Thursday, December 3, 2015

Byung-Ho Park of the Minnesota Twins

The Minnesota Twins won the posting auction* for Nexen Heroes outfielder Byung-Ho Park last month and signed him to a contract this past week.  I thought I'd do a quick post on what legitimate cards of Park exist as there are of course already several unlicensed cards for sale on Ebay.

*Remember that the posting system for players from Korea was not affected by the changes in the posting system for Japanese players that was forced on NPB by MLB two years ago so once the Twins won the bidding process Park could only negotiate with them.

As far as I've been able to tell, Park has only had cards in the Super Star Baseball KBO sets from the last two years.  According to TradingCardDB, he has 11 cards spread in four of the six Super Star Baseball sets although that total includes two autograph cards, two memorabilia cards, a "gold coin" card and a parallel card so the total "regular" card count is more like five (which I think are all short prints or inserts because it's Super Star Baseball of course).  There's also a sticker from this year's Season Two set that is not listed in the checklist.  I have two of the cards plus the sticker:

2014 Super Star Baseball Season One #SBC01-043

2014 Super Star Baseball Season Two #SBC03-057-AS

2015 Super Star Baseball Season Two Sticker (unnumbered)

Park has never played in a World Baseball Classic so there are no American cards for him by Upper Deck or Topps.  He played for Korea in last month's Premier 12 and put the final nail in the USA's coffin in the championship game:



But there's no baseball cards that I know of for the Premier 12.

UPDATE - Almost forgot - thanks to Jason (as usual) and Dan Skrezyna for getting the Super Star Baseball checklists into TradingCardDB.

UPDATE #2 - Dan Skrezyna sent me a scans of a couple other Park cards:

2014 Super Star Baseball Season Three SBC03-021-BS

2014-15 Super Star Baseball Blue Edition #SBCBE-127-AS

1 comment:

Dan Skrezyna said...

Just to be more precise and I failed to mention it when I first read this post, that coin card for each player who has them come in gold, silver and bronze.