Card Of The Week September 27

The January 2009 edition of Sports Card Magazine featured three bonus cards for the 2009 BBM Rookie Edition set.  Two of these featured pictures Kazuhiro Kiyohara and Sadaharu Oh from their rookie seasons of 1986 and 1959 respectively.  These cards were essentially promo cards from the "single-player" sets BBM put out commemorating their retirements following the 2008 season - the backs of the cards were ads for the sets.

The third card, however, featured a player who was not taken in the NPB draft the previous fall, but the Kansai Independent Baseball League.  In the seventh round of the league's draft, the Kobe 9 Cruse took a 16 year old female knuckleball pitcher from Kawasaki-kita Senior High School named Eri Yoshida:

SCM #114

Back of SCM #114

Yoshida has gone on to play for a couple independent teams in the US.  She has been a member of the Ishikawa Million Stars in the BC Challenge league for the past three seasons (if this team sounds familiar, it's the team Julio Franco is managing).  She's had additional baseball cards both in the US and in Japan (she's been in at least one of BBM's Real Venus sets) but this was the first.