Card Of The Week June 7

I've had a busy last couple of days so I haven't been able to track the recent events in NPB very closely so this week I thought I'd do a topic I've wanted to look into for a while.  I've known that former Fighter and Giant (not to mention Lake Country Dockhounds, Brisbane Bandits, High Point Rockers and Oisix Niigata Albirex BC) outfielder Daikan Yoh had changed his name a couple of times during his career but I wasn't sure of how many times or when they happened.  

Yoh is Taiwanese but since he attended high school in Japan, he was subject to the NPB draft.  He was taken by both the Fighters and Hawks in the first round of the high school portion of the 2005 draft and the Fighters won the lottery for his rights (the Hawks had to settle for Yuta Arakawa).  His name in kanji at the time was 陽 仲壽 which was rendered as "Chung-Shou Yang" on his baseball cards in 2006:

2006 BBM Rookie Edition #32

From 2007 to 2009, his name was rendered on his baseball cards as "Chonso Yoh" although the kanji version of his name remained unchanged:

2008 BBM Fighters #F49

He changed his name to 陽 岱鋼 in 2010 which was rendered as "Daikan Yoh":

2014 BBM Speed & Smart #07

He's stayed with that name ever since.  So I guess that technically, he's only had two names but one of those got rendered in two different ways.  I don't pretend to know enough about why that would be or why he changed his name in the first place.  And I'll avoid the obvious "player to be named later" joke since that's been done any number of times - I think I first heard it when Harry Rasmussen changed his name to Eric in 1976.

While reading up about Yoh, I discovered that his older brother Yao-Hsun Yang had pitched for the Hawks from 2006 to 2013.  The elder brother had not gone to school in Japan and was considered a foreign player in NPB while the younger brother was a domestic player.  After being let go by the Hawks, he played briefly in the Pittsburgh Pirates organization in 2014 before joining the Lamigo Monkeys of the CPBL in 2015.  A shoulder injury ended up forcing him to give up pitching and become an outfielder.  He stayed with the Monkeys through 2021 (by which time they were owned by Rakuten) and spent 2022 with the Fubon Guardians.  He signed on with an amateur team after Fubon released him but I don't know if he's still playing for them (he's now 43 years old).

2006 BBM Hawks #H034

The brothers Yang were teammates on the Taiwanese WBC team in both 2006 and 2013.  They both appeared in the 2013 Topps Tribute WBC set (with Daikan getting yet another rendering of his name):

2013 Topps Tribute WBC #55

2013 Topps Tribute WBC #6

More Japanese Pitchers In Korea

I wanted to do a quick update on some Japanese pitchers playing in South Korea, three who I hadn't realized were there before and two that just recently signed.

Let's start with the two newcomers - or one newcomer and one returnee.  The Doosan Bears released their Asian quota player - Ichiro Tamura - last week and replaced him with Takuto Takada.  Takada was the sixth round pick of the Baystars in the 2020 draft and played for them through the 2024 season.  He signed on with the Oisix Niigata Albirex Baseball Club, one of the two independent teams in NPB's farm leagues, after being released by DeNA and has been playing for them until Doosan signed him.

2023 BBM Baystars #DB30

The other pitcher is Keisho Shirakawa, who's been playing for the Tokushima Indigo Socks of the independent Shikoku Island league since 2020.  Shirakawa is joining the KIA Tigers who released their Asian quota player, Australian infielder Jarryd Dale, a few weeks back.  Shirakawa had previously briefly played in KBO as an "injury replacement player" in separate stints with two different teams (SSG and Doosan) in 2024.  He missed the 2025 season due to Tommy John surgery.  I do not have any baseball cards for him but I suspect there are cards of him with Tokushima.

The three pitchers I hadn't realized were in Korea are playing for the Ulsen Whales, an independent team playing in the KBO Futures League, the farm league for KBO.  This is the Whales inaugural season and notable players on their roster besides the Japanese pitchers are eight year MLB veteran Ji-man Choi and Alex Hall, one of the catchers on Australia's WBC teams in 2023 and 2026.  

Jui Kobayashi was the Hawks fourth pick in the 2019 draft.  He was an infielder for his first three years with the team but switched to pitching after being released and resigned by the team as a development (ikusei) player. He signed with Niigata after being released by the Hawks for a final time after 2024 and spent 2025 with them.  I don't have any cards of him as a pitcher, only as an infielder:

2020 Epoch NPB #071

Taisei Naga has spent the past four years playing for independent league teams after graduating from Hokkaido University.  He spent 2022 and 2023 with the Bibai Black Diamonds of the Hokkaido Baseball League and 2024 and 2025 with Gunma Diamond Pegasus of the Baseball Challenge League.  I do not know if he has any baseball cards from either of those teams.

Akitake Okada was the first pick of the Carp in the 2015 draft and was a member of their V3 team which finished in first place in three straight years from 2016 to 2018.  He pitched in the Nippon Series in both 2016 against the Fighters and 2018 against the Hawks but his best season was probably 2017 when he went 12-5 and made the All Star team.  He got injured late in the 2018 season and spent almost the entire rest of his time with the Carp on their farm team.  He missed the entire 2022 season recovering from Tommy John surgery and was an ikusei player in 2024, his last year in Hiroshima.  He spent 2025 playing for Meiji Yasuda of the corporate leagues before giving professional baseball another shot with Ulsen.

2019 BBM 1st Version #166

Who Is Kippei Mikawa?

The Cubs announced that they had signed a Japanese pitcher named Kippei Mikawa this week and I have been obsessed with answering one simple question:

I had never heard of this guy before.  Here's what the article on Cubs HQ said about him: 

A former Rikkyo University pitcher, Mikawa, briefly retired from Baseball only to leave CyberAgent 3 a few months ago to pursue a dream in American Baseball. That dream has officially become a reality, as Mikawa is joining the Cubs and will await his system placement. Before his brief retirement, Mikawa was part of the Yomiuri Giants Jr. squad, which is equivalent to a Minor League affiliate in the U.S.

Hmm, I've never heard of the Giants farm team being referred to as the "Jr. squad" before, but, OK, I'll take that at face value.  But if he went from Rikkyo to the Giants, he must have been drafted, right?  But I looked through the last few years of the NPB draft and I don't see a player by that name being drafted by the Giants (or anyone else).  And I looked through the Giants rosters for the past four or five seasons as well (both 70 man and ikusei) and I didn't find him there either.  

I did some Google searching and once I found the kanji for his name (三河吉平), I started finding some information for him.  He did pitch for Rikkyo but it looks like he only appeared in three games over his four years there.  He pitched 1/3 of an inning against Keio on September 10th, 2023, facing three batters and giving up no runs.  His next outing didn't go as well - one inning against Meiji on September 30th of that year in which he gave up two runs on a hit and a walk.  It would be 13 months before he'd appear in another game and it was a disaster.  He recorded no outs against Tokyo on October 27th, 2024, facing seven batters and walking four of them, hitting one of them and giving up two base hits.  He was charged with five earned runs.  Keep in mind that Tokyo University is traditionally the doormat of the Tokyo Big Six league so read into that what you may.  (I got the stat lines from his college games here.)

Rikkyo University's web page for the "career paths for 2024 graduates" does indicate that he went to work at a company called "CyberAgent" but does not indicate that he'd be playing baseball for them - which more or less matches what the above blurb said.  

OK, so his story is more or less checking out.  Except for the thing about the Giants.  Seems a weird thing to lie about since it's relatively easy to check it out.  But then I found this web page listing all the teams he played for and it all fell into place.  He did indeed play for the "Yomiuri Giants Jr." team but it was in 2014 when he would have been 12 years old.  The "Yomiuri Giants Jr." team is apparently a youth team that I assume has some connection to the NPB club but is not in any sense "equivalent to a Minor League affiliate in the U.S.".

I'm somewhat baffled about why the Cubs signed this guy.  He hasn't pitched competitively in 18 months and he didn't pitch particularly effectively or often before that.  I mean, I wish him the best of luck and it's not my money, but he's certainly a long shot.  I would think there would be other guys playing in the corporate or indy leagues in Japan that would be more likely to pan out (although we're still talking long odds).

I can't imagine that the Cubs thought he'd actually been in the Yomiuri Giants' organization.  If they did, that's really embarrassing.

It should go without saying but I'll mention it anyway - as far as I know, Mikawa doesn't have any baseball cards.

Card Of The Week May 31

There were a couple interesting events last week, both in MLB and NPB.  On Monday night, three Astros pitchers combined to no-hit the Texas Rangers.  One of those pitchers was Tatsuya Imai, who started the game and went six innings.  Imai had also been part of a combined no-hitter last year in Japan.  I had briefly thought that Imai was the first pitcher to have taken part in a no-hitter in both NPB and MLB but I had forgotten that Shota Imanaga had thrown a complete game no-hitter in Japan and been part of a combined no-hitter in MLB.  In fact, Imanaga's combined no-no was the most recent no-hitter in MLB before the Astros' one last week.   Fun fact - the final pitcher of the night for Houston, Alimber Santa, was making his big league debut in that game.  He's the second player in history to debut in a no-hitter, after Bumpus Jones in 1892.

On Tuesday, the news broke that Shinnosuke Abe, manager of the Yomiuri Giants, was stepping down after having been arrested under suspicion of assaulting his teenaged daughter.  I'm not sure all the details have been established but apparently he intervened in an argument between his daughters and may have thrown the older one to the ground.  The daughter contacted child consultation services who then got the police involved.  The whole thing is quite serious and disturbing and it's not what I want to focus on.  With Abe stepping down, the Giants have named Hideki Hashigami as interim manager.  Hashigami had a 12 year career playing for the Swallows (1988-96) and the Fighters (1997-99) - and notably did not play for the Giants.  He's coached for numerous teams since retiring as a player.  Yomiuri is stressing the "interim" part of his job title as the team hasn't replaced a manager mid-season since 1949 and they've never had a manager who didn't play for them.  In fact, they've never had an "official" manager who ever played for another team (at least not before he managed the team).  There's a lot that will still play out in the story but I doubt Hashigami will have the job after the season ends.

Here are cards of both Imai and Hashigami:

2024 Calbee Series Two #114

1994 BBM Late Series #594

RIP Bob Horner

Bob Horner passed away yesterday at the age of 68 years old.  Horner was a star player at Arizona State in the 1970's, winning the first ever Golden Spikes award in 1978.  He was the number one overall pick in the MLB draft that year and was immediately put on the Atlanta Braves' major league roster, skipping the minor leagues entirely.  He'd hit 23 home runs in just over half a season and was named National League Rookie Of The Year.  He'd would team up with with Dale Murphy to be a deadly middle of the lineup combination for much of the next nine seasons in Atlanta, hitting 215 home runs over that time span.  And then, in 1987, Bob Horner went to play in Japan.

Horner had become a free agent following the 1986 season and wanted a contract for $2 million.  No major league team would offer him that but the Yakult Swallows did.  Horner signed and headed overseas.

A major league star at the peak of his career signing with a Japanese club was unheard of at the time (and pretty much still is).  These were the days of Japan's global economic dominance and it seemed like it was just another example of the Japanese buying up everything.  Robert Whiting used Horner's signing and experience playing in Japan as the opening chapter in his 1988 book "You Gotta Have Wa" and put the signing in context:

Japan was at the height of its economic muscle.  Japanese interests owned 54 percent of all the cash in the world's banks, 65 percent of all Manhattan real estate, and 3 percent of the entire U.S. national debt.  A staid Japanese insurance company had paid 39 million dollars for Van Gogh's painting Sunflower.

And now, in what one TV commentator had called the piece de resistance, a Japanese baseball team had outbid the American major leagues for a prime American player: James Robert Horner.

What Whiting didn't know or account for at the time was that the main reason the Swallows were able to sign Horner was that the major league owners were illegally conspiring to not sign each other's players.  Almost no free agents changed teams that winter.  What he also couldn't know was that the Japanese economy would stagnate starting in 1990.  Horner's signing by the Swallows was not a harbinger of things to come but basically a one-off due to unique circumstances - Japan's economic clout and MLB collusion.

The Swallows issued Horner uniform number 50 with the implication that he'd hit that many home runs, despite not joining the team until mid-April.  For the first few weeks, it looked like that was a possibility.  He homered in his first game and hit several more in his next games.  But inevitably the league adjusted to him and and pitchers stopped challenging him.  He finished 1987 with a .327 average, 31 home runs and 73 RBIs in 93 games.  

The Swallows offered him a three year contract for $10 million dollars but Horner had had enough of Japan after one season.  He returned to MLB and signed a one year deal with the Cardinals.  He was invited to spring training with the Orioles in 1989 but retired instead.  

Horner was one of only two Golden Spikes winners to play in NPB (with Trevor Bauer being the other) and one of only four number one overall picks to do so (along with Danny Goodwin, Floyd Bannister and Bryan Bullington).  

As far as I can tell, he only had six cards showing him with the Swallows that came out in 1987.  Five of these were in that year's Calbee set, numbers 101, 111, 121, 201 and 319.  The other was from the Play Ball set which was an unlicensed set issued in the United States, possibly to capitalize on Horner's presence on the Swallows.  He's only appeared in two OB sets since he retired - the 2013 BBM Legendary Foreigners and the 2020 Epoch OB Club Career Achievements sets.  Here are the cards I have of him:

1987 Calbee #101

1987 Calbee #111

1987 Calbee #121

1987 Play Ball #1

2013 BBM Legendary Foreigners #35

In rereading Robert Whiting's book when doing research for this post, I saw that he mentioned a commercial Horner had done for Suntory beer.  I went spelunking through YouTube and found this, although I'm not positive it's the one Whiting meant:

Japanese MLB Players With No NPB Experience

Rikuu Nishida made his MB debut with the White Sox today.  Nishida was born in Osaka, Japan but played college baseball in Oregon for Mt. Hood Community College and the University of Oregon.  He was drafted by the White Sox in 2023 and has been working his way up their farm system ever since.

I think that Nishida is the seventh Japanese baseball player to make it to MLB without having played in NPB first but I'm not positive.  Part of the uncertainty is defining what "Japanese baseball player" means.  Does it mean being born in Japan?   That would mean that someone like Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, who was born in Okinawa to an American serviceman father and Japanese mother, or Lee Jung-hoo, who was born in Nagoya while his father Lee Jong-beom was playing for the Dragons, would count.  I'm not sure folks like that are what most people think about when thinking about "Japanese baseball players", however, so I'm going to go with "players who could reasonably be expected to hold a Japanese passport".

The six previous players by my definition are Mac Suzuki, Michael Nakamura, Kazuhito Tadano, Junichi Tazawa, Gosuke Katoh and Lars Nootbaar.  I'm a little iffy on whether or not Nootbaar has a Japanese passport but obviously he meets the definition of "Japanese" for the purposes of the World Baseball Classic.  I suspect Nootbaar would probably not want to let anyone know he's got a Japanese passport if he ever decided to play in NPB as he would then be subject to their draft rather than being a free agent (which is why Katoh was drafted by the Fighters despite being born in California to Japanese parents).

Four of these six players eventually played in NPB with Tazawa and Nootbaar (so far) being the exceptions.  Three of those four joined the Fighters oddly enough.  Tazawa had wanted to join NPB but was pretty much blackballed after spurning the league for MLB in the late 00's.  He had made himself available for the 2020 NPB draft but wasn't taken by anyone.

Here are NPB cards of the four plus a Japanese WBC card of Nootbaar:

2003 Calbee Series One #082

2006 BBM Nippon Series #S08

2013 BBM 1st Version #171

2024 Epoch Fighters Premier Edition #29

2023 Topps Samurai Japan #10

There have been a number of Japanese baseball players who started their professional careers in North America (but didn't necessarily make it to MLB) before ending up back in Japan with NPB.  I did a post on a bunch of them some years back (which included Suzuki, Nakamura and Tadano) but I don't know if I missed anyone or if there's anyone that's come in the years since then.

Card Of The Week May 24

Taisei Irie of the Baystars tied a dubious record yesterday when he threw 60 pitches in the first inning of his start against the Swallows.  He faced ten batters and gave up six earned runs on six hits (including three doubles) and a walk.  Incredibly, he gave up all the hits (and the walk) after having gotten the first two batters of the game out.  It was the only inning he pitched and the six runs were the only runs scored in the entire game.  

The record he tied was set 29 years ago by Bob Milacki of the Kintesu Buffaloes, who gave up 10 runs int the first inning against the Seibu Lions on June 27th, 1997.  Milacki's stint with Kintetsu was fairly short-lived, going 0-2 with an ERA of 7.30 in six games (including five starts).  Irie was the Baystars first pick in the 2020 draft so I suspect he'll be given a longer rope than Milacki was.

Here are cards of the two players:

2021 BBM 1st Version #265

1997 BBM #166