What it looked like to me was that these were cards of Hirokazu Ibata and Seiichi Uchikawa from some Samurai Japan set that I'd never seen before. I was pretty confident that it was something that Konami had done for the 2013 World Baseball Classic since the Japanese team for that tournament was the only National Team that both players had been on - it was actually the ONLY National Team Ibata had played for other than the 2003 Asian Championship team. But what kind of a set was it? Was it just a team set for the Samurai Japan team or - dare I dream - was it a repeat of the amazing 2009 Konami WBC Baseball Heroes set, which featured cards of over 250 players from all 16 teams in the tournament. Given that Topps' WBC cards from 2013 were a bit underwhelming in number of players and teams represented, it'd be great to have an alternative.
Steve unfortunately could provide no further information about these cards and I kind of put this on the back burner until about a month ago when I decided to try to get serious about tracking the details down. I was able to locate four cards on Mecari and one other one on Yahoo! Japan Auctions - with the images of the fronts and backs I was able to confirm that (1) the set was from Konami, (2) the set only featured members of Samurai Japan and (3) the set only had 11 cards. I eventually found a checklist for the set on-line so I know for sure what cards are out there. Here's the list:
| Number | Player |
|---|---|
| B13SJ001 | Tetsuya Utsumi |
| B13SJ002 | Hirokazu Ibata |
| B13SJ003 | Ryoji Aikawa |
| B13SJ004 | Kenta Maeda |
| B13SJ005 | Takashi Toritani |
| B13SJ006 | Sho Nakata |
| B13SJ007 | Kazuhisa Makita |
| B13SJ008 | Seiichi Uchikawa |
| B13SJ009 | Masahiro Tanaka |
| B13SJ010 | Katsuya Kakunaka |
| B13SJ011 | Yoshio Itoi |
I suspect that these cards were some sort of insert set with one of Konami's larger sets but I don't know which one. I thought the player selection was a little odd until I realized that the set included one and only one player from each of the eleven NPB teams that contributed players to the 2013 WBC team (everyone except the Baystars). Utsumi was from the Giants, Ibata was from the Dragons, Aikawa was from the Swallows, Maeda from the Carp, Toritani from the Tigers, etc. There's still some choices that strike me as odd - why would you pick Utsumi over Shinnosuke Abe or Hayato Sakamoto? - but at least I understand why there's only 11 cards.
Itoi had just been traded from the Fighters to the Buffaloes about six weeks before the tournament - if he hadn't been traded, there wouldn't be any Orix players either.
Only three of these 11 players - Utsumi, Maeda and Tanaka - appear in the 2013 Topps Tribute WBC set which means that between the two sets there are baseball cards for 23 of the 28 members of the team. There are no cards for Hirokazu Sawamura, Masahiko Morifuku, Tetsuya Yamaguchi, Ginjiro Sumitani and Hisayoshi Chono.
Of the five auctions I found, three of them were for much more than I was willing to pay for a single card. The Tanaka card is still out there for 8000 yen! Ryan picked up the Maeda and Utsumi cards for me (at 600 and 1000 yen apiece respectively) and we're both keeping an eye out for more at the right price. Here's images I've swiped from the auctions of the cards of Maeda, Utsumi, Itoi, Tanaka and Toritani - note that the Toritani image has the sellers watermark across it:
With this set it now appears that the 2006 WBC was the only one that did not have any Japanese made baseball cards - 2009 had the aforementioned Konami set and 2017 had the Calbee Samurai Japan set that wasn't officially a WBC set but included most of the players from the team.
1 comment:
Nice bit of detective work to track that down.
Its a shame there weren't any 2006 WBC sets (at least Japanese ones).
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