In just a few short months we'll find out who will be the inductees of the Hall of Fame Class of 2025. There's little doubt that Ichiro will be a member of that class. I always appreciated his old school playing style of trying to slap the ball into play instead of trying to go yard the way most players approach the game today. I don't think we'll see another Ichiro for quite some time, if ever. That being said, I've had my eye on this card for quite some time and I finally decided to purchase one off of eBay since it seems that not a lot of them are available. This is the 2007 Topps Chrome Japanese version and while they're not numbered, their production run is definitely a lot smaller compared to the English version. According to Baseballcardpedia, six Japanese players had a short print Japanese text version of their card (Matsui, Johjima, Ichiro, Okajima, Igawa, and Matsuzaka). The Hobby odds of pulling a Japanese variant from a pack was 1:82 packs. I'm glad to finally have this card in my collection and though I'm not an Ichiro super collector, there are a few more cards of his that I'm hoping to pick up before he gets his call from the Hall.
2 comments:
Super cool. I knew that Dice-K had a Japanese version... but didn't realize Ichiro did too.
Definitely an amazing card. I've been on the fence about collecting his Japanese version of his 2001 Topps Gallery rookie. I think having those together would just look fantastic to display.
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