Why Buy Just a Swatch?

An auction recently popped up for an interesting item that I had to throw down a bid on. The item in question is a pair of Munenori Kawasaki's game-used pants. I didn't expect to win the auction, but I wound up as the winning bidder. 

They arrived in the mail today, and it looks like they are packaged in the bag they came in. They come from Kawasaki's stint with the Chicago Cubs in 2016.

Cross-checking the official MLB hologram tells me that these pants are part of a throwback uniform the Cubs wore in a game against the Reds on July 6th, 2016. Kawasaki didn't appear in that game, as he only made 14 appearances on the year, with his only July appearance coming on the 9th of the month. So these pants are less game-used and more dugout-used. Probably still more relevant than many of the 'event-worn' relics out there.

The pants show a decent amount of dirt and grime for being worn once without a game appearance. That's fine with me. I wish I could find a picture of him from that game, but so far my search has been fruitless. This is a pretty cool item for my collection, especially since I got it for about what a handful of Kawasaki relic cards would sell for.

One of my favorite independent wrestlers, Jazzy 'Alpha Female' Gabert, also has had a couple of MMA fights. She had a neck injury a few months ago, and to help cover her expenses while recovering from surgery, she put some items from her first MMA fight up for sale. I wasn't able to get her ring gear, but I did buy the gear she wore for the weigh-in.

I do have pictures from that event. Here she is flexing on the scale, with all the sponsor logos behind her.

And here is the traditional staredown with her opponent, Manuela Kuhse, before the fight in Iron Fighters Organization (IFO) 3 on October 15, 2016. Gabert would win this fight by TKO in the 2nd round.

She sent along an autographed copy of a photo from that day. I thought that was pretty nice.

And here is the actual gear. She autographed each piece, although it's kind of hard to see in the photos. I don't know how much game- and event-worn clothing I plan on adding to my collection in the future, but these are a couple of cool pieces for my collection. It was fun to get Munenori Kawasaki's pants, and I was glad to be able to help out the Alpha Female while getting some memorabilia in return. Her recovery seems to be going well, and she's started booking some events. It doesn't sound like a contract with the WWE is in her current plans, but she has some other stuff lined up.

Cyber Week Breaks: Day 14 - Baseball Hits, a Green Cyborg, and a Wrestling Mail Day

Today's breaks went pretty well, as I opened 3 packs from my 2012 Topps Series 2 jumbo box and 8 packs of 2017 Topps UFC Chrome. I also got a couple of autographed pictures in the mail from a wrestler, so I'll show those off at the end of the post.

I got two of the three hits from the jumbo box in this batch of packs. First up is this Golden Moments autograph of Jarrod Parker. He had a couple of good years for the Athletics in 2012 and 2013, but then injuries and surgeries kind of knocked him out of the loop. It looks like he pitched a bit in the minors in 2015, but that's about it. I don't know what he's up to now.

The second hit of this batch was a manufactured Team Rings relic card featuring Pirates great Roberto Clemente. Manufactured relics aren't really my thing, but this is a nice-enough card as far as looks go. It is thick and heavy enough that you could probably carry is as a self-defense bludgeon.

The UFC Chrome packs I opened were pretty good to me, dropping several serially-numbered cards on me. The first is this Green Mirko Cro Cop Refractor, numbered # 94 / 99. Colorful Refractors are still fun, even after many years of Topps using the same formula for Chrome parallels.

Next up is the Refractor version of Tyron Woodley's Tier One insert. This shiny card is numbered # 91 / 99. I think the inserts in this product are pretty nice for the most part, and the Refractors are even better.

Slotting in between the Refractor inserts and the Superfractors are the Pulsar Refractors, like this Arianny Celeste Top of the Class card. This is a nice, shiny card, and features one of the more popular subjects featured on UFC cardboard. This one is numbered # 04 / 50.

Closing things out with another Green parallel, here's a Green Refractor autograph of Cris 'Cyborg' Justino. She is an absolute juggernaut, and she'll be fighting Holly Holm pretty soon. I was pretty happy to pull this card, as Cyborg hasn't been in the UFC all that long and her cards are riding high on the wave of novelty. It is cool that the UFC is opening up more weight divisions for women, so that more fighters have the opportunity to fight at reasonable weights.

I got a couple of autographed photos in the mail today from Jazzy 'Alpha Female' Gabert, who is a wrestler/MMA fighter out of Germany. I've written before about collecting some of her Japanese trading cards from her tours with the Stardom wrestling promotion, but lamented that the product didn't feature her autographs. I reached out on Facebook and purchased a couple of her photos directly. She signed them, along with some motivational inscriptions. The one on the left says, "Believe in yourself and in your dreams," and the one on the right reads, "Today you are a FIGHTER, tomorrow you are a WINNER! #BeAlpha" Pretty cool stuff. She was pretty popular during the WWE's Mae West Classic tournament, and there seems to be a decent number of people clamoring for her to get a contract with NXT or WWE. I don't know if that will happen, but it would be cool if it did. I wouldn't mind getting a few Topps cards with her on them.

That's all for today. We finally got our tree set up and our gifts wrapped under it, so I guess we're ready for Christmas now. The kids are pretty excited, which is fun to see.

Stardom Alpha Female Cards

I've blogged a couple of times about the trading cards put out by the Japanese promotion Stardom. Stardom brings in a lot of wrestlers from around the world for guest appearances and tournaments, and the card sets usually include a few cards devoted to those wrestlers. I've started a small player collection for cards featuring German wrestler/MMA fighter Jazzy 'Alpha Female' Gabert. 

She doesn't have many trading cards out there, so I am pretty much limited to collecting her appearances in the Stardom sets. She does appear in the WWE's upcoming Mae West Classic Women's Tournament, so maybe she will eventually make a WWE or NXT appearance and get into a Topps set? I think that would be pretty cool. I had a couple of her individual Stardom cards, and no more showed up when I searched eBay, but I was able to find these multi-wrestler cards featuring her image. The Artist of Stardom Championship is a six-woman tag team title, and the team of Kyoko Kimura, Alpha Female, and 'The Female Predator' Amazon were the third team to hold the belts, from November 4, 2013 to December 29, 2013.

This card features Kyoko Kimura and Alpha Female's reign as the 6th team to hold Stardom's Goddess of Stardom tag team championship, from January 26, 2014 to August 10, 2014. It was pretty cool to get a couple more Alpha Female cards. Hopefully I'll be able to track down some more items for my collection in the future.

Here's a promo video from the WWE for her appearance in the Mae Young Classic. I may have to renew my WWE Network subscription so I can watch it.

2015 Stardom 5th Anniversary Japanese Wrestling Cards from Stardom

In late April and early May, I posted about some cards put out by the Stardom wrestling promotion in Japan. So far there have been two sets released, a 5th Anniversary set in 2015 and another set in 2017. I purchased some singles on eBay, and I purchased some singles from the Puro Central Shop. The Puro Central Shop also gifted me a pack of the 2017 cards after I was unable to get some from the Stardom website. Both sets sold out pretty rapidly after the news broke that Kairi Hojo and Io Shirai from the Stardom promotion had accepted or were considering contract offers from the WWE.

Since the 2017 Stardom cards were sold out, I purchased a 5-pack of the 2015 Stardom 5th Anniversary cards. Like the 2017 cards, these shipped with the cards in a foil pack, tucked inside a paper insert, packed in a team bag. The paper insert has the checklist on the back. Autographs in the checklist are denoted with stars. Since autographs are numbered along with the other cards, this is a base set that is going to be difficult/impossible to complete, especially since the packs are sold out in the official Stardom store.

I didn't scan all of the cards, but I did scan some of the standouts, including cards of the previously-mentioned Io Shirai and Kairi Hojo. I've started a small Alpha Female wrestler collection, but her cards are pretty much limited to Stardom releases and that doesn't leave me with a lot of options to choose from. The card fronts are mostly in English, apart from outliers like Kellie Skater at the top center. As far as I can tell, that text says, "Kellie Skater!" I'm not sure why it's not in English.

The backs are not in English. I haven't taken the time to run my translation app across them yet, but I imagine they contain biographical data and maybe a paragraph describing a match or career highlights.

Here are a few more base cards. Some of the cards highlight the winners of specific tournaments, and some of the more interesting cards are found in a subset showing posters for different events, like Stardom Mask Fiesta, which appears to be exactly what it sounds like.

Card fronts tend to show portraits or posed photos, while card backs tend to show in-ring action. There are exceptions, and there are also cards that focus more on modeling than on wrestling. Stardom is kind of a hybrid organization. They aren't afraid to flaunt the looks of their wrestlers, and most of the wrestlers have done some kind of modeling. Stardom also seems to be the promotion that uses the most gaijin (foreign or non-Japanese) wrestlers as guests in their events. They show up in other promotions, but Stardom really leans on them and cross-promotes with organizations in other countries. That's why there are so many German, British, Australian, and Canadian wrestlers in the Stardom card sets.

I was lucky enough to pull five autographs out of my five packs of cards. I know that some packs didn't have autographs in them, but it seems like most packs did. I did pull doubles of Act Yasukawa's signature card. Haruka Kato's autograph is also a double for me, as it was one of my eBay purchases. Momo Watanabe and Starlight Kid were new ones for me, though. You can see there is some smearing and bubbling in the ink on these. Both Stardom sets used a glossy card coating that didn't take ink well. It is rare to find an autograph in these sets that isn't flawed in some way.

Like I mentioned earlier, the autographs are numbered along with the base set, and the card backs are similar to the ones found on the base cards. It looks like the text on most of them consists of birth date and hometown (not for mysterious masked wrestlers, though!), height, weight, debut, and signature move. Haruka Kato's card is different, though, and I don't know what the backs of the other autographs look like.

That's about all I know about the 2015 Stardom 5th Anniversary trading cards. It is unlikely that I will get my hands on any more packs of these, and I'm sure singles will dry up relatively quickly. It would be neat to get a full set, but that would probably take more money and effort than it would be worth.

Stardom Wrestling Cards from Puro Central Shop

Last week I showed off some Stardom wrestling cards I purchased from eBay, and today I'll be showing a package from the Puro Central Shop. As a short recap, Stardom is a women's wrestling promotion in Japan. They don't participate in the annual BBM True Heart wrestling card sets, but in 2015 and 2017 they released their own trading cards. The 2015 cards were available for a long time, but after the news broke that Stardom wrestlers Kairi Hojo and Io Shirai signed contracts with WWE, both the 2017 and the 2015 packs quickly sold out.

I was able to buy some 2015 packs before they were gone, and I'll post about my pulls from them at some point. I wasn't able to get any of the 2017 packs from the Stardom store, but I bought a quartet of singles from the Puro Central Shop, which sells all kinds of Japanese wrestling goods. The main card I was chasing was the Alpha Female in the upper left. She is also known as Jazzy Gabert, hails from Germany, and competes in MMA as well as wrestling. She has another individual card in the set, as well as some tag team cards, but I was only able to get this one. I also picked up cards from a few other names I recognized.

Here are the backs of the cards I picked up. The fronts of the cards typically show posed shots or photos of the wrestlers during their ring entrances, while the backs typically have an action photo. That isn't the case every time, but that seems to be the usual pattern. The 2017 cards are pretty similar in design to the 2015 cards, outside of the addition of the year on the set logo.

In a pretty cool move, the owner of the Puro Central Shop sent me a pack of the 2017 cards along with the ones I ordered. I don't know that I deserve that kind of honor because I tend to be a bit of a cheapskate when ordering from him (or anyone, really), but I surely did appreciate being able to rip my own pack of 2017 cards.

These were packaged similarly to the 2015 cards, with a paper insert inside of a team bag. The difference is that the 2015 cards were additionally packed in a gold foil envelope that was stapled shut and then placed in the team bag, while the 2017 cards were just slipped inside of the paper insert and put in the bag. The red stars on the checklist denote autographed cards, which are numbered as part of the set. The autographs are either made in differing quantities, or the collation really sucked from order to order, as the Puro Central Shop got several of the same wrestler in the packs they opened, and every pack they sent out also featured the same autograph. There's probably some lucky collectors out there who got only Kairi Hojo or Io Shirai autographs in their packs.

Each pack has ten cards in it, and here are the fronts of the nine non-autographed cards I pulled. There is pretty good variety here, with some homegrown stars, a tag team, some guests from out of the country, and a tournament victory card.

Most of the wrestlers have more than one card in the checklist. Some of them have what I would categorize as wrestling cards and modeling/idol cards. The idol cards have posed photos on front and back, like the cards above featuring Jungle Kyona, Kris Wolf, and Starlight Kid.

My autograph was Toni Storm. The glossy coatings on these cards mean that most of the autographs I've seen are smudged / streaked / faded in some way. BBM's True Heart sets moved to matte finishes on their autographs a few years ago (2014 maybe?), but Stardom's printer probably printed all of these cards on the same sheets and treated them all with the same coating. The only thing really separating these from the look and feel of a regular card is the white box where the signature goes and the 'SIGN CARD' designation under the set logo on the front.

I don't know a lot about Toni Storm, but this is a pretty cool card. Not all of the packs have autographs (maybe), although it seems like the 2017 packs are more likely than 2015 packs to contain an autograph. I haven't opened enough from either year to make a definitive statement on that, though.

I am glad that I was able to get a few of the Stardom cards in various ways, especially since they are now sold out and will probably be impossible to find after another month or two. I don't have any hope of completing a base set from either year, but it would be cool to find all of the Alpha Female cards that are available. She doesn't have an autograph in the set, so that should make the search a little easier.

Much thanks to Puro Central Shop for the bonus pack of 2017 Stardom cards, as I wouldn't have had the opportunity to bust a pack of these otherwise. As always, the card collecting community has proven to be more generous than I deserve. I am planning on sending a couple of these cards out to people who I know are fans of particular wrestlers, so maybe that will keep the karma flowing a little bit.