Japanese Baseball Cards: 2024 NPB Draft

Thursday, October 24, 2024

2024 NPB Draft

The 2024 NPB draft was held today and there's at least eight players who were drafted who already have baseball cards. As always, I'm relying on Deanna's post about the draft while supplementing it with the Japanese Wikipedia page for it as she hasn't gotten around to doing the ikusei portion of the draft yet (she left for Japan today after transcribing the regular phase of the draft).

The cards for the draftees come from three different sets - the Topps Now set for the "Global Games" Samurai Japan team that played Team Europe in a couple friendlies last March, the 2024 Panini Stars & Stripes Japanese Collegiate National Team autographed/memorabilia inserts and the JABA corporate league sets from the last few years. That Samurai Japan team from last March featured four collegiate players and all four of them were drafted today. Similarly last year's Japanese Collegiate National Team featured in the Panini set had four players who were eligible to be drafted (two of whom were on the Samurai Japan team) and all four were drafted. Since I haven't been able to generate a checklist for the 2023 JABA set, I don't know for sure how many players drafted from the corporate leagues had cards. I know that there were no players drafted who had cards in the 2021 or 2022 sets and there were two drafted players in the 2024 set (at least one of which was also in the 2023 set).

OK, enough talking about the cards - let's see them. I should mention that I don't have any of these. Yet. Ryan had ordered the Topps Now Samurai Japan team set for me so I'll get that when I get my next shipment from him. All of these images were swiped from the internet - Jambalaya, Ebay and Mercari.