Sunday, August 2, 2015

Card Of The Week August 2

Last Tuesday, Kyohei Iwasaki of the Buffaloes hit the 8000th home run in team history (including, of course, the period of time that the team was owned by Hankyu).




Orix becomes the fifth team to reach this milestone, behind Yomiuri (9726), Seibu (8466), Chunichi (8352) and Softbank (8093).  (Numbers through last Tuesday I assume).  Seibu is the odd outlier here as the other four teams all started in the 1930's but the Lions didn't begin play until 1950 - they must have a hit a lot of home runs along the way to pass every one but the Giants.

Iwasaki is an odd guy to have hit the home run - it's only the second of his career which began in 2009 in the Dragons organization.

2011 BBM Dragons #D50



2 comments:

Jason Presley said...

I'm curious, when the Orix BlueWave and Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes merged, did they merge records, or have the original Buffaloes franchise records just been abandoned as of the merger?

NPB Card Guy said...

As far as I can tell, Orix has not adopted Kintetsu's records or any other aspect of their history. For example, Keishi Suzuki's uniform number (#1) was retired by Kintetsu but both Mitsutaka Gotoh and Hiroyuki Nakajima have worn it for Orix since the "merger".