Card Of The Week March 30

NPB's Opening Day was Friday and Hiroya Miyagi of the Buffaloes came within six outs of making history.  He took a bid for a perfect game into the eighth inning against the Eagles before giving up a lead-off single to Ryosuke Tatsumi.  Miyagi ended up giving up a run that inning but left the game with a 2-1 lead.  Unfortunately, closer Andres Machado blew the save, allowing the Eagles to tie the game in the top of the ninth.  Luckily for Orix, Kenya Wakatsuki hit a two-out, sayonara double to win the game:

Wakatsuki's hit made new Orix manager Mamoru Kishida a winner in his debut.

Here are cards for both Miyagi and Wakatsuki:

2022 BBM Buffaloes #MG2

2015 Orix Players Card #37

Oldest BBM Set With An Active NPB Player - 2025 Edition

Time for my OTHER Opening Day tradition (and this one will continue) - which is the oldest BBM flagship set to have a currently active NPB player?

I got confirmation today that Hiroyuki Nakajima has officially retired.  He'd been hoping to catch on with another team after the Dragons released him at the end of last season but it was not to be.  This means that the final NPB player who appeared in the 2001 BBM set (the first one I ever collected) has now retired.  The oldest BBM flagship set with an active NPB player is now the 2002 set (or sets really as that was the first year that BBM issued their flagship set in two parts as the 1st and 2nd Versions).

Surprisingly, there's actually three active NPB players from the 2002 1st Version set - Takumi Kuriyama and Takeya Nakamura of the Lions and Masanori Ishikawa of the Swallows:

2002 BBM 1st Version #269

2002 BBM 1st Version #268

2002 BBM 1st Version #24 Facsimile Autograph Parallel

Ishikawa is the only one of the three who also appeared in the 2002 2nd Version set:

2002 BBM 2nd Version #442 Facsimile Autograph Parallel

I did not realize until I pulled these cards that I had the signature parallel for both of Ishikawa's rookie flagship cards.

I don't have enough Calbee cards to track this very as I didn't start getting the complete sets until 2012 but since I have Ishikawa's 2002 Calbee card, I know that the 2002 Calbee set is the oldest one with an active NPB player in it:

2002 Calbee #093

You'll notice that I've been careful to say "active NPB player".  That's because there's an active player in Japan who was in a BBM set earlier than 2002 - Munenori Kawasaki is still playing for the Tochigi Golden Braves of the independent Baseball Challenge League.  At 43 years of age, Kawasaki is actually two years younger than Ishikawa but was drafted in 1999 so his first BBM card was in the 2000 set.

Should all three of these players retire after this season (which wouldn't be a huge surprise), the new "oldest set with an active NPB player" would slip three years to the Hideaki Wakui and the 2005 1st Version set.  If I considered MLB player as well, Yu Darvish would be there with Wakui.  

Play Ball (2025)

I'm continuing my Opening Day tradition of doing a post showing a baseball card from the last year that each of the 12 NPB teams won the Nippon Series which was inspired by (or stolen from) the series of posts that Night Owl Cards has been doing for a while now for MLB teams:

The last time the BAYSTARS won the Nippon Series, cards looked like this:

2024 Baystars Bento

The last time the TIGERS won the Nippon Series, cards looked like this:

2023 Topps 206 #107 Stadium Background Parallel

The last time the BUFFALOES won the Nippon Series, cards looked like this:

2022 Calbee Series Three #181 (Yuma Mune)

The last time the SWALLOWS won the Nippon Series, cards looked like this:

2021 Epoch One #723

The last time the HAWKS won the Nippon Series, cards looked like this:

2020 BBM Hawks #H57

The last time the FIGHTERS won the Nippon Series, cards looked like this:

2016 Calbee All Stars #AS-06

The last time the EAGLES won the Nippon Series, cards looked like this:

2023 BBM Eagles #E08 Foil Parallel

The last time the GIANTS won the Nippon Series, cards looked like this:

2012 BBM All Stars #A42

The last time the MARINES won the Nippon Series, cards looked like this:

2010 BBM/Georgia Coffee #033

The last time the LIONS won the Nippon Series, cards looked like this:

2008 BBM Back To The 70's #119

The last time the DRAGONS won the Nippon Series, cards looked like this:

2007 Calbee Series One #061

The last time the CARP won the Nippon Series, cards looked like this:

1984 Takara Carp #8 (Koji Yamamoto)

All 12 current NPB teams have won the Series at least once so there are no "Photo Not Found" teams.

Given that I've stopped buying new cards, I don't know what the future of these posts are.  I haven't decided if I'll retire it or use scans I grab from the web.  I probably won't make up my mind until next year.

Upcoming Milestones

With Opening Day 2025 arriving in less than a day and a half, I thought I'd roll out my now-traditional post about which players are approaching the career milestones that will ensure them admission to the Meikyukai or "Golden Players Club".  The requirements are that the player has to have been born in the Showa Era (1926-89) or later and accumulated more than 2000 hits, 200 wins or 250 saves.  Statistics from MLB count but only if the NPB stats came first - which is why Alfonso Soriano is eligible but Larry Parrish isn't.

There are five members of the Meikyukai active in NPB right now - Norichika Aoki, Hayato Sakamoto, Takumi Kuriyama, Yohei Ohshima and Yoshihisa Hirano - and one in MLB - Yu Darvish.  Darvish joined last year when he got his 200th victory between NPB and MLB.

I'm going to start by listing the active hitters who have less than 2000 hits but more than 1500:

1. Hideto Asamura,  1964 hits

2024 Epoch/Eagles Team Set 1st Version #36

2. Yoshihiro Maru, 1842 hits

2024 BBM 1st Version #101

3. Takeya Nakamura, 1807 hits

2024 Lions Bento

4. Shogo Akiyama, 1794 hits (1723 NPB, 71 MLB)

2024 Calbee Series One #C-03

5. Ryosuke Kikuchi, 1700 hits

2024 Topps Stadium Club NPB #92

6. Yuki Yanagita, 1595 hits

2024 BBM Hawks - Fly Again #25

7. Sho Nakata, 1569 hits

2024 BBM 2nd Version #475

8. Daichi Suzuki, 1567 hits

2024 Topps Stadium Club NPB #195

9. Tetsuto Yamada, 1565 hits

2024 BBM Fusion #78

10. Hisayoshi Chono, 1509 hits

2024 Topps NPB #41

I should mention that Hiroyuki Nakajima has not officially retired yet but he's not signed with a team since being released by the Dragons at the end of last season.  Should he sign with someone, he'd be second on the list with 1928 hits.

Of this group, I think it's pretty much a lock that Asamura will reach 2000 hits this season (and become the first player born AFTER the Showa Era to join the Meikyukai).  If Maru stays healthy, he's got a shot at it although he hasn't gotten 158 or more hits in a season since 2017.

Next up are pitchers with more than 150 wins and less than 200:

1. Masahiro Tanaka 197 wins (119 NPB, 78 MLB)

2024 Topps NPB #59-8

2. Masanori Ishikawa, 186 wins

2024 Bushiroad DreamOrder Central League Booster Pack Vol. 1 #CBP01-S07

3. Kenta Maeda, 165 wins (97 NPB, 68 MLB)

2020 BBM Carp History 1950-2020 #74

4. Takayuki Kishi, 164 wins

2024 Epoch NPB #254

5. Hideaki Wakui, 162 wins

2024 Calbee Series Two #C-09

I hope Tanaka finally gets the three wins he needs this year - I just wish he'd gotten them last year when he was still with the Eagles.  I don't think anyone else on this list is going to make it to 200 wins this year (or ever, frankly).

Last but not least, here's all the pitchers with more than 200 hundred saves and less than 250:

1. Naoya Masuda,  243 saves

2024 BBM Marines #M28

2. Yuki Matsui, 236 saves (236 NPB, 0 MLB)

2024 BBM Eagles #E099

3. Yasuaki Yamazaki, 231 saves

2024 Topps NPB #201

I feel like Masuda came out of nowhere to jump to the top of this list, considering he wasn't on it two years ago.  He could potentially beat Asamura to be the first Heisei-born Meikyukai member.  Yamazaki could possibly reach 250 saves if he's the closer again (I'm not sure if he's regained that role or not for this season).

Card Of The Week March 23

About a week or so ago, the Tokyo Yakult Swallows announced that Masanori Ishikawa would be the starting pitcher for their home opener on April 1st.  At 45 years old, Ishikawa is the oldest active player in NPB and is also the active NPB leader in victories with 186.  My favorite bit of trivia about him is that he is the last active member of the Japanese National Baseball Team for the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games.  He was in his third year at Aoyamagakuin University during the Olympics and would be the Swallows top pick in the 2001 draft*.

*That's really oversimplifying things - he was taken in the "free acquisition phase" of the draft which essentially meant that he and the Swallows agreed to a deal before the actual draft

Here's a team issued card from the Swallows from 2011 when Ishikawa was just 31 years old:

Wei-Yin Chen

Taiwanese pitcher Wei-Yin Chen announced his retirement a few weeks back (H/T NPB on reddit).  You'd be forgiven for thinking he had already retired as it's been three years since his last appearance in NPB and five since his last one in MLB.

Chen had signed with the Chunichi Dragons as an 18 year old prior to the 2004 season.  He had his first taste of ichi-gun in 2005, posting an ERA of 6.05 in ten games.  He spent all of 2006 on the farm and had some elbow and ligament injuries that ultimately caused him to need Tommy John surgery.  The Dragons demoted him to the ikusei roster for 2007 while he rehabbed but moved him back to the 70 man roster for 2008.

He started 2008 in the bullpen with the top team but by mid-season, he was in the starting rotation.  He'd spend the next three seasons as a mainstay of the Dragons starting rotation, going 8-4 in 2009, 13-10 in 2010 and 8-10 in 2011.  He led the Central League with an ERA of 1.54 in 2009.  He pitched for the Dragons in losing efforts in both the 2010 and 2011 Nippon Series.

He left Chunichi and Japan after the 2011 season, heading to the US and the Baltimore Orioles.  He spent four pretty good seasons in Charm City before moving on to the Marlins for 2016.  He was somewhat less successful in Miami, missing some time due to some injuries.  The Marlins released him with a year left on his contract after the 2019 season and he signed with the Mariners in early 2020.  He pitched poorly in a couple exhibition games and, with the season in limbo due to COVID, ultimately got released in June, freeing him up to return to NPB.

He signed with the Chiba Lotte Marines and debuted with the team in mid-October.  He made four starts and pitched pretty well, posting an ERA of 2.42 in 26 innings.  The Marines, however, only scored a single run in his four starts, leaving him saddled with an 0-3 record.  He started Game 2 of the Final (and only) Stage of the Climax Series against the Hawks and got lit up, giving up five runs on three home runs (two by Akira Nakamura and one by Nobuhiro Matsuda).  He took the loss in the 6-4 defeat that put the Hawks into the Nippon Series for the fourth straight year.

Within a month of the Marines elimination, he left the team as a free agent and signed with the Hanshin Tigers.  He struggled to stay healthy, making only two appearances with the top team in 2021 and a total of 13 appearances on the farm team in 2021 and 2022.  He was released mid-way through the 2022 season and returned to Taiwan.  He had surgery on his arm and spent 2023 rehabbing on his own.  He returned to action last year with the Long Island Ducks of the independent Atlantic League, going 5-5 with an ERA of 6.37 in 17 starts.   

He pitched for the Taiwan Olympic team in both the 2004 Athens games and the 2008 Beijing games.

His first baseball card was in the 2004 BBM Dragons set (#D34).  He appeared in the Dragons team sets in three of the next four years, missing only 2007 since he was a development player that season.  He appeared in a couple of Konami's sets in 2008 and made his BBM and Calbee flagship debuts in 2009.  Here's a handful of his cards:

2005 BBM Dragons #D18

2008 BBM Dragons #D11

2009 BBM 1st Version #295

2010 BBM 1st Version #449

2011 Calbee Series Three #195

2020 BBM Fusion #608

2021 BBM 2nd Version #500

2022 BBM Tigers #T03

Cracking The Code - Konami's Baseball Collection Card Numbers Explained?

I've been involved in a discussion on Reddit over the past week or so regarding a 2021 Konami Baseball Collection "SR" (super rare) card of Roki Sasaki.  I won't rehash the discussion here - you can read it for yourself if you want* - but a lot of the discussion hinges on trying to determine when, exactly, the card was published.

* I should mention that I've had some somewhat less heated discussions in DMs with the OP regarding an actual 1/1 card he pulled.  I also have to always remind myself that arguing with strangers on the internet is rarely a good idea.

Let's start with a little background on the Baseball Collection cards.  Konami produced these cards for five years from 2018 to 2022.  The cards were used in an arcade game and you'd win more cards playing the game although I'm not sure if the cards were somehow available outside of the game as well.  It's not entirely clear to me if the cards were printed by the game or just dispensed - my gut feeling is that they were dispensed but the Japanese Wikipedia page for the game implies they were printed by the game.

Based on some advertising images for the game linked to by the OP on Reddit, the 2021 Baseball Collection cards were released on March 29th of that year.  But did that mean that ALL the cards were released then or just some of them?  And if it was just some of them, was the OP's Sasaki card one of them?

There were a couple things on the back of the card that I felt were clues but I wasn't sure how to interpret them.  The first was the card's number - "202117-SR-M017-00".  What did this mean?  There's a couple things that are obvious - the "2021" is obviously the year, the "SR" is obviously because it's an "SR" card and the "M017" is Marines uniform number 17.  I knew that the "17" at the end of "202117" was not for Sasaki's uniform number because I have other Baseball Collection cards where this number is not the player's uniform number but I didn't know what it meant.  The second and much more interesting thing was the copyright date for the card which was, surprisingly, 2022, not 2021.  What did this mean?

My suspicion was that the "17" digraph somehow indicated a card series of some sort and that the 2022 copyright meant that the series that the card was in was not actually published until 2022 despite having a "cover date" of 2021.  I based this on the handful of 2021 Baseball Collection cards that I own.  I have seven in all and I took a look at the backs of them all.  What I found was that I had four cards that had "00" after the year, one that had "15", one that had "16" and one that had "19".  Here's the front and back of one of the "00" cards and the other three cards:

Here's something interesting - if you look at the lower right of the card backs, you can see the copyright date for the card.  The first three (the "00", "15" and "16" cards) have a copyright date of 2021 but the last one (the "19" card) has a copyright date of 2022.  If the digraph does actually denote some sort of card series, it would appear that the change in year happened between "16" and "17".

 I looked to see if any of my other Baseball Collection cards had a copyright date that was later than the "cover date" and if its digraph was a "high" number (although "high" is kind of meaningless out of context).  I found I only had one - this 2019 Premium card of Takeya Nakamura:

Unfortunately, the digraph for this card doesn't help as it's "C9".  It looks like Konami had issued some special cards that used different digraphs than two digit numbers,  The one thing that indicates that this card was issued after the season ended is that it commemorates Nakamura winning a Best 9 award.  It has to be for 2019 because Nakamura won the award that year but didn't in 2018.

So I had a theory that fit the evidence I had but I didn't really have any facts.  It'd be great to be able to look at Konami's checklists but they basically purged everything each year from their websites and almost none of it appears to be available in the Wayback Machine.  I decided to just Google "ベースボールコレクション" and see if anything useful came up.  I was a little surprised this led me to Suruga-ya's website.  More specifically, it led me to a page listing all of their Baseball Collection cards in their inventory (or may have once had in their inventory - it's not really clear to me how many of these cards are actually available for sale).

One of the interesting things in this listing is a column that includes "発売日" which appears to translate to "release date".  Does this really mean the date the card was released or does it mean the date it entered inventory at the store?  I looked at their listings for both BBM and Epoch and their listed release dates appear to match when the sets were released.  It may be a kind of moot point - if Suruga-ya got the item in on the day it was released, the date will be the same regardless of what it actually means.

So the nice thing about the page listing all the Baseball Collection cards is that I can search by card number or, more usefully, PART of a card number.  So I can search for all the 2021 cards simply by putting "2021" in the search field.  Or, even better, I can search for all the cards that start with "202100" by entering "202100" in it. 

What I get with the last search is a list of 285 cards that all have a release date of 3/29/21 which, as the OP of the Reddit post had pointed out, was the date the 2021 Baseball Collection cards were initially released so that checks out.

What happens if we do the search for the "202101" cards?  We get a list of 39 cards that all have release date of 4/8/21.  What's interesting is that the cards all carry the label "SEASON 2021アペンドパック第1弾" which translates to "SEASON 2021 Append Pack 1st Edition".  So it does look like that digraph indicates the series number or the "append pack edition".

I should mention that I didn't confirm if all 285 "00" cards listed or all 39 "01" cards are unique with no card being listed more than once.  Since most NPB card issues have sizes that are multiples of 12 (because there's the same number of cards for each team), my bet is that there are cards listed more than once.  The other possibility is that not every card that was issued is listed.  To be honest, this process was tedious enough without trying to determine if there were duplicate cards in the listings.

I repeated this process for "02", "03", "04", etc up to "19".  Actually to be honest, I tried a search for "20" but got a "0 results for search" message.  What I found is what I kind of expected.  Each new "Append Pack" edition has a release date later than the one before it.  And, as my handful of cards predicted, the 16th Edition was the last one published in the calendar year of 2021 (December 9th) with the 17th Edition being the first published in 2022 (January 6th).

I searched some of the digraphs that contained letters as well.  I ultimately did searches on something like 39(!) separate digraphs.  All the cards for a particular digraph had the same release date with two exceptions.  Again, this may be the day the cards entered into Suruga-ya's inventory but why would all the cards for a given digraph have entered the store's inventory on the same day unless that was the day they were released?

The exceptions were the "R1" and "R2" cards.  There were eight R1 cards - four of which were released on August 26th with two each being released on October 14th and November 11th.  There were only three R2 cards with two of them being released on December 2nd and the other on December 23rd.  I have no idea why these and only these have different release dates.  All the "R3" and "R4" cards have the same release dates.

Here's a breakdown of all the digraphs I found along with their release dates.  I've listed the R1 and R2 cards multiple times based on their different release dates.  

Digraph	Release Date	Number Of Cards	Description
00	3/29/2021	285
C0	3/29/2021	12	Startup Campaign
01	4/8/2021	39	Append Pack 1st Edition
02	4/22/2021	38	Append Pack 2nd Edition
N1	4/28/2021	24	Nostalgic Player Card Challenge Part 1
03	5/27/2021	36	Append Pack 3rd Edition
04	6/10/2021	38	Append Pack 4th Edition
C1	6/17/2021	12	Starting/Relief Prospect Campaign
05	6/24/2021	37	Append Pack 5th Edition
C2	7/1/2021	12	Utility Player Campaign
06	7/8/2021	37	Append Pack 6th Edition
C3	7/21/2021	12	Franchise Player Campaign
07	7/29/2021	39	Append Pack 7th Edition
N2	8/5/2021	24	Nostalgic Player Card Challenge Part 2
08	8/12/2021	39	Append Pack 8th Edition
09	8/19/2021	36	Append Pack 9th Edition
10	8/26/2021	36	Append Pack 10th Edition
R1	8/26/2021	4	Memorial Mission
C4	9/2/2021	12	Helper Campaign
11	9/16/2021	37	Append Pack 11th Edition
12	9/30/2021	38	Append Pack 12th Edition
N3	10/7/2021	24	Nostalgic Player Card Challenge Part 3
13	10/14/2021	39	Append Pack 13th Edition
R1	10/14/2021	2	Memorial Mission
14	10/28/2021	38	Append Pack 14th Edition
C5	11/4/2021	12	New World Campaign
15	11/11/2021	36	Append Pack 15th Edition
R1	11/11/2021	2	Memorial Mission
C6	11/25/21	12	Rookie Campaign
R2	12/2/2021	2	Memorial Mission
16	12/9/2021	58	Append Pack 16th Edition
K1	12/9/2021	24	Japan’s No.1 Tournament
C7	12/23/2021	24	Selection Player Card Challenge Fielder Edition
R2	12/23/2021	1	Memorial Mission
17	1/6/2022	69	Append Pack 17th Edition
R3	1/13/2022	2	Memorial Mission
K2	1/20/2022	36	No. 1 Deciding Match
18	2/3/2022	72	Append Pack 18th Edition
C8	2/10/2022	12	Pinch Hitter Trump Campaign
R4	2/10/2022	7	Memorial Mission
C9	2/17/2022	34	Title Holder Campaign
19	2/24/2022	70	Append Pack 19th Edition

I don't think this list is actually complete as the search for all the 2021 cards gives a total of 1651 cards and my list here only accounts for 1423.  My enthusiasm for this project kind of waned after a while and I felt I'd put enough effort into this to prove that my suspicions were correct.

So to sum everything up, it appears that the Baseball Collection cards were issued in multiple series or editions, at least for the 2021 edition (and probably for the other four as well).  Which edition a particular card is from is identified by the digraph after the year in the card number.  Cards were issued from the end of March of the year on the "cover date" on the card into the following year with the copyright date on the card indicating the year it was published - so the 2021 cards were issued from March of 2021 until February of 2022.