GO DUCKS GO!!!  Behold, my latest international acquisition, all the way from Austria!  No, not the place with the wombats and wallabies.  Austria; the place by Germany and Switzerland.  In Europe?  The place with the history.  Das land von baseball!

    Celebrating 25 years of Diving Ducks baseball, the team from Weiner Neustadt of the Austrian Baseball League issued a set of 18 cards.  The set documents the players from the team's anniversary season.  I learned about this set entirely by accident as I was compiling my International Baseball Keyword Cheat Sheet.  Sadly, of the six teams in the Austrian Baseball League, only the Ducks had baseball cards, and them only this one set.

     The cards could either be bought from the team's webstore as a complete set for €10 or in packs of 5 cards for €1,50 each.  Since shipping TO the United States is a lot cheaper than shipping FROM the United States, when I finally figured out how to register, I had to pick up a set and some packs.  About a week after my order, the following arrived in the mail:


    The "card stock" is really more of a highly glossy paper.  These are about as thick as your average Wired magazine cover.   Aside from the high gloss coating on front and back, they have about the same weight as the Alaska Goldpanners cards from the mid-1990s.  The fronts feature an assortment of action and closeup shots (no studio portraits/mugshot-style photos), the player name and number.  Faintly against the photo is the "GO DUCKS GO!!!" text.  Along the very bottom of the front, in tiny stylized text is printed "diving ducks baseball cards - limited edition 2012".  On the top 40% of the backs is another action photo along with the players' 2012 batting and pitching stats, as well as a "25 YEARS DIVING DUCKS BASEBALL WR. NEUSTADT" vertically along the either the right or left side.



   The cards are unnumbered, but do feature the players' uniform numbers on then front, so I've checklisted them accordingly.

3  Martin Cuperus 4  Armin Alteneder 5  Jan Alteneder 6  Krisztian Völgyes 7  Matthias Scheicher 12 Victor Torres 13 Clemens Seiser 14 Christian Scherz 15 Ferdinand Obed 16 Sebastian Scheicher 20 Ryan Kroko 21 Julio Diaz 22 Clemens Cichocki 23 Manfred Heisler (Coach) 27 José Ortiz 31 Jayson Wall 46 Claus Seiser 75 Elias Perez

    The license for producing the official CPBL set changed hands for the league's 9th season.  The new set was produced as "T-Point 1998 CPBL Traditional Card" and came in foil packs of 8 cards.  The base set contains 188 cards, distributed unevenly between the six teams present in the 1998 season.  There were seven limited print run insert sets.  These sets covered 1998's crop of rookies, monthly MVPs, yearly award winners and league leaders, Best Nine, Golden Gloves, game used jersey cards and autograph cards.  There was also a redemption set for autographed versions of the jersey cards.

The set is described, with examples of the packs, all card types and much more detail, in this blog post:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/blog/post/28111594

The base cards can be seen in the accompanying album:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/album/set/16814950

The Award Winner set is shown here:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/blog/post/41528921

The Gold Glove set is shown here:
http://jackli7751.pixnet.net/blog/post/41865766

The standard base card:

024 front	166 back

     Below is the complete checklist as I've managed to construct with much assistance from jackli7751.  The scans in the album cover only the base cards through #001-188. I'm updating the insert sets as I find them. Thanks to Mr. Westbay over at JapaneseBaseball.com, I have been able to complete the base set checklist with player data from one KT Chiu of the mostly defunct TWBaseball.info to translate the names.

    As I seem to have missed the last few of his newer cards, this should clear the to-do list on recent acquisitions for my Meulens collection.  Sponsorship for the yearly San Francisco Giants stadium giveaway team set has changed hands multiple times since 2012.

    The set had been sponsored by Emerald Nuts for several years, but that ended in 2012 with this set (which is a glaring example of why foil text on card fronts is a bad idea):

    As aging All-Stars get to the point in their career where their long-term contract prospects have dried up, but they're still producing respectable numbers, their opportunities lend more toward the short-term, hired gun variety.  In Dave Winfield's case, it was also an opportunity to play in front of his hometown. Dave was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, and was a star baseball and basketball player for the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers, so it was an easy decision for him to sign with the Twins, joining a roster that included another future Hall of Famer, Kirby Puckett.

     Winfield signed with the Minnesota Twins in mid-December 1992.  By that time, the first series of all the main 1993 sets had already been printed and were already being shipped.  As a result, Winfield would appear as a Blue Jay for the first couple months of the baseball season.  However, given the move to multiple series and the expansion of sets issued around the start of the season, there were a lot of non-update type cards to feature Dave in his new duds.  I'll just take these alphabetically.

     In 1991, the "pre-rookie" fad was still in full swing, and still no one really cared.  Despite all the marketing of minor league cards as the best way to get in on the ground floor of future Hall of Famers, the cards just didn't sell.  The only minor league cards anyone was remotely interested were those issued in the late 1970s and early 1980s by Cramer, Chong and TCMA.  By the time Impel had joined the party, there had already been two years of mass produced, pack-issued minor league sets from ProCards, Star and Best Cards, and they still weren't generating much excitement.