Carter Stewart

It was big news last month when Carter Stewart, the Atlanta Braves top draft pick from last year, signed a six year deal with the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks.  Stewart was the eighth overall pick in the 2018 draft out of high school but failed to come to terms with the Braves. 

I was fortunate enough to be at the Hawks game on June 2 where the team introduced him to the Fukuoka Dome crowd at the beginning of the Hawks "Lucky 7".  His official introduction was at a press conference the next day.  He's been working out with the Hawks farm team ever since although he has not appeared in a game yet.

I've been asked about Japanese baseball cards for him.  There's actually one out already - there's an Epoch One card for him from the press conference on June 3rd.  A couple of these have made their way to Yahoo! Japan Auctions and from them I can see that the print run for the card was only 326 which I think is surprisingly low.

BBM announced their annual Hawks team set this past week and the promotional material for the set says it will include Stewart.  That's the only BBM card I know for sure will be issued for him this year although I would expect that he'd either have a card in the 2nd Version set in August or the Fusion set in November (or possibly both). 

Other than that - your guess is as good as mine.  There's a couple sets that I expect be released in the fall that he could show up in - Calbee's Series Three, BBM's Rookie Edition Premium and Genesis sets - but nothing I feel he'd definitely show up in.  Of course it'd entirely possible that BBM or Epoch will release something else this year that has him in it.  I also would not be surprised if he showed up on another Epoch One card before the season is over, especially if he made an appearance with the ichi-gun Hawks.