Card Of The Week June 14

There were two things that happened last week in NPB that I wanted to highlight.  On Wednesday, the Rakuten Eagles announced that manager Hajime Miki was stepping down and Tatsuya Shiokawa was taking his place on an interim basis.  Shiokawa had had a seven year playing career, all with the Eagles and has been a coach for the team since 2018.  It's kind of funny but by replacing Miki, who had never played for the Eagles, with Shiokawa who had, all the NPB teams are now managed by former players for that team with the exception of the Giants - who've NEVER had an "official" (non-interim) manager who didn't play for the team.  The Eagles have now had twelve managers in 22 seasons if you treat Miki's two stints as separate managers, 11 in 22 if not. Orix is the only other team to have double digits in that time period and that was partly because Akira Ohgi passed away after one season.  The Eagles had also had an odd habit of having a manager serve only one season every year ending in a "5" or "0" - Yasushi Tao in 2005, Marty Brown in 2010, Hiroki Ohkubo in 2015 and Miki in 2020 - which Miki had avoided last year but apparently for only a few more months.

The other thing that happened last week was that Shinya Hasegawa of the Lions had sayonara hits on back-to-back days, walking it off against the Carp on both Tuesday and Wednesday.  It was the first time a Lions player had had back-to-back walk offs since Kazuo Matsui did it in 2002.  (H/T NPB Reddit)  Hasegawa had been drafted by the Lions as a development player in 2020 and wasn't added to the 70 man roster until the following year.

Here are the Rookie Edition cards for both guys.  Shiokawa was the fifth round pick in the Eagles' initial draft class in 2004 and I don't think they'd unveiled their uniforms by the time the photos were taken for the set.  You can see that Hasegawa's uniform number has three digits due to his ikusei status.

2005 BBM Rookie Edition #32

2021 BBM Rookie Edition #031