miyamoto, M. Tatsukawa, K. Danie...er S. Nishiyama, K. Nomura, Y. Wada

2000 Epoch Pro Baseball stickers box break (pack 24)

Phil Clark....make that Phill Clark. Never underestimate the potential for misspellings on baseball products, no matter what country they come from.

Bobby Rose is another player in the vein of Tuffy Rhodes. Not much success in MLB, but went to be a huge star in Japan for awhile.

Doubles: Oh, K. Akiyama, M. Tanishige, K. Nomura, S. Tohyama

2000 Epoch Pro Baseball stickers box break (pack 23)

Doubles: S. Taninaka, T. Ide

2000 Epoch Pro Baseball stickers box break (pack 22)

Looks like this box may finish strong. Yet another solid turnout with 8 new cards and just 2 doubles.

Doubles: M. Kitoh, H. Takahashi

2000 Epoch Pro Baseball stickers box break (pack 21)

Nice, after a relatively weak pack, back to 9 new cards!



Not one, but TWO former Japanese All-Stars who can't seem to do better than emulate Mike Gallego on the Major League level.

Doubles: K. Machida