Check Out Clyde's Cards (p5)

I emailed COMC in response to the notification that one of my cards was being returned and very plainly stated my case, how I'd verified that every single card I submitted was, in fact, listed by Beckett, and identified the card to them as what Beckett called "1995 Takara SW16 Kazuhisa Ishii" and now they've acknowledge finding the card in Beckett's listings and are going to add it to my inventory.

Granted, for the typical COMC user, this card is a bit obscure, not worth very much, sure it's just Kaz Ishii, and he's not even relevant to American baseball anymore, but they chose to correct the oversight and that's good customer service. Whatever else I may have to say about how they choose which cards to list, I can't deny that Check Out My Cards has very good customer service!

 

2000 Epoch Pro Baseball stickers box break (pack 26)

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

2000 Epoch Pro Baseball box break (pack 17)

16 packs in an now the doubles out-number the new cards!



Well, at least a couple of decent cards resulted. A perennial All-Star in Kazuhiro Kiyohara, the first card so far of the Leading Players shiny set and another part of the Kaz Ishii puzzle make for decent consolation prizes. Hiroki Kokubo was a strong power hitting infielder for the Hawks through most of the late 90s and 2000s. He has been fighting injuries over the last few years, and in 2009 managed to play in all 144 games for the first time in his career, but had one of the poorest seasons of his career, hitting only .266 with 18 HR.


Doubles: Ohtsuka, Saitoh, Kosaka, Wada, Iwamura, Shibahara, Kimura

2000 Epoch Pro Baseball box break (pack 16)

Interesting here as both a puzzle piece AND a Star Player sticker turn up!



Satoru Kanemura
Hisanori Takahashi
Katsumi Yamashita
Tomohito Itoh
Atsuya Furuta
Kazuhisa Ishii puzzle piece (who, according to Gary Engle, was the real prize of the puzzle piece inserts).

Doubles T. Iguchi, Kitoh, Takatsu, Wakatabe

So 16 packs in, out of 160 possible different stickers, the set stands at:

103/204 base stickers

13/108 puzzle pieces

0/24 Leading Players

2/12 Star Players

118 unique cards, 42 doubles

I think those are actually pretty decent numbers. Just over half way thru the box, and the base set is just over half complete. The inserts are a little more disappointing, but that's life with inserts. This was before the days of the card companies being masochistic enough to actually guarantee "hits" per box, which did drive up sales of high-end product, but also led to incessant whining among collectors who felt robbed when the only got a box full of base cards of Ichiro, Pujols, Griffey, Dice-K, etc, and didn't get their guaranteed GU card (which probably would have been David Wells or Omar Vizquel anyway).