Japanese Yomiuri Giants postcards

Once again, through the kindness of his heart, Ryan over at This Card is Cool helped me pick up some more stuff I was wanting. This time it was a pack of eight postcards released by the Yomiuri Giants. The number on the photo is the player's jersey number. The back is basic and the same for all postcards. I have no idea if this is the full set or if there are many more I'm missing. I would assume the latter. But as you may suspect, I bought these in order to get the Seung-yuop Lee postcard which I hope to get slabbed by PSA in time. I hadn't seen these before. I am unsure of the year but I know it's either 2007 or 2008 because Nioka played for Nippon-Ham in '09-'10 and Lee wore #33 in 2006. The rest of these players in this package (minus Nioka) played all of Lee's Yomiuri years.

2	Michihiro Ogasawara
7	Tomohiro Nioka
10	Shinnosuke Abe
19	Koji Uehara
24	Yoshinobu Takahashi
25	Seung-yuop Lee
26	Tetsuya Utsumi
48	Kenji Yano

Why do I grade some of my cards and why PSA?

As most of us in the hobby, I got back into collecting after many years away. I will tell my story as best as I can remember. When I was sitting in the dugout of a rec-league baseball game in 2012?, my good friend and teammate Josh asked me if I collected baseball cards. I told him I did occasionally buy cards but wasn't too serious about it. I told him I collected Don Mattingly, Jerry Rice, Sterling Sharpe, Dominque WIlkins and others. Sometime after that he mentioned PSA. I don't think I knew anything about card grading services at the time. He told me about it and I decided to get back into collecting more seriosuly. And who did I decide to collect? Don Mattingly.

Yes, I was already collecting him but I decided I was going to go full-steam into buying his cards. I'm not sure why but team collecting has never piqued my interest. It has always been about the player. When I started up again, I think for almost all of my Mattingly purchases I was using eBay because I didnt know about COMC or Sportlots. I eventually started using COMC for the Mattingly PC. I would end up buying everything I could find. Star sets, Broder cards, random oddballs, food issues, all the discs, coins. You name it and I had it. At least it felt that way. As I was acquiring his cards and remembering what Josh told me, I decided at some point in late 2012 or early 2013, I started sending my cards to PSA. At this time, I think subs were about $4.50 per card! And you'd get your cards back in ~60 days! I would send in whatever amount of cards I could afford. I think I eventually got up to #2 or #3 on the Mattingly PSA Master Set registry. Doing this registry set, I met legendary Mattingly collector Chris Sakers and we've been online friends for a while now.

In January 2014, I moved to South Korea to teach conversational English. Since that point, I have lost interest in pursuing the registry for Mattingly and have not bought many of his cards. I have even sold off some of my Mattingly PSA slabs I have with me here in Korea as well as Mattingly slabs and memorabila (ceramic cards, plates, magazines, etc..) when I have been home for vacation. Josh has been letting me keep in storage at his house and I would go there to sell stuff off. Why have I stopped? I think the main reason was interest followed closely by cost. I didn't want to keep spending money on grading cards I no longer had a deep interest in. The fact I moved across the world also helped that happen. I still have a large collection of Mattingly PSA slabs/memorabilia at Josh's house. I still have Star sets already organized in vault boxes in card savers ready to be subbed to PSA. They've been there for several years now.

Here are some Mattingly oddballs:



In the past few years I have been going full steam with collecting Mark Buehrle and even had started subbing cards to PSA for his Master Set Registry but that didn't last long. It came back to cost. I've decided that I would keep a Buehrle Topps Basic Registry set and everything else will stay raw in card savers in white, cardboard vault boxes. I was grading all his autos which I have stopped doing. I even cracked slabs of Buehrle autos that were PSA 8 or less to save some space/weight.

Here are a few of my favorite Buehrle cards:



I haven't mentioned why I grade them. As a player collector, I grade cards because I like the uniformity, protection and most importantly, the cataloguing and building of the PSA Registry from scratch of a player no other American collects, retired Korean baseball star, Seung-yuop Lee. I have my 200+ Lee PSA slabs in a black, vault case. That story will come sometime this month.

I also like the PSA slab the best. I like the red flip, the all caps and font, and it's eay to read. Worst thing of course is that they do not provide sub-grades. I don't like the thickness of the BGS slab, the font size or its gold flip. I am also not a fan of the new SGC flip, its font and size. Of course none of that mattered anyway because I trusted Josh's suggestion of PSA and never looked back.

Do I believe third-party grading companies can/have worked unethically? Yes. Do I think the companies and customers can scratch each others backs in different ways? Yes. I do not concern myself with any of that because it doesn't impact me as I know they aren't giving my card subs 10s due to me subbing thousands every time. I continue to grade with PSA because I don't want to change the uniformity of my collection and I want to continue expanding my Lee registry.

Current Lee Seung-yuop cards at PSA

These are the cards that are currently at PSA processing. I really hope I don't get any return N9s. To date, I believe I have added 195 different Lee cards to my Master Set, which also makes up the Showcase I published. If all 25 of these are graded then the total will come to 220. That's a great feeling when you start the set from scratch.

2000 Teleca '99 Korea Japan Super Game #KJ20 Soo-Keun Jung / Seung Y. Lee / Jong-Beom Lee / Ki-Tae Kim / Min-Tae Chung
2000 Teleca '99 Korea Japan Super Game #KJ40 Seung Y. Lee / Hideki Matsui
2000 Teleca '99 Korea Japan Super Game #KJ43 Seung Y. Lee / Min-Tae Chung
2004 BBM 2nd Version Light Pack #558 Seung Y. Lee
2004 BBM Touch The Game #046 Seung Y. Lee
2004 Konami Prime Nine Silver #04TE-182 Seung Y. Lee
2005 BBM All-Star Game #A29 Seung Y. Lee
2005 Konami Prime Nine Team Edition #181 Seung Y. Lee
2006 BBM 2nd Version Light Pack #683 Seung Y. Lee
2007 Yomiuri Giants Jersey #NNO Seung Y. Lee
2009 BBM Yomiuri Giants Silver Signature #G046 Seung Y. Lee
2010 BBM Yomiuri Giants Bat Card #GM2 Seung Y. Lee
2011 BBM Orix Buffaloes #Bs45 Seung Y. Lee
2011 BBM Orix Buffaloes #Bs45 Seung Y. Lee Parallel
2011 BBM Orix Buffaloes #Bs45 Seung Y. Lee Gold Signature
2011 BBM Orix Buffaloes The Great Horns #BsG5 Seung Y. Lee
2011 BBM Orix Buffaloes Jersey Card #BsM2 Seung Y. Lee
2014 Ntreev Duael Superstar Season 2 All Star #004 Seung Y. Lee
2015 SMG Ntreev Samsung Lions Collection #1 Seung Y. Lee
2015 SMG Ntreev Super Star Gold Edition All Star Wave #043 Seung Y. Lee
2016 SMG Ntreev Super Star Black Edition #001 Seung Y. Lee
2018 Epoch Orix Buffaloes Stars & Legends Gold #26P Seung Y. Lee
2019 Epoch Orix Buffaloes Stars & Legends #38 Seung Y. Lee
2019 Epoch Yomiuri Giants 85th Anniversary The Legendary Players #01 Seung Y. Lee
2019 Epoch Yomiuri Giants 85th Anniversary The Legendary Players #01 Seung Y. Lee Parallel
2011-12 Topps Bundesliga Sticker #145 Son Heung Min

1984 Donruss blurred circles

I am today years old to realize the 1984 Donruss set had at least 46 cards that had intentional blur in the background. Most of them are blurred with whitish circles over what I assume are fan faces. Was this because they didn't want to be libel for some reason? There may be a full-on explanation somewhere already done but sometimes I like to do this on my own before learning about it. Either way, some of them are pretty artistic-looking and I am considering buying them for that sole purpose.

I was initially searching on TCDB for old Comiskey Scoreboard backgrounds in this set, none of which I saw, but I realized many cards had the intentional blur so I started jotting them down and came up with at least 46, but some with a lesser extent of circles. 1981 Fleer is THE set for Comiskey and Wrigley backgrounds but was hoping to find more in this set. But these are my favorite blurred-circle cards in the 1984 Donruss set:

#121 Dave Concepcion	#138 Glenn Brummer
#184 Gary Redus	#311 Ryne Sandberg
#433 Jody Davis	#470 Ken Landreaux
#529 Ron Reed	#563 Brian Giles

These are all the cards that have more blurred circles, to a lesser or greater extent, on them: 35 59 71 94 121 137 138 155 157 176 184 189 207 223 253 293 296 301 305 311 315 333 367 377 381 383 384 395 399 400 422 429 433 437 459 470 488 494 499 506 512 514 529 541 552 559 563 606 610 633 649

UPDATE: I was just informed by @vossbrink on Twitter that the blurred circles is catadioptric bokeh caused by using mirror lenses. Nick also stated this happened a lot in vintage sets. I don't look at vintage much so this is the first I'm noticing it.

Gravure Idol: Anri Sugihara autographs

I have made many purchases recently in different areas of my hobbies. I have become more serious with my aquariums, selling off some of my Mattingly cards and putting the money into savings and took up reading.

Today I am sharing the Anri Sugihara autographed cards I purchased in the last two years. She is a former Japanese Gravure Idol (model) that I decided to try and collect. These are all of Anri's autos that I have. Most of these autos have ranged between $10-$40. The following are types of cards that are released long with sets at around same time. Ryan gave me a better summary of what each type of card is. I will update this page as I buy more.

2012 Hit's Event Privilege 01
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2012 Hit's Event Privilege 02


2012 Hit's Event Privilege 03
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2012 Hit's Event Privilege 04
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2012 Hit's Shop Campaign


2012 Hit's Shop Campaign Kiss & Auto


2012 Hit's Event Privilege 01
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2012 Hit's Event Privilege 02
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2012 Hit's Event Privilege 03
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2012 Hit's Event Privilege 04


2012 Hit's Internet Privilege Kiss Auto


2012 Hit's Internet Privilege


2013 Hit's Box Privilege 01
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2013 Hit's Box Privilege 02
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2013 Hit's Box Privilege 03
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2013 Hit's Event Privilege 01
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2013 Hit's Event Privilege 02
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2013 Hit's Event Privilege 03
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2013 Hit's Shop Campaign 01


2013 Hit's Shop Campaign 02


2013 Hit's Shop Campaign 03


2013 Hit's Platinum Distribution Privilege


2013 Hit's Platinum Event Privilege 01


2013 Hit's Platinum Event Privilege 02


2013 Hit's Platinum Box Privilege 01
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2013 Hit's Platinum Box Privilege 02
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2013 Hit's Platinum Internet Privilege 01
NEED

2013 Hit's Platinum Box Privilege 03


2013 Hit's Platinum Photo & Autograph 01 /60


2013 Hit's Platinum Photo & Autograph 02 /60


2013 Hit's Platinum Shop Campaign A


2013 Hit's Platinum Shop Campaign B


2014 Hit's Internet Event Privilege 01
NEED

2014 Hit's Internet Event Privilege 02


2014 Hit's Internet Reservation Privilege


2014 Hit's Shop Campaign A


2015 Deep Reservation Privilege 01


2015 Deep Reservation Privilege 02 Kiss & Auto


2016 Hit's LAST Shop Campaign A


2016 Hit's LAST Shop Campaign B


2016 Hit's LAST Shop Campaign C Kiss & Auto