Brito Completo! 1987 Cleveland Indians Photocard

   With this eBay win, I declare victory in my pursuit of the Complete Bernardo Brito Collection:

DEAL. OF. THE. YEAR. (brought to you by the letters F, B and I.

     In a previous post, the phrases "nearly impossible to find for anything less than $50 each" and "will likely be forever on my Dave Winfield Want List" were employed in an attempt to express how unattainable this piece likely would be for my collection.  But then, by sheer dumb luck, this happened:

     Never underestimate what is possible due to an obscurely worded eBay listing.  This complete box was listed and as "Dave Winfield/NY Yankees, Vida Blue/KC Royals Card Disks, Bantam Box" and sold with a only a single bid for the grand total of $13.95!  Yes, Johnny, dreams really do come true.

Team-Issued Stadium Give-Away Sets in Japan (Part II)

** POST IN-PROGRESS **

(expect this to be a very long post)

     To follow on to the previous post on team-issued sets from Japan, I'm going to list all the sets I've dug up so far and ask that if anyone has information on any set not listed here, please drop me a line.  This post will serve as a to-do list for building checklists, a plea for new information and a list of what I've discovered so far.  I'll add thumbnail scans when I find them and a * next to those that have at least partial checklists in the Inventory Manager at SportsCardForum.com.

     Credit for a very large portion of these checklists (and sample scans) goes to the Antique Baseball Shop blog in Japan.  If you are interested at all in Japanese player pins, that blog is a gold mine.  It's also hugely useful for promo cards.  The news pages for the individual teams also yielded a lot of information for cards that were distributed at specific games as promotions.

Team-Issued Stadium Give-Away Sets in Japan

     As I've mentioned frequently here, a major source of frustration for the player collector (and probably for the type-card collector as well) is the lack of documentation for certain areas of the hobby.  An excellent example of this problem are the team-issued cards given away at the ballparks in Japan.  Most teams have been issuing cards, often multiple sets a year, for decades now, but these represented a major gap in contemporary price guides and checklist catalogs.  Gary Engel has included a few in his books, but mainly just Orix BlueWave sets due to the inclusion of Ichiro. When I asked him about it he explained that his interests tended more toward the vintage areas of the Japanese hobby, and that with all the still-undocumented vintage issues he still had to cover, and not having the resources of the likes of Sports Collectors Digest in its prime, he didn't have the time to spare to modern team-issued sets.  Given how much effort it has taken me to simply compile and translate checklists for mainstream sets each year, I understand his point completely.

The Buffaloes Bombers

Fresh off a sold-out engagement in Japan...

 the Dynamic Duo...

the Masters of the Long Ball...

For one night only!

Norihiro Nakamura and Tuffy Rhodes!

1988 New York Yankees Press Player Identification Photo

     I'm not sure what the technical term for this item would be, but for the price, I couldn't pass it up as an addition to both my Hensley Meulens and Roberto Kelly collections.  I've seen lots of these popup on eBay in the last year, mostly priced beyond what I'd want to spend, but this is the only one that has featured two players I collect with a starting bid of under $10.  It's just too bad it didn't also have Dave Winfield on it!

     Presumably, sets of these were available to the media as a way to help identify the players on the teams, and given the inclusion of Meulens on this one in 1988, I have to conclude it was distributed during Spring Training, as Bam Bam wouldn't see big league playing time until August 1989.