Livan Moinelo of the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks made his first start of the 2026 season last Tuesday. The reigning 2025 Pacific League MVP had a late arrival to Japan in the spring due to the World Baseball Classic and a wide scale power outage in Cuba. He worked out with the farm team and made an appearance with the ikusei squad against the Shikoku Island League's Ehime Mandarin Pirates but a shoulder injury further delayed his start to the season. He went six innings against the Marines last week, giving up four hits and no runs while striking out five and walking no one, so he appears to be back to his normal self.
Moinelo had originally signed with the Hawks in May of 2017 as an ikusei player (along with Oscar Colas who defected in 2020, signed with the White Sox in 2021 and is playing in Mexico this season) and was moved to the 70 man roster a month later. He made his ichi-gun debut on June 27th, pitching a scoreless inning against the Fighters. He was a bullpen staple for SoftBank for his first seven seasons in Fukuoka and has been an excellent starter for them the past couple.
His first baseball card with the Hawks was from the "1st Version Update" subset of the 2017 BBM Fusion set (#602):
This is not his first baseball card, however. Moinelo has pitched for Cuba in past three World Baseball Classics (as well as all three Premier 12 tournaments) and shared a card from the 2017 Topps Now WBC set (#W-7) with three other Cuban pitchers - Bladimir Banos, Vladimir Garcia and Miguel Lahera. I think Moinelo is the second player from the right on the card:
There is also a Spanish-language parallel version of this card. I'm a little disappointed that he has not appeared on any other World Baseball Classic cards.
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