Japanese Baseball Cards: Takashi Toritani

Monday, February 28, 2022

Takashi Toritani

My final retirement post for this offseason is for former Hanshin Tigers and Chiba Lotte Marine infielder Takashi Toritani. I previously did a post for Toritani about 4 1/2 years ago when he reached 2000 hits so I'll just kind of repeat and update what I wrote then.

In fact, I need to correct something - in that post I erroneously said that Toritani was the Tigers' fourth round pick in the 2003 draft out of Waseda University. He actually was essentially their first pick - he and the Tigers agreed to a pre-draft deal as part of the "free acquisition frame" of the draft. He took over as the starting shortstop for Hanshin in 2005 and didn't miss a game for them for the next 13 years. He was a seven time All Star (2005-06, 2012-15, 2017) a six time Best 9 award winner (2008, 2010, 2011, 2013-15) and a four time Golden Glove award winner (2011, 2013-15). He played in the Nippon Series twice, losing to the Marines in 2005 and the Hawks in 2014. He was a member of the 2013 World Baseball Classic Japanese team and had a critical stolen base in the ninth inning of their game against Taiwan that put him in position to score the tying run on Hirokazu Ibata's single.

After a poor 2019 season, he and the Tigers parted ways and he signed with the Chiba Lotte Marines. He played sparingly over the next two seasons, didn't hit very well and announced his retirement at the end of October. He'll be a baseball commentator on TV this season.

Toritani's first BBM cards are from the 2004 Rookie Edition (#40) and 1st Version (#213) sets while his first Calbee card was #055 from the 2005 Series One set. Here's a bunch of his cards - I purposely picked ones that I didn't show (or like the Rookie Edition card didn't have) in the previous post I did for him: