I had mentioned a couple weeks ago that Panini had included redemption cards for autographed cards of Tomoyuki Sugano in their recent Donruss set. It turns out that that's not the only appearance of Sugano in a Panini set so far this year as he has also popped up in the Prizm set that was released a few weeks ago. I was first made aware of it by a tweet from BITS!, the Nagoya card shop and after a little looking around I discovered there were actually two cards of him in the set - a bast card and an insert card. I picked both of them up off Ebay for $6-ish total for the two cards - it was kind of funny that the base card cost more than the insert. Here's the front and back of both cards:
I don't like unlicensed cards and I don't like shiny cards so I can't say I'm a big fan of these. I find it kind of funny that the stats on the back of the two cards don't match - the stat line on the base set card says he threw 147 innings in 23 appearances last year with 104 strikeouts and a 3.12 ERA while the insert card says 149 innings in 24 appearances with 105 strikeouts and a 3.38 ERA. It turns out that they're both correct although the insert card is a little misleading. If you look at Sugano's Baseball-Reference page, you'll see that the base card has his ichi-gun stats from last year while the insert card has his stats from both ichi-gun and the two innings he pitched at ni-gun. I do find the prospect of Sugano being "the next big import from Japan" pretty dubious - he'll be 33 at the end of this season, he tried to sign with an MLB team a few years ago and got no offers that he liked and he really hasn't pitched all that well the past few seasons.
I will be curious to see if Panini includes him (or any other NPB players) in any additional sets this year.
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