RIP Jitsuo Mizutani

Former Hiroshima Toyo Carp and Hankyu Brave Jitsuo Mizutani has passed away from heart failure in Nishinomiya after several months of poor health.  He was 77.

Mizutani was the ace pitcher at Miyazaki Shogyo High School and played in the Summer Koshien tournament in both 1963 and 1964.  The team made it to the semi-finals in 1964 before losing to Kochi High School, the eventual champions.  He was taken in the fourth round of the 1965 NPB draft (the first one ever) by the Carp.  He suffered from kidney disease which caused him to miss training camp in 1966 and I think played a role in him switching to being a position player.  He made his ichi-gun debut late in the 1966 season, striking out in his only at bat - a pinch hitting appearance.

He spent most of the next three seasons on the farm before making the top team for good in 1970 and becoming one of the Carp's starting outfielders the following year.  He made the All Star team and won a Best 9 award in 1971, the only time he did either of those things in his career.  He was a solid outfielder for the team for the next few years before being moved to first base in 1977.

He led the Central League in batting with a .348 average in 1978 and helped the Carp win the Central League pennant in 1975, 1979 and 1980.  He had two home runs in the 1979 Series against the Kintetsu Buffaloes and won an Outstanding Player award.

He was traded to the Hankyu Braves for Hideji Kato following the 1982 season and had a career year in his first season in Nishinomiya, hitting 36 home runs with a league leading 114 RBIs, both career highs.  On Opening Day of 1984, however, he was hit in the head with a pitch, fracturing his skull.  He never really recovered, getting into only 63 games in 1984 and hitting .181 and only 23 games in 1985, hitting just .083.  He suffered from the effects of the beaning for the rest of his life.

He retired following the 1985 season and embarked on a somewhat long career as a coach, working for Hankyu (1987-88), Hiroshima (1989-93), Kintetsu (1994-95), Fukuoka (1996-97), Chunichi (1998-2001) and Hanshin (2003-06, 2013).  He was interim manager for the Buffaloes in 1995, taking over the team after Keishi Suzuki was dismissed and leading the team to a 16-25 record.  

He had done some baseball commentary on both TV and the newspaper Daily Sports.  He also ran a chicken shop in Nishinomiya between his coaching stints with Hanshin.

Mizutani's first known baseball card was #296 in the 1973-74 Calbee set.  He had a number of cards in various Calbee, Yamakatsu, Takara and other sets during his career and appeared fairly regularly in OB sets from both BBM and Epoch since 2002.  Here's a handful of his cards:

1975-76-77 Calbee #299

1979 TCMA #30

1979 Yamakatsu JY8 #58

2002 BBM All Time Heroes #081

2013 BBM The Trade Stories #36

2017 BBM Time Travel 1975 #53

2020 BBM Time Travel 1985 #81

2020 BBM Carp History 1950-2020 #19

2021 Buffaloes History 1936-2021 #38

Magazine Cards

Among the many cards in the box Ryan sent me were a handful of cards that had been issued in magazines.  Three of these I had been eagerly awaiting as they closed out "sets" on my want list.

The first of these is this Hiromitsu Ochiai promo card from the 2002 BBM All Time Heroes set.  Despite the card not having any markings that it came from Sports Card Magazine (SCM), I'm pretty sure it was issued in SCM #30 in November of 2001.  Here's the front and back of it:

This is another example of BBM not clearly indicating on the front of the card that it's not really a memorabilia card - not that I thought this one was.  

This is the last SCM card that I was looking for.  I don't quite have a complete collection of all the baseball-related SCM cards but I have all that I wanted to get.  Most of what I don't have are promo cards - the Ochiai is a rare one that I wanted since it was Ochiai, one of my favorite players.

The second card I got that completed a set was this one of Shigeo Nagashima:

This ended a quest of mine that began when I picked up an oddball card of Eiji Sawamura from Rob Fitts four and half years ago.  It turned out that the Sawamura was one of five cards that BBM issued with a mook celebrating the Giants' 70th Anniversary in 2004.  Ryan had previously tracked down a copy of the mook for me.  Each issue had two of the five cards in it - the issue I got had Sadaharu Oh and Tatsunori Hara.  I found the Tetsuto Kawakami card at SportsCard BITS in Nagoya last year and found this one on Yahoo! Japan Auctions earlier this year.

Speaking of Nagashima, the third and final card that completed a "set" featured a manga version of him:

I don't know for sure what this is from but I assume that it was some sort of publication that was tied into the 2000 Nippon Series which was known as the "ON Series" since it pitted Nagashima's Giants against Sadaharu Oh's Hawks.  I had picked up the matching card of Oh about a year ago and now I have both cards.

The last two cards are each from my remaining magazine issued card goals.  This card of Isao Harimoto is from the Fall 2004 issue of "Baseball Magazine" and is one of four "Disbanded Club Player" cards that was given away with that issue:

Ten years later, BBM would use a better version of this photo in the Memories Of Uniform set.

I now have 31 of the 36 cards that were issued in "Baseball Magazine" between 2004 and 2008.

The other goal I have is trying to get all of the "Season Memorial" cards issued in Shukan Baseball between 2005 and 2016.  Like the "Baseball Magazine" cards, there are 36 of these total (four for each year form 2005 to 2010 and two for each year from 2011 to 2016).  With this 2005 Norichika Aoki card, I'm down to only needing 13 of them.

This was part of an auction containing several Aoki cards which I'll be sharing in future posts.

Card Of The Week August 10

Masanori Ishikawa started Thursday night's Swallows game against the Giants.  He got a hit that night which was his first hit this season.  He now has at least one hit in 24 consecutive seasons (H/T NPB Reddit) starting in his rookie season of 2002 which is second all time to Motonobu Tanishige who had hits in 27 consecutive seasons.  

It is unlikely that Ishikawa will catch up with Tanishige, though, and not because he's 45 years old right now.  On Monday of last week, the Central League announced that it would introduce the DH in 2027, meaning that the last league in which pitchers batted has relented.  Should Ishikawa continue to play, he'll have to settle for a 25 year streak (which, to be fair, is the record for most consecutive seasons with a hit for a player who signed out of college - he set that record two seasons ago).

Ishikawa was not the only pitcher in that game to get a hit.  Masahiro Tanaka, the Giants starter that evening, hit a double and scored a run.  Here's cards of both pitchers batting:

2023 BBM Fusion #24

2013 BBM 2nd Version #671

The Fusion card shows Ishikawa getting the hit that gave him hits in 22 consecutive seasons, setting the record for former college players.

2024 Epoch Career Achievements Japan National Team

Back in March, Epoch put out a box set called "Japan Professional Baseball OB Club Official Card Japan National Baseball Team Career Achievements 2024 Card Set" which is quite a mouthful.  I've taken to calling it the "Career Achievements Japan National Team" for simplicity.  The set was issued in partnership with the Japan Baseball Promotion Association (OB Club) but was a somewhat reasonably priced boxed set rather than their usual ultra high-end sets with six cards for something like 18,000 yen.  This set was a 28 card box set that retailed for 10,000 yen.  Each box contained the full 26 card base set plus one serially numbered parallel card and one of three different types of autograph cards.

I'm kind of confused about the timing of the set.  The set was released in March of 2025 but has a 2024 "cover date", implying that Epoch had intended to release the set in 2024.  But Topps had the Samurai Japan baseball card license in 2024 so I don't understand how Epoch could have released the set then.  It's possible (and, in fact, very likely) that I don't fully understand how the Samurai Japan licensing works - especially since BBM had included Samurai Japan cards in the 2023 Infinity set when Topps had the license and Bushiroad is putting out DreamOrder Samurai Japan cards next month (while I assume Epoch still has the license but maybe they don't).

The set features retired (OB) players who have either played for or managed Samurai Japan (or, as it was known before 2013, the Japanese National Baseball Team).  I should specify that it's only players and managers of the professional version of the team, so basically we're talking players from the past 20-ish years who took part in the major tournaments (Olympics, World Baseball Classic and Premier 12), minor tournaments like the Asia Professional Baseball Championship and all the various friendly matches over the past 12 years or so with Australia, Taiwan, the Netherlands, Mexico, Team Euro and the MLB All Stars.  All the players are depicted in their national team uniforms.

I mentioned that the base set contains 26 cards but there's only 25 people featured in the set.  Hirokazu Ibata, the current Samurai Japan manager, has two cards - one as a player and one as manager.  The other managers are Sadaharu Oh (manager of the 2006 WBC champs) and Hideki Kuriyama (manager of the 2023 WBC champs).

The remaining 22 players are kind of a mixed bag.  There's some fairly big names in the set - Norichika Aoki, Yoshio Itoi, Hisashi Iwakuma, Munenori Kawasaki, Nobuhiro Matsuda, Michihiro Ogasawara and Seiichi Uchikawa - but it's really missing the big stars from the 00's WBC and Olympic teams like Ichiro, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Koji Uehara, Kosuke Fukedome, Kenji Johjima, Shinnosuke Abe and Nobuhiko Matsunaka.  There's a lot of guys who were minor stars - Shunsuke Watanabe, Ryosuke Hirata, Motohiro Shima, Kazuhisa Makita and Yusuke Nomura - but I'm not sure how much of a draw any of them are.

I have most of the Japanese National Team cards and sets since...well, since 2000, when Upper Deck issued a set for the Japanese delegation to the 2000 Sydney Olympics which included most of the baseball team.  So I sat down and went through this set to figure out if there's anyone in it that hadn't appeared on a card in a National Team uniform issued by Upper Deck, Topps, BBM or Calbee.  I found only three guys - Tsuyoshi Ishizaki, Ryoma Matsuda and Tomomi Takahashi.  All three of these players had relatively short careers and only briefly played for Samurai Japan.  Ishizaki played in the 2017 Asia Professional Baseball Championship, Matsuda played in the friendlies against Taiwan in 2013 and Takahashi played against the MLB All Stars in 2014.  

There are two other players in the set whose National Team cards are a bit harder to find.  Satoshi Komatsu played in the 2009 WBC and is in Konami's Baseball Heroes WBC set.  Yoshio Itoi played in the 2013 WBC and only appears in the very rare Konami Samurai Japan set.

The cards themselves are...OK.  The photos are mostly "batters batting, pitchers pitching" poses although Samurai Japan cards are uncommon enough that I don't feel like I've seen the same photo for a player over and over like I do with some of the NPB cards.  I'm not a big fan of the card design - it seems kind of busy to me.  I feel like the design really cramps the photos but, as I've said countless times over the years, I prefer borderless card designs so maybe it's just me.  Here's some example cards:

#02

#08

#13

#24

#01

#12

#17

#26

I really wanted to like this set, especially since I decided to violate my "not buying any new sets" rule and asked Ryan to pick it up for me (although I can claim it's ok on a technicality - while it was released in 2025, it's REALLY a 2024 set).  However, I ended up disappointed with it.  I was hoping to get a "this is a good overview of the stars who've played for Samurai Japan" vibe from it and instead I got a vibe of "here's a bunch of Samurai Japan players who were willing to sign autographs for us" which is not an unusual feeling to get from OB player selection in an Epoch set (or BBM for that matter).  In addition to the missing players I mentioned above, it would have been nice if the set had included cards of Tatsunori Hara and Koji Yamamoto, the managers of the 2009 and 2013 WBC teams respectively, who've never had National Team cards.  Another interesting route Epoch could have taken would ahve been showing players who played for the amateur version of the National Team, especially guys who played on the Olympic teams in the 80's and 90's like Katsumi Hirosawa, Kozo Shoda, Atsuya Furuta, Hideo Nomo, Kenjiro Nomura and Hiroko Kokubo.  I've frequently said that I'm a sucker for National Team sets and this was probably my first real disappointment in one of them.

As usual, you can check out all the cards over at Jambalaya to see if you agree with my assessment.

There's been a lot of Samurai Japan posts this past week.  I'll get back to some NPB cards from Ryan's shipment next week.

Topps Now Samurai Japan Cards - 2024 Premier 12

Ever since Topps started doing Topps Now cards for the Samurai Japan teams - both individual cards and team sets - I wondered what they'd do for the 2024 Premier 12 squad.  What I kind of expected that they'd do was pretty much what they had done previously - 8-16 (probably 16) individual Topps Now cards plus a 28-30 card team set.  

However, it became quickly apparent last November that Topps was upping the number of individual cards Topps Now cards for this tournament.  The initial batch of cards on Topps' Japanese website included seven cards that only covered the team's first two games of the tournament.  Since Japan was reasonably expected to play nine games in total, 3 1/2 cards per game would result in something like 32 cards, twice as many as had been issued for any other Samurai Japan incarnation.

I also discovered that there'd been six (well, five really - more about that in a minute) Topps Now Samurai Japan card issued for a couple games the team played against the Czech Republic as a warm up just before the tournament that must have only been available on-line for about ten minutes because I never saw them.  Between the disappointment that there were six cards I missed and not wanting to spend a fortune,  I decided that I wasn't going to get all of them this time.  It was just too much money to put out, especially since I figured there'd be a full team set coming out by the end of the year.  So I asked Ryan to order specific cards for me - I pretty much picked one card per game - and I waited for Topps to offer the team set.

Except that Topps never offered the team set.  I don't know if they decided not to issue the team set because Samurai Japan didn't win the tournament or, more likely, they ran out of time before their license to do the carsd expired, but, either way, there wasn't going to be a team set.

Since I didn't realize there'd be no team set until after the individual cards weren't available anymore, I was kind of stuck.  I'd have to start looking for the cards on the secondary market.

That's worked out better than I expected.  It helped that Topps didn't issue quite as many cards for the tournament as I had feared - only 22 in all.  Ryan had ordered nine of them directly from Topps and I've found another ten of them (that Ryan picked up for me) so I'm only missing three of them.  I've also managed to get one of the cards for the games against the Czech Republic - there's only five of them as it appears that one of the cards (#11) was never issued,

OK, that was a lot of prelude to get to the cards themselves.  They're basically the standard Japanese Topps Now cards - nice photos on the front, next to nothing information on the back.  Each card was selling for 1342 yen ($8.72) if you were in Japan but only 1220 yen ($7.92) if you were in the States (since you don't have to pay taxes on it).  Of course, if you're in the States, you had to pay for shipping and that was at least 4000 yen or about $26.  The cards are numbered in continuation of the individual cards issued for the "Global Games" against Team Euro in March of 2024.  Those cards were numbers 1 through 8, the Czech Republic games were cards 9 through 14 and the Premier cards were numbers 15 to 36.

Here are the cards I have:

#9

#15

#16

#17

#19

#20

#22

#23

#24

#25

#26

#27

#28

#29

#30

#32

#33

#34

#35

#36

I think the 22 Premier 12 cards cover 19 of the 28 players on the roster.  The nine missing players are Takahisa Hayakawa, Ryoya Kurihara, Masayuki Kuwahara, Taisei Ota, Keito Sano, Sora Suzuki, Ryosuke Tatsumi, Shosei Togo and Rikuto Yokoyama.  Five of those players - Hayakawa, Kuwahara, Sano, Tatsumi and Togo appear in the Czech Republic cards.

I was kind of surprised that the cards didn't have the Premier 12 logo on them, especially since the 2023 Asia Professional Baseball Championship cards had had the logo for that tournament on them.  I guess that means that these aren't "official" Premier 12 cards.

As I mentioned earlier, the card backs have the usual very little information on them.  All they have is the opponent, date and location of the game, along with which section of the tournament the game occurred - "Opening Round", "Super Round" or "Finals".  For whatever reason, as usual Topps didn't include the score of the game.  Here's the back of Hiroto Saiki's card (#23) as an example:

Jambalaya has all these cards up on their website although it's a bit confusing - they use the same page for all 28 of these cards, all eight of the "Global Games" cards and the 30 card "Global Games" team set.

Like I said yesterday, I think the Topps Now Samurai Japan cards are one of the few things that Topps has done well in Japan.  I just wish I'd known they weren't going to do the team set in time to have ordered all these cards (and known the Czech Republic cards were there).  I know I'll eventually find the rest of them, though.

2024 Topps Now Samurai Japan Global Games Team Set

#1

There was a pair of international friendly games played in Osaka back in March of 2024 between Samurai Japan and "Team Euro" - an All Star team consisting of players from various European countries.  Japan won both games rather handily with scores of 5-0 and 2-0.  That 2-0 score wasn't a close as it looked as six Japanese pitchers combined to no-hit the Europeans.  

Topps issued eight of their Topps Now Samurai Japan cards for members of the team (including a card showing all six of the pitchers involved in the no-hitter) immediately after the games and followed that up a little later with issuing a 30 card team set, also under the "Topps Now" label (which makes sense since it was only available to order on-line and they only printed up the number that were ordered).  This is the third Topps Now Samurai Japan team set issued by Topps Japan in the past few years after the ones for the 2022 Australian Friendlies team and the 2023 Asian Professional Baseball Championship team.  (I'm not counting the 2023 WBC team set as it was not "Topps Now".)

This team lacked a little of the star power of some of the previous incarnations of Samurai Japan but there's still some big names in the set.  Several members of the 2023 WBC champs are in the set - Munetaka Murakami, Kensuke Kondoh, Sosuke Genda, Ryoji Kuribayashi, Hiroya Miyagi, and Takumu Nakano - along with Shota Morishita, Shunpeita Yamashita, Chusei Mannami and Kotaro Kurebayashi.  Here's some examples:

#7 Masato Morishita

#18 Sosuke Genda

#9 Ryoji Kuribayashi

#24 Munetaka Murakami

One of the unique things about this particular Samurai Japan team is that it included four collegiate players on its roster - Yumeto Kanemaru of Kansai University, Rui Muneyama of Meiji University, Yuto Nakamura of Aichi Tech and Mishi Nishikawa of Aoyama Gakuin University.  All four players were first round picks in last fall's draft - Kanemaru by the Dragons, Muneyama by the Eagles, Nakamura bu the Swallows and Nishikawa by the Marines.  Their inclusion in the set means the four of them have pre-rookie cards which is pretty rare in Japan.  Here's all four of their cards:

#8 Yumeto Kanemaru

#20 Rui Muneyama

#12 Yuto Nakamura

#26 Mishi Nishikawa

As you can see, the cards are reasonable attractive, at least on the fronts.  As usual, however, Topps made almost no effort on the backs.  Other than the player's name and position, there's no information about the players on the card backs.  As has been standard for the Samurai Japan team sets, all the backs (except for the "team card" shown at the top of this post that has the team roster on its back) just say when and where the games occurred - they don't even have the scores of the games.  Here's the back of manager Hirokazu Ibata's as an example:

I'm a sucker for Samurai Japan sets so I really like this one.  I feel like these are one of the few things that I've really liked that Topps has done in Japan.  Of course, they don't have the Samurai Japan license anymore which means they won't be doing any more of these.

UPDATE - Almost forgot to mention that you can see all the cards in the set (along with all the other 2024 Topps Now Samurai Japan cards) over at Jambalaya.