Card Of The Week January 31

I mentioned earlier in my post about the Orix Anniversary set that Leon Lee was the first black manager in Japan when he managed the Blue Wave back in 2003. Lee was the hitting coach for the team and took over after Hiromichi Ishige (the former Seibu Lions infielder) was fired 20 games into the season with a record of 7-12-1. The Blue Wave went 41-76-3 in the 120 games that Lee managed. Following the season, when the Lions let Haruki Ihara go (because somehow finishing first and second in his two years of managing wasn't good enough), Orix hired him to manage and asked Lee to take his old job as hitting coach again. Instead, he returned to the States.

As far as I can tell, there's only one card of Lee as manager of the Blue Wave, and it's this 2003 BBM 2nd Version card (#774):


I got much of the background information for above from the entries for Lee, Ishige and Ihara from Japan Baseball Daily's manager section.

2009 Epoch All Japan Baseball Foundation Set

Hitting the stores this past fall was a set produced by Epoch (who's previous contribution to Japanese baseball cards was a set of stickers back in 2000) that commemorates the 15th Anniversary of something called the "All Japan Baseball Foundation". I'm not exactly sure what this organization is, but I think they're a group of retired players that promotes youth baseball. Their website is here and there's a page with information about the set (and possibly order it, although I don't know if they ship internationally) here.

The set is a 77 card box set that includes 76 "regular" cards of OB players and an autographed card. The set information page I referenced above gives a complete list of the players in the set - this Google translation of the set information page does a decent job of rendering most of the names in English - players marked with an '*' have autograph cards available as inserts.

It's an eclectic group of players ranging from players from the 1940's (Tetsharu Kawakami) to almost the current day (Shinji Sasaoka). Sadaharu Oh, Isao Harimoto, Koji Yamamoto, Tsutomu Wakamatsu, Senichi Hoshino and Koichi Tabuchi are some of the big names in the set. Since I don't know why these players were selected, it's difficult to say who a notable exclusion is - the set doesn't have Shigeo Nagashima, Katsuya Nomura or Masaichi Kaneda in it, but I don't know if that's because they're not involved with the organization. A couple of players in the set are deceased - Kazuhisa Inao and Akira Ohgi. Choji Murata shows up in the set after being noticeably absent from recent BBM OB sets.

Here's some example cards:





That's Yoshinori Hirose (#46), Morimichi Takagi (#14), Yoshio Yoshida (#09), and Yukihiro Nishizaki (#60).

I'm not sure really what I think of the set. It's an interesting collection of players, but if you're looking for something to be a good representation of NPB history, this probably isn't it.

2009 BBM Orix 20th Anniversary Set

Following the 1988 season, the Hankyu Corporation sold the Braves to a company called Orix. The team was called the Orix Braves for the 1989 and 1990 seasons, then renamed the Orix Blue Wave in 1991. Following the 2004 season, Orix and the Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes officially merged, although essentially what happened is that the Buffaloes were absorbed by Orix and Kintetsu stopped owning a baseball team. The resulting team was the Orix Buffaloes.

BBM has celebrated the 20th Anniversary of Orix buying the Hankyu Braves with a 55 card box set (as opposed to the usual 99 card pack-based sets for the rest of the recent Anniversary sets). Despite being smaller, the set follows the same pattern as the other Anniversary sets - there's a six card subset showing highlights in Orix History, 33 cards featuring former Orix players and 15 cards for the 2009 team. Each box set also contains an insert card which potentially could be some sort of memorabilia card.

The six events chosen to represent the high points of the past 20 years were Ichiro Suzuki's 200 hits in 1994, Koji Noda's 19 strikeout game in 1995, Yoshinori Satoh's nohitter in 1995 (he was the oldest pitcher to throw a nohitter until Masahiro Yamamoto threw one in 2005), the clinching of the Pacific League pennant in 1995, the Nippon Series championship in 1996 and the retirement of Kazuhiro Kiyohara in 2008. The last one strikes me as a bit of an odd choice, seeing as how Kiyohara didn't play for Orix very long and seeing how making the Climax Series in 2008 might have been more significant.

The 33 former Orix players include both retired players and those still playing elsewhere, both in NPB (Yoshitomo Tani, Arihito Muramatsu) and MLB (Ichiro, So Taguchi). (I think this is only the second appearance of Ichiro in a BBM set since he left Japan, but I could have missed one.) Retired players include Boomer Wells, Shigetoshi Hasegawa, and Koichi Ohshima. I don't see any glaring omissions, but it might have been cool to have had a card of Leon Lee, who was the first black manager in Japan when he managed the Blue Wave in 2003. Troy Neel had some good years with Orix in the mid-90's, but was probably left out due to his current legal issues.

I found it a bit odd that there isn't more variation in the uniforms shown in the photographs for the former players - no one is shown in an Orix Braves uniform and only Kazuhiro Kiyohara and Akira Ohgi are shown in Buffaloes uniforms - and there was no other option for Kiyohara. The picture they used for Ohgi was strange not simply because they must have had a million pictures of him in a Blue Wave uniform (since he managed the team from 1994 to 2001), but also that it's pretty much the same picture that was used for his 2005 BBM 1st Version card.

The 15 players chosen to represent the 2009 team include Tuffy Rhodes and Alex Cabrera, although it doesn't include the manager Daijiro Ohishi.

Here's a sample card from each of the three subsets:




That's Ichiro Suzuki (#18), Shogo Yamamoto (#37), and the card commemorating the clinching of the Pacific League pennant (#52).

Card Of The Week January 24

In the Hall Of Fame balloting a few weeks ago, Hiromitsu Ochiai missed election by only three votes.


1987 Calbee #377

Shigeru Kobayashi

Former Giants and Tigers pitcher and lately Fighters coach Shigeru Kobayashi passed away abruptly last weekend. As Deanna points out here, he was a pretty good pitcher in the late 70's - early 80's who career is now mostly remembered as the guy traded to the Tigers for Suguru Egawa during the "Egawa Affair".

The "Egawa Affair" was when Suguru Egawa refused to sign with the teams that drafted him (first the Lions, then the Tigers) because he wanted to play for the Giants. Eventually, the Giants basically said that if he wasn't allowed to sign with them, they'd up and leave NPB. Given the popularity of the Giants compared to the rest of the league, the league caved and the Giants were allowed to trade Kobayashi to the Tigers for Egawa.

I frequently use this story to show people who compare the Giants with the Yankees that the Giants have been able to pull stuff that the Yankees can only dream of. And in case anyone thinks the Giants shenanigans are only in way in the past, remember that a couple of years back, the Hawks gave the Giants Hiroki Kokubo for nothing. Speculation at the time was that Daiei was preparing to sell the team and wanted to ensure that they had the Giants approval for whoever they sold the team to. And shortly after, they sold the team to Softbank.

Here's some cards of Kobayashi (who this post was actually meant to be about!):





That's 1975/76 Calbee #606, 1978 NST #30, 1979 Calbee "July's Best" #2 and 1979 TCMA #85.

Yet Another Bowman WBC set

Recently, Topps put out the Bowman Draft Picks And Prospects set which included one more World Baseball Classic subset (don't think it could be considered an insert set - I bought two packs and got four WBC cards!). This set has 35 cards including six players from Japan - Norichika Aoki, Yu Darvish, Munenori Kawasaki, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Ichiro and Seiichi Uchikawa. All of the photos are "mugshots" like the one of Darvish above (#BDPW2). I think this is the only card of Kawasaki in all the WBC sets.

I'm guessing that this is the final WBC set for the 2009 games, so I'll try to do a wrap up of all the sets in the next few weeks.

Matsui Home Run Cards

When Hideki Matsui was a rookie back in 1993, there were some major expectations laid on him. He was given uniform number 55, for the number of home runs he was expected to hit in one season which of course would tie the existing record shared by Sadaharu Oh, Tuffy Rhodes and Alex Cabrera (although it was held solely by Oh in 1993). He was also expected someday to break Oh's career home run record. To this end, Nippon TV started a card set featuring a card for each home run Matsui hit.

This set has continued to the present day, including the home runs he's hit for the Yankees. Nippon TV is now looking into whether or not they can get recognition from Guiness for longest running baseball card set.

Jason had a post about this set last month and a link to a gallery of his collection of these cards. The Yakyu Baka story I linked to above has a link to the Offical Matsui Home Run Card club website.