Card Of The Week October 4

Marty Brown is apparently out as manager of the Carp and Kenjiro Nomura is expected to be named the new manager soon. Here's Nomura's 1995 BBM card (#131):

A Restaurant in Osaka

Years ago, there was a day when I was a little burned out on baseball and wanted to do something that didn't involve it. My then-girlfriend (now wife) read a review in the Baltimore Sun about a restaurant in Timonium called Ralphie's Diner and wanted to check it out. Upon arrival, we discovered that the place had a bust of "Ralphie" and it turned out that he was Ralph Salvon, longtime trainer for the Orioles. Without even trying, I had managed to make an innocent trip to a restaurant baseball-related.

I was reminded of this by a recent post of Deanna Rubin's in which she goes out to dinner in Osaka and discovers that the place is owned by a former NPB player, Tadami Nakatani.

Nakatami had had a short career from 1987 to 1994 with the Tigers, Buffaloes and Blue Wave. (Hmm, he moved from the Buffaloes to Blue Wave after 1993 - wonder if there's a connection to Akira Ohgi who left the Buffaloes for the Blue Wave at the same time.) I've got a couple of his cards - none with the Tigers (who he only played in 11 games for in 1987-88). Here's his 1991 and 1994 BBM cards (#72 and 408 respectively):

Ten Years Later

One of Deanna's readers has been asking about Tomohiro Nioka and wants to see baseball cards of him. She suggested he take a look over here. Apparently, he was given Nioka's 1999 card and would like "to see the difference in the cards I have from 1999 to now". So, here goes...

Nioka's 1999 BBM card happens to be his rookie card. It's #330:


His regular card with this year's BBM 1st Version set is #093:

Yet more WBC and 2010 is coming soon

Some new stuff I discovered today:

- Topps has issued yet another World Baseball Classic insert set. The latest flavor of Bowman contains a 40 card WBC insert set. The set is numbered from 21 to 60, so it's a continuation of the earlier 20 card Bowman insert set. The set contains ten Japanese players - Norichika Aoki, Hisashi Iwakuma, Shuichi Murata, Masahiro Tanaka, Kyuji Fujikawa, Michihiro Ogasawara, Takahiro Mahara, Hiroyuki Nakajima, Toshiya Sugiuchi, and Shunsuke Watanabe (who's labeled as being on the Chinese team in the checklist). I think these are the only WBC cards for Fujikawa, Mahara and Sugiuchi.

- BBM's website today listed this year's Rookie Premium set. This is a 50 card boxed set featuring rookies from this season. There are 48 "regular cards" - 36 "regular" (3 per team) and 12 "subset" (1 per team). The set also includes two insert cards - parallels, photo or memorabilia cards. It will hit the stores in late October. Typically, this set has a design similar to the "Touch The Game" sets, so if you like that sort of thing this set should be right up your alley.

- BBM also listed their first set for 2010 today - the latest in the annual "Historic Collection" sets - the "Memory Makers - Instant Of Glitter" set. It looks like it's the standard "Historic Collection" set - 144 cards consisting of 72 OB players and 72 active players, plus the usual collection of inserts. I'm not quite sure I understand the theme - the Babel Fish translation is pretty vague - but I'm sure it will be clear when the set goes live in late November.

Card Of The Week September 27

In his 18 year career (9 years in Japan, 9 years in the US), Ichiro Suzuki had never been thrown out of a game. Until last night.

Here's his 1999 BBM card (#452):

Shozo Doi

Former Giants infielder and Orix Blue Wave manager Shozo Doi has passed away at age 67. Doi made his debut with the Giants in 1965, which was the first year of the V9 Giants. His team won the Nippon Series for each of the first nine years of his 14 year career. Doi is more notable for being Ichiro Suzuki's first NPB manager - the one who famously said that Ichiro would never hit with that batting stance. He managed Orix from 1991 to 1993. He was later a coach with the Giants.

Some cards:

1997 BBM Giants (V9 subset) #G93:


1978 NST #172:


1991 BBM #74:


1997 BBM Giants #G3:

2009 BBM All Stars

I used to really like BBM's All Star sets.

When I was learning about Japanese baseball, those sets helped me learn who some of the better and popular players were in the league. They also helped fill in my collection for some of the years where it's a bit thin (like 1998).

But I think now that a combination of the fact that I'm getting a lot more cards now than I used to and the fact that I've haven't liked the design of the cards much in recent years (with the notable exception of 2007) are making me reconsider if I want to keep getting this set.

Now admittedly, this is simply my personal preference, but I think the nicest looking cards are ones with border-less, full bleed photos and a minimum of text (name, team, position, etc) in an unobtrusive manner. So take a gander at a couple of "regular" cards from this year's BBM All Star set (#A59 & #A58):



So we've got an odd orange-ish border around the edge (it's blue-ish on the Pacific League cards) that for some reason is thicker on the bottom. There's the words "2009 All Star Cards" running down one side of the card. If the player was selected by the fan voting, there's a "Fan Selected" thing in the middle of the picture. If it's the first time the player was selected, there's a "1st Time All Star" thing in the picture. And if, like Masato Akamatsu here, the player was both selected by the fans AND a first time All Star, he gets both things cluttering up his picture.

Oh, and if you're going to have the player's team "flag" in one of the upper corners, you don't need to list it again under the player's name. I just feel the front of the cards are way too busy.

Anyway, some details about the set. Like always, it's a 65 card box set. There are 28 cards for each of the two all star teams, three cards for the managers and coaches for each team (Hisanobu Watanabe, Masataka Nashida and Daijiro Ohishi for the Pacific League, Tatsunori Hara, Hiromichi Ochiai and Akinobu Mayumi for the Central League), two cards for the MVPs for last year's All Star games (Takeshi Yamasaki - card #A64 pictured below - and Masahiro Araki) and one card for the player who got the most votes from the fans - Atsunori Inaba.


To wrap up on a positive note, I guess the one thing I can say about this set is that I like it better than last year's set.