The 2025-26 Caribbean Winter Leagues are already underway and the Australian Baseball League will be starting their season later this week. This means that it's time for my annual post about which Japanese players have been dispatched by their NPB teams to get some overseas experience over the winter. Well, I say "over the winter" but typically the players only play in these leagues for a month or so, usually returning to Japan in time for Christmas or New Years. As usual, I'm relying on the WinterLeagueJP website for much of this information.
The Australian Baseball League is going to look a little different this year. They lost two teams over the off-season, with the Melbourne Aces departing the league for the KBO Fall League and the Canberra Cavalry just flat out disbanding. That leaves the league with just four teams - the Brisbane Bandits, Sydney Blue Sox, Adelaide Giants and Perth Heat - which is half of what the league had six years ago.
Adelaide will welcome four Giants of the Yomiuri variety - Yu Aramaki, Yusei Ishuzaka, Yamato Shiroki and Tomoki Tamura:
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| 2025 BBM 1st Version #025 |
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| 2025 Epoch NPB #016 |
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| 2023 BBM 2nd Version #541 |
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| 2023 Bowman NPB #BP-10 |
Brisbane is getting Kyosuke Mashiko and Hayate Nakagawa from the Yokohama DeNA Baystars:
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| 2021 BBM Baystars #DB37 |
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| 2024 BBM Baystars #DB74 |
Moving over to the Western hemisphere, four NPB teams are sending players to three teams in the Puerto Rican Winter League. Most of these players are on the young side with only a few years of professional experience with one exception - the Swallows are sending 30 year old and 12 year veteran Kazuto Taguchi to the Leones de Ponce:
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| 2023 BBM 1st Version #170 |
The Gigantes de Carolina are getting four players from two teams - Ryuta Hirose and Kazuo Ohno of the Hawks and Ren Mukunoki and Kaisei Tohmatsu of the Buffaloes:
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| 2024 BBM Hawks #H49 |
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| 2023 Epoch Hawks Premier Edition #15 |
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| 2022 Epoch NPB #246 |
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| 2024 Topps Stadium Club NPB #45 |
Lastly, the Lions are sending three players to the Senadores de San Juan - Minato Aoyama, Shinya Hasegawa and Taishi Mameda:
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| 2024 Epoch NPB #288 |
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| 2022 BBM Fusion #620 |
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| 2024 BBM Lions Collection #LC11 |
There is another winter league that is starting up this winter that has some Japanese players - Baseball United. Most of those players are not under contract to an NPB team anymore, however. I will discuss them in a post that I hope to get to later this week.
NOTE - any 2025 cards in this post are images swiped from Jambalaya.
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