For the third time in five years an all star team from the Shikoku Island League is going to be playing in the CanAm League.
Starting tomorrow night and continuing for the next three weeks this team will play 19 games in the league that will count in the league's standings.
The
roster for the team is not available on the CanAm League's website yet but there's
a pdf available from the Shikoku Island League's website for the roster - although there's been one change -
Kagawa pitcher Akifumi Matayoshi stepped down due to injury and was replaced by a pitcher from Ehime named Yudai Hayashi (I think).
As I did with the
2015 and
2016 versions of this team, I took a look at the roster to see which players and coaches had NPB cards. The answer is not many.
 |
| 2000 BBM Preview #P125 |
The only player on the roster with NPB experience is Ehime Mandarin Pirate pitcher Itsuki Shoda. Shoda is the only player on the roster to appear on the previous CanAm league squads. Shoda was the first round pick of the Nippon-Ham Fighters in the fall 1999 draft and was the Pacific League Rookie Of The Year in 2003. He was traded to the Tigers following the 2006 season for Takehito Kanazawa and was released by Hashin after two seasons. He spent the next two seasons in Taiwan with the Sinon Bulls before
making an attempt to join the Red Sox in the spring of 2011. After being released by Boston he joined Niigata Albirex of the Baseball Challenge League. He spent the next two seasons with the Tokyo Yakult Swallows, then started the 2014 season back in Taiwan with the Lamigo Monkeys but he was released after two months. He then joined Ehime where he's been ever since. TradingCardDB.com has
a list of NPB and CPBL cards for him - this may not be a complete list.
 |
| 2005 BBM Fighters #F38 |
Teppai Komai is the hitting coach (I think) for the team. He was a sixth round pick of the Fighters in the 2000 draft. He spent his entire career (2001-08) with the Fighters, almost entirely with their farm team. He had one at bat in one game at the
ichi-gun level in 2003. He was the bullpen coach for the Fighters for three years after he retired and became a coach with the Tokushima Indigo Socks starting in 2016.
Besides a card in the 2001 BBM flagship set all of his cards are from BBM's Fighters team sets.
 |
| 2002 BBM Fighters #031 |
Team manager Testsu Yofu has had an interesting career. After graduating from Asia University, Yofu spent several years playing for Nissan Motor in Japan's corporate leagues. He made the move to professional baseball in 2001 at age 27 when he joined the Brother Elephants in Taiwan. He won a Gold Glove that season and was named MVP of the Taiwan Series. He decided to try his luck in NPB after that and was a seventh round pick of the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks in the fall 2001 draft. He spent all of 2002 on the Hawks farm team and was released at the end of the season. He signed a minor league deal with the Chicago White Sox and split each of the next two seasons between their AA Birmingham and AAA Charlotte teams. The highlight of these two seasons was the no-hitter he pitched for Charlotte against Durham in 2004. Things fell apart for him in 2005 though when he was suspended for testing positive for a banned substance and subsequently released by the White Sox. He signed on with the Newark Bears of the Atlantic League but never got into a game. He returned to the Brother Elephants for the 2006 season and retired afterward. He returned to Taiwan and the Brother Elephants (now called the Chinatrust Elephants) to coach for the 2015-16 seasons and was the manager of the Tokushima Indigo Socks in 2017. I'm not positive but I think the league hired him to manage the All Star team as opposed to having one of the managers of the league's teams manage them. Yofu only has two NPB cards that I know of (2002 BBM 1st Version #239 and BBM Hawks #031) but
he had a number of cards during his time in the White Sox organization (including any number of Bowman parallels in 2005) and a couple CPBL cards in 2016.
No comments:
Post a Comment