Checklist Translations: 1990-1992 Chiclets Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL)

     The inaugural season of the CPBL was accompanied by several different sets of baseball cards in various forms.  For the first three years of it's existence, the American Chicle Company (or their Adams subsidiary) produced sets of baseball cards for the CPBL under the Chiclets brand (芝蘭口香糖).  Technically this is a single set, spread across the first three seasons of the CPBL, and is numbered contiguously from 1-400.

     Slight digression - As with most CPBL sets, the cards were actually issued the year following the year they represent, so the 1990 was actually released in 1991  After all, there was no 1989 season, so it would have been very difficult for anyone to acquire all the photos necessary to produce a decent sized 1990 set during the 1990 season and still have it in stores before the year was out.  Today it could probably be done, but remember this was in the days before digital photography.  Aside from some small, team-based sets, this tradition has continued to the present.  Now the official CPBL sets tend to include a reference to the season number in the set names with 1990 being the first.  So the set that will be issued in 2015 will cover then 2014 season and probably have a "CPBL 25th" referenced somewhere.

     Chiclets cards were issued with the well-known candy-coated gum.  The first series of cards had a colorful design that was coordinated with each teams' colors and, as with almost all cards from the region, prominently featured the player's uniform number along with name, team and position.  Foreign players also had their names printed in English on both front and back.  The backs have the card number in the upper left corner, the usual player biographical details and a summary of their 1990 statistics.  The first series includes cards 1-118.  The first 17 cards feature a coloring variation on the back and can be found with both a much lighter border than the rest of the set, being more of a blue-gray as well as the richer blue of the remaining 101 cards.

1994 Uni-President Lions Playing Cards

 

I recently acquired this set on eBay from a seller that had picked up a few baseball-related souvenirs on a trip to Taiwan back in the mid 1990s. All of the face cards feature photos of players from the 1994 Uni-President Lions team.  The box, and all card backs, feature artwork of Lions' pitcher Chang-Heng Hsieh. If there is any particular significance to the arrangement, it escapes me.

Checklist Translations: 1994 Chinese Professional Baseball League (in progress)

     For the 1994 set, the CPBL expanded their flagship set to 506 cards issued in two series.  The first 176 cards covered the individual players, organized by team. Cards 177-182 were the team checklists  All of the cards from 183-235 are serial numbered on the back, in quantities that one would assume were limited in 1994 (though even for Taiwan, the numbers see high, given the likely population of collectors in Taiwan in 1994).  Cards 183-188 were team logo holograms; 189-197 covered the 1994 Gold Glove winners; 198-206 was the Best 9 subset, which is meant to depict the best all-around player for each position in the league (an award that seems common in Korea, Taiwan and Japan, but not in the US).  The usual annual awards and league leaders are covered by cards 207-217; they feature a color photo of the player against a holographic background.  Cards 218-220 represent home run milestones during the 1994 season.  221-224 cover the main season awards (Manager of the Year, ROY, MVP, Most Improved).  Cards 225-232 cover the Monthly MVPs selected over the course of the 1994 season.  These would be analogous to the MLB Player of the Month awards.  Cards 233-235 depict the top team from the season's first half, second half and over all champion...which ended up being the Brother Elephants in all three cases.  The next 270 cards, from 236-505 represent the winning RBI for each game of the 1994 season.  The last card of the set, #506, is for Wu Fu-Lien, but I'm not really sure what the significance is.  In any case, the 1994 set represented a substantial increase in cards over previous years.

The set is described in this blog post:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/blog/post/27540320

The award winner/league leader subset can be seen here:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/blog/post/41424839

The Gold Glove subset can be seen here:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/blog/post/41791036

The cards can be seen in this album:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/album/set/16814886

The standard base card front and back:

Checklist Translations: 1991 Chinese Professional Baseball League

     For the 1991 season, the official CPBL set was expanded to 103 cards (which seems a very odd number for a set), and were still issued on plastic with rounded corners, slightly smaller than the standard size.

The set is described in this blog post:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/blog/post/27357188

The cards can be seen in this album:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/album/set/16814806

     The card fronts have borders matching the teams' primary color, and as seems standard for almost all non-American cards, the players' uniform numbers are displayed prominently:

 

Checklists Translations: 1990 Chinese Professional Baseball League

     In the past couple of weeks, I found some resources for information on older baseball card sets from Taiwan.  The main resource is this blog and accompanying album:

中華職棒言舊苑
言舊員怪e紅傑克的懷舊蒐藏與歷史記錄
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/blog

     Everything is in Chinese, so I've had to make liberal use of Google Translate, but beginning with his first post, the author has been posting on the history of baseball cards issued in Taiwan since 1990, just after the Chinese Professional Baseball League was formed.   Thanks to this wonderful blog, I am now aware of some 60+ sets for the CPBL, the short-lived Taiwan Major League as well as the Chinese Taipei national team.  Now the door has opened to a new world of cards, I am attempting to assemble checklists for all of the sets referenced and add them to the SportsCardForum.com Inventory Manager.