2023 Topps Now Asian Professional Baseball Championship Samurai Japan Team Set

Topps was selling a 28 card Topps Now team set online for the Samurai Japan team that won the Asian Professional Baseball Championship back in November.  The set was up for about a month between mid-December and and mid-January.  I got my set in the mail the other day.

This is not the first Topps Now cards that Topps issued for that particular iteration of Samurai Japan - they issued 16 individual cards back in November for manager Hirokazu Ibata and 15 players on the team.  This set has Ibata in it with all 26 of the players on the roster which accounts for 27 of the 28 cards with the other card being a team card.  The cards in this set look very similar to the earlier ones with one major difference - the names on the cards are in Japanese rather than English.

This team was very different than last spring's WBC Samurai Japan team.  The roster rules for the tournament mandated that all but three of the players must be age 24 or younger (born on or after January 1, 1999) and the other three must be 29 or younger (born on or after January 1, 1994).  So a lot of the older staples of past national teams like Tetsuto Yamada or Kensuke Kondoh were too old to be on this team.  Shugo Maki was the only player on the WBC team to also play for this team.  I had done a post for the roster back before the tournament started so rather than list all the players here, I'll just refer to it.

The cards are pretty attractive.  Here's some examples:

#SJ-1 Hirokazu Ibata

#SJ-7 Kojiro Yoshimura

#SJ-16 Kota Ishibashi

#SJ-17 Shugo Maki

#SJ-19 Teruaki Sato

#SJ-21 Makoto Kadowaki

#SJ-24 Shota Murakami

#SJ-25 Yuto Akihiro

#SJ-27 Chusei Mannami

It's a pretty good looking set and for the most part I like the photos that Topps picked.  It's funny that none of the photos used are the same that were used in the earlier set but there's at least two that are obviously from the same event but from a different angle or just seconds apart - Yuto Koga's bunt and Kadowaki's game winning hit from the final game against Korea.

Like the earlier cards, there's a "1st Samurai" icon on the front of every player who hasn't played for Samurai Japan in a professional tournament which means everyone except Shugo Maki (and manager Ibata).  I'm assuming Topps is qualifying it like that since at least Teruaki Sato, Takahisa Hayakawa, Shota Morishita and Shunsuke Sato all played for the collegiate Samurai Japan team and Teruaki Sato played on the Samurai Japan team that played friendlies against Australia in November of 2022.

Topps of course continued their lack of effort on the backs.  The back of every card except the team card is identical except for the card number and the player's name and position.  The back simply lists general information about the tournament in both Japanese and English.  As I've complained about the backs of every Topps Now Samurai Japan card issued by Topps in Japan, I'm astonished that they don't even put the scores of the games on them.

As I said, the one card that has a different back was the team card which has the full roster for the team (including the coaching staff).  Here's the front and back of that card:

#SJ-28

As I always say, I am a sucker for national team cards so I really like this set.  I am going to be curious if Topps will again do Topps Now Samurai Japan cards (individual cards and/or another team set) for the friendlies next month.  I think it's much more likely they'll do cards for the Premier 12 team next fall but it's not out of the question they'll do cards for both teams.

You can see all the cards over at Jambalaya.