Checklist Translations: 1995 A-Plus Card Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL)

     [Intro paragraph coming soon]  While this set covers the 1995 season it was actually released in March of 1996.

The set is described in this blog post:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/blog/post/27785920

The annual award and league leader cards can be seen here:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/blog/post/41452379

The Gold Glove cards can be seen here:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/blog/post/41808883

The base cards can be seen in this album:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/album/set/16814900

The standard base card front and back:

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:

1989 Topps/LJN Baseball Talk series

    In the late 1980s and early 1990s, companies were trying all kinds of ideas to draw in more customers.  About that time, LJN was a company fairly well known for electronic toys and video games.  For 1989, LJN teamed with Topps to produce this set of talking baseball cards.  Each oversized card featured a recording in the form of what amounted to a miniature vinyl record attached to the back.  Rather than go into any further detail, feel free to peruse the Wikipedia entry on the set and player.

Checklist Translations: 1992 Chinese Professional Baseball League

     Moving on to 1992, and comprising at least 110 cards. For the first time, team logos are displayed on the front, and I suppose a brand logo (?) of sorts on the top left.  The only color scheme for this issue is on the players' names in the upper right corner on the front.  As with previous years, the cards are plastic with rounded corners.  A special album was issued to hold the set and was available to order on the backs of the 5-card packs.

The set is described in this blog post:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/blog/post/27390664

The cards can be seen in this album:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/album/set/16814816

The 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.