Ohtanis In The Outfield

 

2013 Calbee Series Three #AS-22

I saw a question asked both in comment in an old post here on the blog and over at NPB Reddit about whether the above card of Shohei Ohtani is the only Japanese card of him listing him as an outfielder.  I actually knew from a discussion I'd had on BlueSky recently that it wasn't, but I got curious about how many cards did list his position as an outfielder.  So I took a look.

Before I get to what I found, I want to take a minute and get kind of nit-picky about the Calbee card though.  Technically, it doesn't list Ohtani's position.  Rather it's listing the slot he had on the All Star team - "Pacific League Outfielder".  Now you're probably thinking to yourself "what's the difference?" so let me explain a little bit more.  Players are listed on NPB rosters in four separate categories - "Pitcher", "Catcher", "Infielder" and "Outfielder" - and those four categories are typically what you'll see on their baseball cards.  For example, Munetaka Murakami's cards list him as "Infielder" and not "Third Baseman".  The other cards in the All Star subset from that Calbee set list the actual position for the infielders rather than the generic "Infielder".  For example, Nobuhiro Matsuda is listed as the "Pacific League Third Baseman" and Kazuo Matsui is listed as the "Pacific League Shortstop".  That's because what the card is actually listing is their position for the All Star game and not their general position.  It's splitting hairs to be sure but I wanted to point out that the circumstances for this card are different than those of the other cards in this post.

I research this, I did searches for Ohtani's cards over at Jambalaya and examined the results.  I got my initial list from this and then checked some additional cards that I had that Jambalaya didn't.

What I discovered is that the vast majority of Ohtani's NPB cards list him as "Pitcher" which is what I expected.  As I said above, typically cards of NPB players reflect their category on the team's roster and Ohtani was always listed as a pitcher on the Fighters' rosters.  But I found ten cards that listed him as "Outfielder" - even though he didn't actually play in the field after 2014.  Every card that lists him as an outfielder shows him batting but not every card that shows him batting lists him as an outfielder.  With one exception, it's only BBM cards that listed him as an outfielder.  What's kind of odd is that BBM only did it for their flagship sets and a couple of their Genesis sets.  For the Fighters' team sets, he's always listed as a pitcher - even on the card in the 2013 set that shows him batting.

Without further ado, here are the cards listing him as an outfielder:

2013 Bandai Owners League 02 #074

2014 BBM 1st Version #137 (Batting Version)

2014 BBM Genesis #054

2015 BBM 2nd Version #343

2016 BBM 2nd Version #340

2016 BBM 2nd Version "One and Only" #OO02

2017 BBM 1st Version #002 (Secret Version)

2017 BBM 2nd Version #388

2017 BBM 2nd Version #CS39

2017 BBM Genesis #008

A couple comments:

• It may not be obvious that the Bandai card lists his position as "Outfielder" but if you look at the text in the lower right corner, you'll see "外野手" which is Japanese for "Outfielder"
• This is not a definitive list.  I only have a couple of his Bandai cards and none of his Konami cards as well as only a couple team issued cards.  But I'm pretty confident that I've checked all his BBM, Calbee and Epoch cards
• The 2014 Genesis set has two Ohtani cards - one pitching (#46) and one hitting (#54).  The 2017 set only has the one card
• The 2017 "Cross Squall" subset is the only one of the "Cross" subsets to have two Ohtani cards - one pitching and one hitting.  All the other ones between 2013 and 2016 have only one card that lists him as a pitcher, even if the photo shows him batting