Japanese Baseball Cards: November 2024

Friday, November 1, 2024

Dual Champions Revisited

I did a post a few weeks ago that listed the potential new members of the "dual champions" club - players who have won both a Nippon Series and World Series championship. Now that the Dodgers have knocked off the Yankees, there are two new members of this club - Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.

This means it's time for an updated post. Ohtani and Yamamoto are the first new members since Chris Martin joined in 2021 which was the last time I did a post about this (although third altogether - the first was in 2010 when I first came up with the list and the second was when Koji Uehara joined it in 2013). I'll remind you of my rules for this - to qualify, the player has to appear in the World Series or Nippon Series in question, not just be on the roster or to have played for the team in their winning season. So George Vukovich, who was on the roster for the 1980 World Champion Philadelphia Phillies but didn't play in the Series and then won Nippon Series with the Seibu Lions in 1986 and 1987, doesn't count. Neither do Adrian Garrett (14 games for the 1972 A's, won championship with 1979 Carp), Doug Jennings (4 games for 1989 A's, NPB champ with 1996 Blue Wave), Domingo Martinez (15 games between 1992 & 1993 for Blue Jays, NPB Champ with 2000 Giants) and Munenori Kawasaki (16 games with the 2016 Cubs, NPB Champs with the Hawks in 2003 & 2011) - there may be others like these four. Please note - other folks have lists out there and may have different criteria. I'm not going to argue that they're wrong and I'm right - I'm just explaining why my list is different.

Here's the list of players, more or less in the order that they made the list. Their World Series winning teams are listed first, followed by their Nippon Series winning teams: