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!

Tiny, Tuffy and Taiwanese Cards: Part I (and semi-evenly spread thanks)

      A couple of big thanks (of appropriately varying size) to NPB Card Guy of the Japanese Baseball Card Blog and Ryan G of This Card is Cool (among others) for all of the cards you are about to see here (some cards not for use with some sets).  Freshly back from his WBC-watching tour of Japan, the Guru of Eastern Cardboard flung this batch of goodies at me via the USPS.  I'll take them in the order implied in the title and start with The Tiny.

Checklist Translations: 1996/97 ProCard Notable Players (CPBL) Series Two

      Considered the second series of ProCard's 1996/97 effort, 1997 NP (Notable Players) is numbered as its own set and released in June of 1997.  The Notable Players set includes, presumably, the best 15 or so players from each team, 1996 award winners, each pitcher with 10 wins, each hitter with 100 hits, highly touted rookies, and a "key player" from each team.  This set also included a couple of autographs, one limited to 300 cards for Taiwanese pitching legend Yuen-Chih Kuo, better known in Japan as Genji Kaku of the Chunichi Dragons, and the other limited to 500 cards of 1996 CPBL Rookie of the Year (and current all-time CPBL home run leader) Tai-Shan Chang.

The set is described in this blog post:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/blog/post/28009363


Base card front:

1991 Tucson Toros Jones Photo set confirmed

     Based on the existence of a few other undocumented Jones Photo sets from the 1990s, I had theorized that there were likely Tucson Jones Photo sets issued each year from 1987-1999.  Beckett and SCD had previously catalogued parts of the sets from 1987-1989 and 1998.  I later found photos from the sets for 1993, 1997 and 1999.  This morning, a listing appeared on eBay of a lot of Tucson-related cards and photos (baseball and college basketball) and it included 8 photos from the 1991 set, including a very rare Kenny Lofton.  Here is a cropped version of the image from the listing, focusing on the Toros photos:

Checklist Translations: 1997 Taiwan Major League Power Cards

     So far I've been able to dig up very little information on the nature of this set.  It was issued for the 1997 Taiwan Major League season, and is apparently designed as some sort of card game.  All of the cards have standard poker suits in the upper left corner, as well as menko-style paper, rock, scissors icons in the lower right corner.  Each card has some sort of power value in bold letters under the player name. The main base set is comprised of 180 player cards, and there is also a 36-card, white-bordered insert set that includes 26 game actions and 10 players.

Here are some examples of the base cards:

Sam Horn

Chi-Yueh Li

Checklist Translations: 2008 TSC La New Bears

    Sometime in the mid 2000s, Taiwan Sports Cards (http://www.taiwansportscard.com.tw/), more commonly known as TSC, began producing baseball cards for the CPBL.  In 2008, very similar to how BBM releases sets for each of the teams every year, TSC released pack-based sets for the Brother Elephants, Sinon Bulls and the La New Bears.  The sets featured the full assortment of inserts to be expected from a BBM pack-based team set; autographs, memorabilia cards, photo cards, etc.