Finally trying to get caught up on the recent MLB signings...
Yokohama DeNA Baystars outfielder Yoshitomo Tsutsugoh signed a two year deal with the Tampa Bay Rays back in mid-December. Tsutsugoh was a first round pick out of Yokohama High School by his hometown team back in 2009 and has spent his entire career with the Baystars. He spent most of 2010 with the Baystars farm team in Yokosuka although he made his debut with the
ichi-gun team that October, hitting his first home run against the Hanshin Tigers on October 7th. He was originally a corner infielder but injuries and other players limited his opportunities for playing time in his first couple seasons. Manager Kiyoshi Nakahata moved him to the outfield in 2014 and he responded with a breakout season, hitting .300 with 22 home runs and 77 RBIs. He improved on that in 2015 with a .317 average, 24 home runs and 95 RBIs and had his best year in 2016 with a .322 average, 44 home runs and 110 RBIs. He's a five time All Star (2015-19), been named to the Best 9 team three times (2015-17), and led the Central League in home runs and RBIs in 2016. He's played in one Nippon Series (2017) and represented Japan in the 2015 Premier 12 and the 2017 World Baseball Classic. He won an All Star Game MVP award in 2016 and was one of the WBC first round MVPs in 2017.
Tsutsugoh's first card is from the 2010 BBM Rookie Edition set (#042). His other 2010 BBM cards include two cards in the 1st Version set (#212 & #476) as well as a card in 2nd Version (#617) and five cards in the Baystars team set (#YB54, #YB80, #YB88, #YB89, #YB90). He's been in every BBM Baystars team set since then 2010. He was only in 1st Version in 2011, was in both 1st and 2nd in 2012, only in 1st Version in 2013, only in 2nd Version in 2014 and has been in both 1st and 2nd Version every year since then. His first appearance on a Calbee card is one of the checklists (#C-1) of the 2011 Series One set which shows him hitting his first home run on October 7th, 2010 but his first actual player card wasn't until 2012 (#141). He's had at least one card in every Calbee set since 2012 although he only had a "Title Holder" card in 2017, not a regular player card. He's also appeared in sets from Bandai, Konami, Epoch and Front Runner over the years.
TradingCardsDB.com has a good list of a lot of his cards.
I'm going to do something a little similar to what I did last year for
Yusei Kikuchi and concentrate the first part of this post on his early cards:
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| 2010 BBM Rookie Edition #042 |
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| 2010 BBM 1st Version #212 |
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| 2010 BBM 1st Version #476 |
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| 2010 BBM 2nd Version #617 |
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| 2010 SCM #156 |
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| 2012 Calbee #141 |
Since he played in the 2017 World Baseball Classic, Tsutsugoh already has a number of American cards. For the second part of this post I wanted to concentrate on those. If we include memorabilia cards, he had seven different cards from Topps in 2017 - the Topps Now Team Japan set (#JPN-4), the Bowman Paper Prospects card (#BP62 which had some ridiculous number of parallels including Chrome), a Museum Collection Quad Relic (#WBCQR-YT with three parallels), a Allen & Ginter WBC Relic (#WBCR-YT with a "framed mini" parallel), a Triple Threads WBC Relic (#WBCR-YT with five parallel versions), a Triple Threads WBC Combo Relic with Hayato Sakamoto and Tetsuto Yamada (#WBC-SYT with five parallel versions) and a Diamond Icons Single-Player Relic (#SR-YT with two parallels). Here's what I have of these:
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| 2017 Topps Now Team Japan #JPN-4 |
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| 2017 Bowman Paper Prospects #BP62 |
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| 2017 Topps Allen & Ginter #WBCR-YT |
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| 2017 Topps Triple Threads #WBC-SYT |
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