Collecting Korea: Finally, Korean Baseball Cards!

One thing I noticed while in Korea that I keep coming back to is that Koreans haven't really developed a collecting culture. There are hobbies, of course. It seems like outdoor activities are extremely popular, especially with older generations. Video games and card games are fairly common, though there isn't much of a retail base for those. And everybody goes to Lotte World on their day off.

When it comes to souvenirs, though, they just haven't taken hold. I found a mall with several stamp collecting stores on my prior trip, though I'm not sure how they survive. As far as sports goes, I'm surprised there are no big baseball CCGs and there were no cards at any of the stadium stores I visited.

Teleca released a few sets in the 1990s. Three sets similar to what you see in America were issued in 1999 and 2000, plus several team and smaller issues seem to have come scattered over the years. I believe I have singles from the 1999 and 2000 issues and a few of the other random prior issues, but with limited details I don't know how complete my Korean collection is.

I didn't find any normal cards on this trip. I came home with seven different uncut sheets, though!

 Here's the first one. They remind me a lot of the old menko cards from Japan because they have card numbers and stars that could be used to play a game. And some of the earliest baseball menko cards were round. The sheets are die-cut and the discs can be punched out. This one is blank-backed; the others below all have similar backs. Each sheet is devoted to one team.

 This is obviously the Lotte Giants. I haven't tried translating any of the Hangul, but I'm assuming these were issued in 1983.

 Superman in his underwear in the upper-right might be the best card on this sheet, but there are two discs which feature only a player's waist or legs. It's an interesting idea.

 I have no idea how these were distributed, but the dealer I bought these from had some similar sheets with non-baseball artwork on them.

 I wonder if these were licensed. I don't think licensing is so tightly controlled like it is in Japan and America. The placement of the text on some of these discs is fairly funny, running right across the player's face.

 When you don't have enough pictures to fill a card, you just use large ones that take up multiple discs. So you have a disc with someone's stomach, and another one with his forearms. And then there's the photo in the lower right, which was cropped so tight that the disc shows only his eyes and nose!

The last might be my favorite because of the extra cartoons and inclusion of a game ball image.

I haven't done any research to try to discover any player names and an issue date, and I'm too busy these days to do so anyway. I'd be interested in compiling as extensive a list of Korean sets as possible for a post - I'm aware of most of the Teleca cards, of course, the 1995 sticker set, and the 2010 card game set. (I think SCF could really be improved by the addition of league information for each set.)

And yes, that's it. Perhaps a return to some of the stamp shops or similar shops in Korea might provide me with some additional sets, but it really does seem they have all disappeared. There aren't many paper-goods dealers at the flea markets I visited in Seoul.