Team Issued Cards

The box Ryan sent me last week contained a bunch of team issued cards.  Team issued cards - like magazine issued cards - are one of the great unknowns when it comes to Japanese baseball cards.  No one seems to know for sure how many sets are out there.  As a result, I'm always happy to find some although frequently they raise more questions than answers.

Some of these cards are ones I saw on Yahoo! Japan Auctions or Mercari and asked Ryan to pick up for me and some of them were cards Ryan put in the box figuring that I would like them (and he was right!).  I thought I'd do a post showing these off.

I'm kind of excited about this first pair of cards as they may be the first team issued cards I've ever seen for the Hiroshima Toyo Carp which is the only NPB team that I don't have any such cards for.  There's nothing on the cards that would lead you to think these were some sort of food issue.  There also isn't anything on them indicating what year they're from although they must be from 2021 or later as Kuribayashi didn't join the team until then:

The backs of the cards are generic, identical and not any help:

There were a bunch of cards for the Fighters in the box.  This card commemorates Yukio Tanaka reaching 2000 hits and I assume it was issued in 2007:

These two cards were issued in 2014 as some sort of tie-in to the tenth season of interleague play (and not the team's 10th Anniversary in Hokkaido as their tenth season up north was 2013).  I have another card from this set as well:

In 2017 the Fighters issued a set in conjunction with their "Legend Series" of games where the team wore throwback Toei Flyers uniforms.  The Haruki Nishikawa and Takuma Nakashima cards from this set were in the respective card lots I got for them.  I was a bit disappointed that they don't show the players in the Flyers uniforms although the cards have a nice throwback feel to them:

Takuma Nakashima

Haruki Nishikawa

The Nishikawa lot also had this other 2017 Fighters card:

This last Fighters card has to be from 2022 since the Fighters didn't use that logo or uniforms until then and Ishikawa joined the Buffaloes after that year.

The back's a little interesting as it talks up salmon from Hokkaido:

Google translation version:

I got a bunch of Lions team issued cards.  First up are three "Lions Classic" cards.  The first one is a postcard-size card from 2013 showing Yusei Kikichi, Takumi Kuriyama and Ginjiro Sumitani:

Next is standard (or close to it) sized card of Shogo Akiyama from 2018:

I don't know if the last "Lions Classic" card should really be considered a card or not.  It's more like a 4x6 photo as it's printed on photographic paper.  It shows Yuji Kaneko and the photo apparently is from the Lions-Eagles game on April 22, 2022 (although there is no information about the game - a 3-0 Lions victory - on the "card" at all):

Ryan found me some Lions cards from last year.  These all appear to be from the "Team Lions" set.  I guessing it's a "comprehensive" team set that includes the development (ikusei) players as well as the guys on the 70 man roster:

Kaito Awatsu

Shota Hiranuma

Toshihiro Idei

Sho Itoh

Seiji Kawagoe

Daichi Nakaguma

Yuta Nakamigawa

Hiromasa Saito

Masato Saito

Wataru Takagi

Towa Uema

Ryan also found me a handful of the "L Collection Vol 1" cards that the Lions did with BBM last year.  He got me 16 cards in all - ten base set cards and six "Hero" insert cards - but since you can see most of the cards from the set over at Jambalaya, I'm only going to show a couple here:

#LR18

#LR8

#LR12

#LH4

#LH12

It took me a little while to figure out this next card.  It looked like it could have been from the same set but it was labeled as a "2022" card (and featured Hatsuhiko Tsuji who was manager that year).  It didn't look much like the 2022 "L Collection Vol 1" cards (don't ask me why they're called "vol 1" when I've yet to see any "vol 2" cards) but I wasn't sure where else it could be from.  Here's the front and back of it:

I did some searches on YJA and finally discovered what it was from.  The Lions released several cards at their offseason "Thanks Festa" fan festival and this card was one of them.  The letters in the card number (LTF05) stand for "Lions Thanks Festa".

Moving on from the Lions...Ryan also sent me a couple Baystars cards from last year:

I usually struggle with figuring out what the name of any given team issued set is but I have a good guess at what to call these.  Ryan sent them in their original packs.  It's kind of hard to read it in the scan but the pack says "2023 Official Fanclub Card":

The last card I want to show in this post isn't from an NPB team.  Instead it's the 2010 Akashi Red Soldiers team card of Shouta Tougo.  The Red Soldiers were a team in the Kansai Independent League back in 2009 and 2010 - the league itself only lasted from 2009 to 2013.  Here's the front and back of the card:

The implication of the card number in the lower right corner of the card back is that there's at least 15 other cards in the set.  I've never seen any other ones though.