2017 NPB Draft

The annual NPB draft was held yesterday - I guess that technically it should be referred to as the 2016 draft but since the BBM baseball card of everyone drafted will say they were drafted in 2017, I'm going to call it the 2017 draft.  Deanna live blogged the draft again and Gen of YakyuDB has a round by round list for both the regular and ikusei portions of the draft.

My part of this tradition the past eight years is to list the existing baseball cards of the draftees.  The list of cards has grown smaller over the past few years as BBM hasn't done a collegiate baseball card set since 2013.  This year there's only one draftee who appears in any of BBM's collegiate sets - Yuhei Takanashi who was drafted in the ninth round by Rakuten from JX-ENEOS of the industrial leagues.  Takanashi attended Waseda University from 2011 to 2014 (I assume he played for JX-ENEOS in 2015 and 2016) and appears in two of BBM's TOkyo Big Six sets:

2011 BBM Tokyo Big Six Autumn Version #27

2012 BBM Tokyo Big Six #08

For the second year in a row the only players from the Shikoku Island League that got drafted were ones that had played on the All Star team in the Can-Am League.  There were three players drafted - Yusuke Kinoshita of the Tokushima Indigo Socks (Dragons, ikusei round 1), Shungo Fukunaga also of Tokushima (Tigers, round 6) and Yusuke Matsuzawa of the Kagawa Olive Guyners (Giants, ikusei round 8).  Matsuzawa was drafted by the Giants in the first round of the ikusei draft last year but did not sign - he's kind of the reverse Hisayoshi Chono.  As far as I can tell from looking at the team websites, the only Shikoku Island League teams to do team sets last year were Ehime and Kochi so there aren't any cards of Kinoshita, Fukunaga or Matsuzawa, at last for 2016.

I don't know how many other former Tokyo Big Six players with baseball cards are out there in the industrial or independent leagues who could be drafted in the future so this may be my last draft post.