Purchased some menkos yesterday

Yesterday I purchased single lots of menkos of both Shigeo Nagashima and Masaichi Kaneda. They were a little more than I felt comfortable paying but because I needed most of them I didn't mind. These cards will be added to their respective pages once I receive them. I also won a single 5-card lot of Katsuya Nomura, one of which I already have. I will be having these cards sent to Ryan who will then ship to me. Usually when I bid on individual menkos of these players they end up not being too affordable so I feel better about these lot buys. What I enjoy most about buying menkos is adding them to the site and researching them (from Gary's guide) so I know what I have and what I still need. A few of these will be available for trade (for other menkos) or purchase.



Shigeo Nagashima


Katsuya Nomura


Masaichi Kaneda

Shigeo Nagashima & Masaichi Kaneda cards

I have been collecting their cards for about a year now, maybe longer. I decided to add their cards to this site. You can find them in the mneu on the left at the bottom. I will only be adding what I have purchased and not sure I'll ever add a checklist for them because they have so many menkos/bromides I'll never get aorund to buying and/or finding. So Buehrle, Lee, Nagashima and Kaneda have become the main four players I collect. I have purchased the newest 2021 BBM Lees and am hoping to land more soon.

2021 SCC KBO Rainbow set breakdown

Here is the breakdown for the soon-to-be-released (June 30th) 2021 SCC KBO Rainbow set. There is no base set, it's all parallels. Boxes will cost W150,000 ($138) and include one guaranteed auto and rookie parallel. Try searching here to buy a box online from Korea.



As you will see below, all players in this set will have an auto numbered to /24. Total players in the set is 199, E01 was removed from Hanwha, otherwise all teams have 20 players each, featured in the various parallels. This set will include Shin-soo Choo's first KBO card (SCC-21/S17). I will add these to TCDB when I hear back about the best way to upload sets that dont have a base set.

Foil Collection (135 different players)
/280 White Gold
/280 Aqua Blue



Coating Collection (134 different players)
/280 Flat (not Plate)
/280 Block



Rookie Parallel (10 different players)
/9 Red
/50 Orange
/100 Green
/150 Blue
/190 Violet



Limited Parallel (54 different players)
/90 Diamond
/150 Metal Sand
/220 Metal Fila (not Filler)
/280 Flash



Autographs (All 199 players)
/24 All players

2021 Hobby Goals

In no particuar order, these are my goals for 2021.

1 - Purchase a certified Korean issued Lee Seung-yuop autograph.
2 - Continue to try and build illustrated and die-cut menko sets.
3 - Continue to find more Lee cards I am missing and submit to PSA.
4 - Put menkos in tobacco sheets in a binder.
5 - Work on an excel sheet for all foreign NPB players
6 - Collect NPB cards of foreign players
7 - Attempt to find and buy more 2014-15 Blue Edition coin cards
8 - Send KBO HOF RC to PSA
9 - PSA sub reveal of a Lee submission.
10 - Try to get PSA to grade past N9'd Lees.

Some of these goals are more important to me than others. Glancing over these, I think 1, 2, 3, 4, 9 and 10 are the most important to me, at the moment. Feel free to link me to your 2021 hobby goals in a comment below.

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