Who Are The Japan Breeze?

The 2025 Caribbean Series started the other day and there's an unusual team playing in it.  For the first time ever, a team from Japan is taking part.  Unlike the other teams in the tournament, however, the Japanese team is not the most recent NPB champion (which, of course, would be the Baystars).  Instead, a team called the Japan Breeze in playing.  

Who are the Japan Breeze?  I took a look at the team's roster, did some digging and I think I figured out who 27 of the 28 players are.  I couldn't find anything out about outfielder Jin Yamamoto, but most of the rest of the players are from various independent league teams in Japan.  The Ibaraki Astro Planets, Oita B-Rings (which I'm not positive still exist), Ishikari Red Phoenix and Kochi Fighting Dogs have all contributed multiple players.  There's also three players who spent last year with the Kufu Hayate Ventures Shizuoka, the independent team that played in NPB's Western League farm league.  I think there's only one player from the corporate leagues - Tatsuhiko Sato who at one time was with Honda.  I'm not positive he's still with Honda, however, as the roster I got for the team at the industrial league tournament I went to last May didn't have him on it.  A couple of the other players have also played for corporate league teams but were most recently with independent teams.

I'm not going to list all the players with the teams that they've played on but I do want to highlight some of the more interesting ones.  Catcher Mitsuki Fukuda spent two seasons with the Ottawa Titans of the Frontier League and will be returning to Canada this season with the Chatham-Kent Barnstormers of the Intercounty Baseball League (the league that will also feature Ayami Sato and Fernando Rodney).  Outfielder Ren Tachioka has spent the past three seasons playing for Southern Indiana University.  Two pitchers - Isaki Ninomiya and Rintaro Hirama - played in the Venezuelan Winter League this winter.

There are five players on the roster who have spent time in NPB although none of them are currently the property of any NPB team.  The best known player is 44 year old Munenori Kawasaki who is also the only former MLB player on the roster.  Kawasaki's been out of NPB since 2017 and has spent the last few seasons with the Tochigi Golden Braves of the independent Baseball Challenge League.

2006 Hawks Team Set #52

The remaining four players all are former Yokohama DeNA Baystars which makes some sense since the team is managed by former Baystar player and manager Alex Ramirez (although only one of the players was on the team when Ramirez managed them).

2016 Baystars Team Set #80

That player is Shuto Sakurai, who was DeNA's fifth round pick in the 2017 draft.  He was with the Baystars until last year when he moved to the Eagles in the Active Player draft.  He had a pretty lousy year in Sendai, posting an 8.44 ERA in eight appearances.  (In fairness, those numbers were inflated by the game I saw him pitch in - the 21-0 thrashing the Hawks administered to the Eagles in Fukuoka.  Sakurai gave up six runs in one inning.)  The Eagles released him after the season ended.

2024 BBM Eagles #E015

The other three players were all development players with DeNA.  Dai Kato was the team's second round pick in the ikusei phase of the 2020 draft and spent three seasons on their farm team.  He spent last year with the Kanagawa Future Dreams after DeNA let him go after the 2023 season.

2021 Epoch Baystars Rookies & Stars #19

Takeru Ohashi came to the Baystars from Ibaraki as their third round pick in the 2021 development player draft.  Like Kato, he was released by the team following the 2023 season and he spent 2024 with the Quitana Roo Tigers of the Mexican League.

2022 BBM Rookie Edition #057

Aki Watanabe was another Ibaraki Astro Planet who ended up with the Baystars as an ikusei player.  He was their fourth pick in the 2022 development player draft and parted ways with the team after last season.

2023 Bowman NPB #BP-6

Some of the other players may have baseball cards but it's difficult to track cards for independent league teams.  However, I do have cards for two of the other players.

Pitcher Rintaro Hirama spent most of the four seasons between 2020 and 2023 with the Kochi Fighting Dogs (except for a few months in 2022 that he played in Mexico) and had a baseball card in their 2020 set:

2020 Kochi Fighting Dogs #04/31

I had previously mentioned Tatsuhiko Sato from Honda in the corporate leagues.  He is in both the 2021 and 2022 JABA sets although I only have his 2021 card:

2021 JABA #21JP081

Sato is the son of former Hawks and Swallows outfielder Shinichi Sato who was the MVP of the 1990 IBAF "World All Star Game" in Atlanta.

Card Of The Week February 2

One of the things that was noted with some of the reporting about Shinnosuke Ogasawara signing with the Nats was that it was the first time that Washington had signed a Japanese pitcher.  That's not completely accurate, though, as Hideki Irabu, Masato Yoshii and Tomo Ohka had all played for the franchise in Montreal and Ohka appeared in ten games for the Nats in their first season of 2005.  It is true, however, that Ogasawara is the first player that the team has signed directly from Japan as the other three had all played for other MLB teams before joining the Expos.  

I had done a post for Ohka when he retired back in 2017 in which I mentioned that I knew of ten Japanese cards for him, of which I had five.  I've since discovered at least one other one (which I have) and I picked up one of the other five that I previously didn't have.  They're both from BBM's Baystars team sets - one from 2010 (showing him in the press conference announcing his return to the team after eleven years in North America) and the other from 2011.  Both of them have the same card number - #YB22:

Unexpected Calbee Set and 2025 Epoch Ones

Training camps are opening in Japan tomorrow (well, pretty much as I write this in the evening of January 31st on the US East Coast) and there's a couple new items that have popped up in the last day or so so I thought I'd do a quick post on them.

- For the second year in row, Calbee has issued an unexpected set in January.  Last year it was a 36 card team set for the Hawks that was probably delayed for a few months.  This year it's a 47 card set that's a tie-in to the video game "Pro Yakyu Spirits A".  The latest version of the game was released back in September so I suspect that Calbee meant to publish this set earlier.  UPDATE - according to a comment below from twycchang, the set is a tie-in to the mobile game "Pro Yakyu Spirits A" and not the one "Pro Yakyu Spirits" like I had originally thought although I still think the set was originally supposed to have been published earlier.  The cards all have a "cover date" of 2024.  47 is an odd number of cards for an NPB set to have but when you take a look at the checklist, you'll see what happened.  The checklist is arranged basically as four groups of 12 with each group having a player from each of the twelve NPB teams in it.  Well, that's how it was SUPPOSED to be but card #PS-11 did not get issued.  Extrapolating from the teams that are included in the other cards in that first group, you can see that the player who's missing is from the Marines.  I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb to guess that that was originally supposed to be Roki Sasaki but he had to be pulled from the set since he was heading to MLB.  The first 23 cards were picked by Konami while the last 24 cards were selected from user voting.  As far as I can tell, they are available all over Japan (as opposed to the Hawks cards from last year which were only available in Kyushu).  The cards are already on sale as someone on Reddit had a photo up of some of them.  I also was told by Kenny (Zippy Zappy) that he'd seen them in a convenience store - I assume he was in Tokyo. UPDATE - you can see most of the cards in the set (along with kira parallels) over at Jambalaya.

- Epoch is back with their on-demand Epoch One cards.  Like last year, the 2025 edition of the cards is starting with draft pick cards.  So far, there are 47 cards available featuring the 2024 draft classes (regular phase, no development players) for the Marines, Dragons, Fighters, Lions, Eagles, Swallows, Baystars and Giants.  It would not surprise me to see Epoch add cards for the Hawks and Tigers draft picks as well since they, along with the other eight teams, were the teams that Epoch included in the Epoch One cards last year.  The Buffaloes and Carp would surprise me since Epoch has never done Epoch One cards for Orix and hasn't done them for the Carp since 2019.  The cards are still 500 yen each, as they have been since 2018.

2024 Topps 206 NPB

There are many things that are popular for absolutely no reason that I can understand.  I won't list them here as, for the most part, I don't care if other people like things that I don't like.  I think one of the worst aspects of social media is someone saying that they like something and someone else replying and telling them that they're wrong to like that thing.  I mean, why harsh someone's mellow?

However.

The popularity of last year's Topps 206 NPB set boggles my mind.  What a boring set, with 216 head and shoulder portraits (or, as I like to call them, mug shots) of players, border color parallels and mini parallels.  I even found the "alternate image" parallels to be kind of dull.  About the only thing I had any positive feelings about were the "stadium background" parallels.  

Obviously most people did not feel this way about the set.  As I mentioned, it was very popular.  Popular enough that Topps brought it back for 2024 - it was one of the three NPB sets that Topps released in mid-December.  I got some cards from it from Jason which arrived earlier this week.  I actually had only bought seven cards but he threw in several more for no additional charge which gave me a good overview of some of the parallels.

The design of the base cards look pretty similar to last year's - same head and shoulder portraits, similar backgrounds, same set logo in the top left corner.  About the only real difference I can see is that the names of the player and team across the bottom uses a bigger font than last year*:

#16

* Calbee has taught me to look for subtle changes in card designs

The card backs look a little different from last year although Topps continues their dedication to putting as little effort into them as possible - although in fairness this is in keeping with how they've done the MLB versions of this set as well:

Here are the other base cards I had asked Jason for.  I had pretty much just wanted some of my favorite players:

#158

#123

#51

Jason sent me a couple of the very common brown border parallels, including one for Yanagita:

#51

#75

#7

He also sent me an "alternate image" parallel for Yusuke Ohyama:

#5

He sent me three different parallels for Yoshihiro Maru - the brown border, the mini and the "alternate image" mini.  Looks like the background is subtly different between the full size card and the mini:

#74

#74

#74

Looking at the official checklist for the set from Topps, I think every card has a mini parallel but only 60 cards (five per team) have "alternate image" parallels.  Those same 60 have a mini "alternate image" parallel too.  The checklist does not list the border color parallels.  I suspect that the all the cards have brown border parallels.  There are also at least three different numbered foil parallels - "Foil" (/99), "Blue Foil" (/75) and "Gold Foil" (/50).  There are at least two back parallels - carp (or koi) which is /8 and "beckoning cat" which is /7.

There's one other parallel which I thought was kind of interesting.  36 cards (three per team) have "Comic Book Variation" parallels which have a different design and a different background to go with the same mug shot as the base card:

#182

I like this design although I think I'd like it better if was on a full bleed action photo rather than just a  portrait.

There's an insert set of min-sized cards using the T205 tobacco card design.  There's only 24 of these (two per team) and they're numbered separately so they're not technically parallels (although they may be using he same mug shots as the base cards):

#T205-5

#T205-19

I actually like these quite a bit.  However, I think getting all 24 of them would be kind of boring as, again, they're all mug shots.

You've probably gathered at this point that I'm not a big fan of this set.  Besides the dullness of it, it just seems like it's almost identical to the 2023 version.  It seems strange to me that Topps dropped the Bowman NPB set (which I've also had issues with but I didn't think it was boring) to repeat the 206 set.

The issue I have with the set may simply be that I'm a set collector.  All I can think of is how boring it would be to look at all 216 cards in the set in a binder.  I guess other folks who aren't set collectors might not be as bored by it.  So I apologize for harshing your mellow, everyone.

You can, of course, look at all the cards over at Jambalaya (including some of the more rare ones).  You know, in case you need help falling asleep.

And once again, thanks to Jason for sending me these cards.  I do appreciate it, even if I'm not a big fan of this particular set.

2024 Topps Chrome NPB

Among the cards I got from my friend Jason yesterday were a bunch from the 2024 Topps Chrome NPB set that was released last month.  Like the 2023 version of this set, this is not simply an ugly chrome version of the 2024 Topps NPB set that came out last May.  Instead it's a whole new set which different players and different photos.  To be honest, if Topps had published a non-Chrome version of this set last May, I'd have been a lot happier than I was with the dreck they actually published.  The photos in this set are pretty good (and were taken in 2024 instead of 2023) and the player selection is better than the earlier set.

I didn't buy a complete Chrome set.  I REALLY don't like the Chrome finish on the cards - I think it makes the cards really ugly and they don't scan well - so I wasn't interesting in getting all the cards but there were a handful I asked Jason about.  Most of these were either favorite players or I liked the photo (although there's a couple I don't remember why I wanted.)  Here's what I got in the package yesterday:

#104

#209

#210

#184

#94

#9

#131

#180

#28

#57

#43

#183

#98

You're going to have to take my word on the fact that these look much better in person than in the scans.  Well, not MUCH better because they obviously still have the ugly "chrome" finish on them (have I mentioned I'm not a fan of the "chrome" finish?) but better than this.  Jambalaya seems to have done a better job scanning the cards than I have so you can check out all the cards over there.

Besides not liking the "chrome" finish, I'm also not a big fan of the myriad of parallels that this set has.  I was surprised, though, that there was one parallel that I liked.  Known as the "kanji" parallel, it replaces the English text on the front of the card for the player's name, team's name and position with Japanese text (which isn't necessarily Kanji).  I got both the base card and the "kanji" parallel for Iori Yamasaki's card:

#120

#BKV-5

It's difficult to tell from the scans but these are actually the same photo - I have no idea why the scan of the base card turned out so much darker than the parallel.  Also I guess that technically this isn't a parallel since the "kanji" card has a different number.

The complete set has 216 cards which, as always, breaks down to 18 cards per team.  All three of the NPB sets Topps put out in December - this, Stadium Club and 206 (which I'll post about tomorrow) - have 216 cards in them so I got curious if they all had the same set of players.  I'm a computer programmer so I wrote a little application to compare all three checklists.  What I found was that all three were different.  There are 283 players represented in at least one of the three sets.  There are 157 who appear in all three sets, 25 who are in Stadium Club and 206 but not Chrome, 14 who are in Chrome and Stadium Club but not 206 and 12 who are in 206 and Chrome but not Stadium Club.  There are 33 players who only appear in Chrome (including Stewart and Kishi from the cards above), 22 who only appear in 206 and 20 who only appear in Stadium Club.

I do want to thank Jason again for selling me these cards.  Despite my feelings about the "chrome" finish on them, I like what I got.

Mail Day From Jason!

Got a package in the mail from my friend Jason today that contained a bunch of goodies, most of which were from the Topps Chrome and 206 sets that were released last month.  I'll be doing posts about those cards in the next few days but I thought I'd do a quick post about the BBM cards I got from him first.

I picked up two "secret version" cards from the 2024 BBM Fusion set.  The first shows Shogo Togo's no-hitter from last May while the second one celebrates Franmil Reyes' 25 game hitting streak:

2024 BBM Fusion #30 (Secret Version)

2024 BBM Fusion #84 (Secret Version)

The other cards were all jersey cards from the 2024 BBM Genesis set:

Both cards are /350.  I think this is my fourth jersey card for Yamada - I wasn't going to buy another one but Jason made me an offer I couldn't refuse.

The last card I'm going to show tonight was the one I was most excited to receive - it's another jersey card from last year's Genesis set:

It's /60.  Takeya Nakamura is my favorite active player and this is the first memorabilia card I have for him.

Thanks for the cards, Jason!

Card Of The Week January 26

The Orix Buffaloes announced this past week that they were inviting Jarryd Dale of the Melbourne Aces (and veteran of six seasons in the San Diego Padres organization) to join them for spring training next week.  Dale hit .381 for the Aces in this winter's Australian Baseball League season that just wrapped up and the Buffaloes were familiar with him as they've been sending players to Melbourne the past few seasons.  I don't think he's guaranteed a roster spot but Orix is at least giving him a chance to try to make the team.

There's obviously no Japanese cards of Dale yet - and there won't be if he doesn't make the team - but there is at least one Australian card of him from the 2018/19 ABL set from Choice (#35):

Shinnosuke Ogasawara Of The Washington Nationals

The Washington Nationals have signed former Chunichi Dragons pitcher Shinnosuke Ogasawara to a two year contract.  Ogasawara is the fourth and final Japanese pitcher to sign with an MLB team this off season and today was the deadline for his posting.  If he hadn't signed today, he'd be back with the Dragons this season.

Ogasawara was Chunichi's first round pick in the 2015 NPB draft out of Sagami High School.  He was actually not the Dragons' first choice in that round.  The Dragons initially picked Junpei Takahashi who was also picked by the Hawks and Fighters.  The Hawks won the lottery for him so both the Dragons and Fighters picked Ogasawara.  The Dragons won the lottery for him with the Fighters ending up with Kenta Uehara as their third selection for their first round pick.

He split time between the farm team and the top team for his first few seasons, missing some playing time on multiple occasions due to elbow injuries.  By 2021, though, he was healthy enough to be one of the Dragons' top three starters (along with Yudai Ohno and Yuyu Yanagi and he was a staple of the starting rotation every since.  He made his only All Star team appearance in 2021.

His numbers haven't been great but some of his superficial stats like win-loss have been hurt by the fact that the Dragons have been pretty miserable the last couple years.  I saw him pitch twice last May when he was going through a stretch of something like 40 innings where the offense didn't score any runs when he was on the mound.  I saw him throw eight-plus shutout innings against the Tigers in Nagoya but he left the game with a no-decision in a game the Dragons ultimately lost 1-0 in 11 innings.  Things were better a week later against the Giants in Tokyo - he only went six innings and gave up two runs (one on a home run by Yoshihiro Maru) but the Dragons scored four runs and he got the win.

His first card was in the 2016 BBM Rookie Edition set (#094) and he appeared in several other BBM sets that year including 1st Version (#292), Genesis (#091) and the Dragons team set (#D02).  2016 also saw his first Calbee card (#208 from Series Three) and, somewhat surprisingly, his first Epoch card - #8 from the Chunichi Dragaons 80th Anniversary - Record Breakers set.  Here's some of his cards - it's a little heavy on the 2016 cards:

2016 BBM Rookie Edition #094

2016 BBM 1st Version #292

2016 Calbee Series Three #208

2016 Epoch Dragons 80th Anniversary - Record Breakers #8

2017 Epoch Dragons #PS-02

2018 BBM Dragons #D02

2019 Calbee Series One #064

2020 Epoch NPB #362

2021 BBM 2nd Version #517

2022 Topps NPB #164

2023 Calbee Series Two #118

2024 BBM 1st Version #138

I'm kind of excited for the upcoming season as three of the four new NPB imports are playing for the three MLB teams closest to where I live.  Tomoyuki Sugano is with the Orioles, Koyo Aoyagi is with the Phillies and now Ogasawara is with the Nationals.  Makes it much more likely that I might see one of them in person.