Card Of The Week February 11

After six seasons in the majors, Norichika Aoki is returning to NPB and the Tokyo Yakult Swallows.  He played for seven teams in his six seasons - two years with the Brewers, one each with the Royals, Giants and Mariners and then three teams last season - the Astros, the Blue Jays and the Mets.

I don't usually collect memorabilia cards but I got a good deal on a bunch on Ebay a few years back and one of them was this one of Aoki from the 2007 BBM 1st Version set:

2007 BBM 1st Version #M2

Matt Murton & Colby Lewis

Two former MLB players announced their retirements in the past few weeks and since both spent time in NPB I thought I'd do a quick post on them.

Matt Murton was originally drafted in the 1st round of the 2003 draft by the Red Sox out of the Georgia Institute of Technology but he was only in Boston's organization for about a year.  He was traded to the Cubs along with Nomar Garciaparra in the four team trade that brought Doug Mientkiewicz and Orlando Cabrera back to the Sox.  He made his major league debut with the Cubs in 2005 and bounced between AAA and the majors for much of the next three seasons before he was traded (along with Josh Donaldson and a couple other guys) to Oakland in the middle of the 2008 season for Chad Gaudin and Rich Harden.  He was traded again to Colorado prior to the 2009 season which he again split between AAA and the majors.  He was released by the Rockies after the season and ended up signing with the Hanshin Tigers.

He spent six seasons with the Tigers.  He broke Ichiro Suzuki's single season hits record in his first season in Japan and led the Central League in hits again in 2011 and 2013.  He also had a 30 game hitting streak in 2011, the most ever by a foreign player in NPB and the fourth highest ever at the time.  He won the 2013 CL Batting Crown, was named to the Best 9 team four times (2010, 2011, 2013, 2014) and the All Star team the same four years.  He played in one Nippon Series in 2014 when the Tigers lost to the Hawks.

He returned to the US and the Cubs, signing a minor league deal with the team for the 2016 season.  He spent the entire season in AAA and then was released.  He signed a minor league deal with the Tigers - Detroit this time - for the 2017 season but was injured after only 7 games in AAA.  He announced his retirement about a month ago.  He'll be taking a front office job with the Cubs.

2010 BBM 1st Version #134

2011 BBM 1st Version #339

2011 Calbee #124

2012 BBM 1st Version #375

2013 Calbee #183

2014 Tigers Original Player Card #23

2015 BBM Tigers #T59

2015 Calbee #054

Colby Lewis was a first round pick of the Rangers in 1999 out of Bakersfield College.  He made his MLB debut in 2002 with Texas.  He was picked up by Detroit off of waivers after the 2004 season.  He missed the entire 2005 season due to rotator cuff surgery.  After splitting 2006 between AAA and the majors he left Detroit as a free agent.  He signed a minor league deal with the Nats in November 2006 but was released by them four months later.  He then signed with the Athletics and again split the season between AAA and the majors.  He was claimed by the Royals off of waivers in early November 2007 but released by them a month later.  He then signed a deal with the Hiroshima Toyo Carp.

Lewis spent two seasons in Hiroshima.  He led the Central League in strikeouts both seasons and was named to the All Star team in both seasons as well (although he declined to participate in the 2008 games).  He went 15-8 with a 2.68 ERA in 2008 and 11-9 with a 2.96 ERA in 2009.

He resigned with the Rangers in time for the 2010 season and remained with them for the rest of his career.  He pitched in the World Series for Texas in both 2010 and 2011.  He apparently announced his retirement a few months back because his Wikipedia page says his new job is special assistant to Rangers general manager Jon Daniels and he was hired back in November.

2008 BBM 2nd Version #596

2008 BBM All Stars #A07

2009 BBM 1st Version #326

2009 Calbee "Opening Day Pitcher" #OP-10

2009 BBM Carp Promo #SP1

2010 BBM 1st Version #454

2018 BBM Time Travel 1989

BBM's first set labeled as a 2018 set was actually released in late December of 2017.  The set is entitled "Time Travel 1989" and is the second retro set BBM has issued highlighting a past season - the first was last year's "Time Travel 1975" set.

The underlying idea of the set is to look like a set actually issued in 1989 - the stats on the back of the player cards only include 1989 and previous seasons.  The photos on the cards all could have been taken that year as well.  The cards have a matte finish rather than BBM's standard glossy finish and the backs are monochrome rather than full color.

There are 99 cards in the set.  78 of these are the "regular" cards of players (but no managers) who were active in 1989.  This breaks down to six cards per team except for the two pennant winners - Kintetsu and Yomiuri - who have nine cards each.  There are some big names in the set - Koji Akiyama, Norihiro Komada, Hiromitsu Kadota, Masahiro Yamamoto, Takehiro Ikeyama, Tatsunori Hara, Hiromi Makihara and Masaki Saitoh - and a handful of gaijin - Boomer Wells, Larry Parrish and Ralph Bryant.  There are also "Rookie" cards of several players who's rookie season was 1989 - Kenjiro Nomura, Yasuaki Taihoh, Yukinaga Maeda, Terushi Nakajima, Tsutomu Sakai, Tomio Watanabe, Kenji Tomashino and Motonobu Tanishige.  Each of their cards has a "Rookie" icon on it.  There's also a couple cards of players who played in MLB later in their career - Masato Yoshii and Masumi Kuwata.

I felt like last year's set did a pretty good job representing 1975 with only a handful of "important" players left out.  Not so this year.  Central League MVP Warren Cromartie (who also lead the league in batting and made the Best 9 team) isn't in the set.  Choji Murata, Pacific League ERA leader, isn't in the set.  Central League Best 9 third baseman Hiromitsu Ochiai isn't in the set.  Actually these three aren't a big surprise as Cromartie's only been in four BBM sets since he returned to MLB in 1991; Murata hasn't appeared on a baseball card since 2009 and Ochiai hasn't been on a card since 2011.  But there's a whole bunch of gaijin who also don't appear in the set - Cecil Fielder, Jim Paciorek, Wade Rowdon, Carlos Ponce, Matt Keough, Tony Brewer, Mike Diaz, German Rivera, Willie Upshaw, Tony Bernazard and Mike Easler.  Additional Japanese players who are missing include Takayoshi Nakao (CL Best 9 and Golden Glove at catcher), Masahiro Kawai (CL Golden Glove winner at shortstop), Hiromi Matsunaga (PL Best 9 and Golden Glove at third base), Satoshi Nakajima (PL Golden Glove catcher), Atsuhiro Motonishi (PL Golden Glove outfielder), Tsutomo Itoh and Kazuhiro Kiyohara (although Kiyohara's legal issues have caused BBM to not include him in any sets for the past three years).

On the plus side though - the cards look really good:

#27

#15

#72

#30

#51

#17

Here's what the back of the cards looks like:

Back Of #64 (Makoto Sakaki)

The remaining 21 cards in the set are split into four subsets.  The first of these is the "1989 Retirement Players" subset that features six cards of players who retired at the end of that season - Kenji Awaguchi, Shigeru Kurihashi, Masayuki Matsunuma, Kiyoshi Nakahata, Takamasa Suzuki and Tsutomu Wakamatsu.  Here's the Nakahata card:

#79

There's a five card "1989 Highlights" subset.  After the 1988 season Nankai sold the Hawks to Daiei who moved them from Osaka to Fukuoka.  At the same time Hankyu sold the Braves to Orix.  The debut of the two teams are the first two cards in this subset.  The remaining three cards commemorate Sadaaki Yoshimura's return to the Giants lineup in early September after missing most of the season due to injury; Ralph Bryant's four home runs in four at bats in a double header on October 12th and the Giants comeback victory in the Nippon Series after being down 3-0.  Here's the card for Byrant:

#88

There's a four card "Pop Culture" subset featuring pop culture "things" from the year.  The four "things" are Mr Malick's "Super Magic" TV show(?), Nejime Shoichi winning the Naoki Prize (a literary award) for the novel Kōenji Junjō Shōtengai, the manga series Obatarian winning the Bungeishunjū Manga Award and Yoshiharu Habu winning a major shoji tournament at age 19.  Here's the Habu card:

#93

The final subset is the six card "Born In 1989" subset which features six current players who were born in 1989 (obviously).  The six players are Hikaru Itoh, Yuki Karakawa, Yoshihrio Maru, Tomoya Mikami, Akira Nakamura and Yoshinori Satoh.

#94

I like the set, even if I feel it left a lot of players out.  I'll be curious to see if and how BBM does future editions of this set.  Will they stick with years before they started to make cards (1991)?  I'd love to see a set for 1950 (first year of the two league system) but I doubt that would ever happen - they'd only be able to have maybe three OB players signing autographs.  Moving earlier than the late 70's will make it more difficult to have active players in a "Born In..." subset.  I guess we'll know in the fall.

You can see the entire set (including the insert sets) at Jambalaya and Ryan did a post back in December for the set as well.

I teased this the other day so I will tell the story about the obstacles I had getting this set.  The set came out right around Christmas and I kept searching Yahoo! Japan Auctions for complete sets but I kept not finding any.  Finally after about a week I realized that the search term I was using ("2018 1989") wasn't finding much because most of the sellers had the set listed as a 2017 set.  So once I changed the search terms I finally found a complete set.  But when I went to bid on the auction via Noppin I discovered that they had closed for about five days for New Years.  Since I already had the Fusion and Samurai Japan sets waiting for me with Noppin I didn't want to use JAUCE or kuboTEN to get it.  Luckily the set was still available when Noppin reopened a few days later and I was able to buy the set.  Now obviously before Noppin can ship the set to me, they have to receive the set from the seller.  Usually this only takes a couple days - this time it took a week.  Once they got it, I sent a packing request to them.  They got back to me a day later telling me how much it would cost to ship all three sets (Fusion, Samurai Japan and Time Travel 1989) and I immediately paid it.  Noppin promises that they will ship the next business day after you pay for it.  Of course I paid on a Friday so they didn't ship until Monday.  But finally it had been shipped and I should get it in a couple days, right?  Well, not quite.  Tracking showed that it reached customs in New York - and then the US government shutdown for three days.  I don't know if that actually had any impact on my shipment but it took a whole week to clear customs.  It finally arrived at my house about a week and half ago - 12 days after Noppin shipped it.  But all's well that ends well and these are all first world problems so enough whining.

Card Of The Week February 4

Daisuke Matsuzaka had a try out with the Chunichi Dragons a few weeks back and did well enough to merit a place on the team's ichi-gun roster for spring training.  Matsuzaka has been fighting injuries ever since returning to Japan from MLB three years ago.  He spent the past three seasons with Softbank but only made one start with the top team during that time.  His making the team probably says more about the state of the Dragons' pitching than anything else but I hope he gets it together for one last good season.  Here's a card of him back in his glory days with the Lions in the 00's:

2005 BBM Glorious Stars "Active Star" #AS2

2017 Calbee Samurai Japan

For the second year in a row Calbee issued a 36 card Samurai Japan set late in the year.  This year's set has cards for 35 players plus a checklist card and covers almost all the players who played for the professional version of the Japanese National Team in the four friendlies against Mexico and The Netherlands in November of 2016 as well as the World Baseball Classic last March.  I believe that the only two players not included were Norichika Aoki (who I assume was not included due to licensing since he played in MLB last year) and Ginjiro Sumitani (who was a late addition to the WBC roster replacing the injured Motohiro Shima).  I'm actually kind of curious why Calbee decided to include the checklist card rather than add a card for Sumitani.

In case you don't remember off hand who was on the roster of the late 2016 to early 2017 version of Samurai Japan, the set includes most of the top names in NPB including Shohei Ohtani, Tomoyuki Sugano, Hayato Sakamoto, Tetsuto Yamada, Takahiro Norimoto, Yoshitomo Tsutsugoh, Seiya Suzuki, Shogo Akiyama and Sho Nakata.  All three of the MLB imports from Japan this winter - Ohtani, Kazuhisa Makita and Yoshihisa Hirano - are in the set as well.  The checklist card shows a post-game victory lineup.

Like last year's set the cards resemble Calbee's high end "Star" insert cards but unlike last year's set the cards are much more attractive this year.  I think the sepia colored backgrounds look better than the dark blue ones from last year and the kira finish this year doesn't make it look like the player's engulfed in a snow storm.

#SJ-36

##SJ-21

#SJ-25

#SJ-22

#SJ-10

As usual you can see all the cards (including the parallel version) over at Jambalaya and as usual Ryan has already blogged about the set.

2017 BBM Fusion

I'm finally getting around to writing about this set - it was issued a little over two months ago in late November but I didn't get my set until about a week ago.  There's a bunch of reasons for that - most of which have to do with the new Time Travel set so I'll wait until I do the writeup on that set before I go into the reasons.  Or not - my tribulations getting cards are probably not something anyone else cares about.

Anyway, onto the set.  This is the second year that BBM has issued a set called Fusion and this set is very similar to the one they issued last year.  The set has 144 cards which break down into four distinct groups - a nine card "1st Version Update" subset, a nine card "Ceremonial First Pitch" subset, a 24 card "Leader" subset and 102 "regular" player cards.

The nine "1st Version Update" cards are numbered 601 to 609 so they pick up right where this year's 2nd Version set left off.  Four of the players in the subset are late signing foreign players (Wily Mo Pena, Roel Santos, Chris Marrero and Carlos Rivero), three of the players were traded during the season (Luis Mendoza, Toshiaki Kurobane and Keisuke Tanimoto) and the other two were foreign ikusei players who were promoted to the ichi-gun team during the season (Xavier Batista and Livan Moinelo).

#603

#607

The only difference I can see between these cards and the 1st Version cards (beyond the set name on the front) is that the backs of the cards include the player's stats for the 2017 season.  Here's the back of Chris Marrero's card where you can see that he played in the majors for the San Francisco Giants this season as well as for Orix:

Back of #605

The "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards are numbered FP14 to FP23 which is a continuation of the card numbering for the "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards in the 2nd Version set.  As usual these cards feature Japanese celebrities throwing out the first pitch at a game.  A couple of these celebrities have been on these cards before - Ayame Goriki and Ami Inamura (who's been on about a dozen of these cards now).  The other seven are actress Airi Eino, actress/singer Aya Hirano, gravure idol Ren Ishikawa, actress/singer (and former AKB48 member) Tomomi Itano, Momoiro Clover Z leader Kanako Momota, actor Tatsuya Nakadai, and Super Girls singer Kome Watanabe.

#FP19

#FP14

The "Leader" subset features the 2017 statistical leaders for 12 categories for each league - Batting Average, Home Runs, RBIs, Hits, OBP, Stolen Bases, ERA, Winning Percentage, Wins, Saves, Hold Points and Strikeouts.  If a player led the league in multiple categories then he has multiple cards - for example Alfredo Despainge led the Pacific League in both Home Runs and RBIs and therefore has two cards in the subset.  If there's a tie for a category then there's multiple players on one card.  For example, Marcos Mateo and Kentaro Kuwahara of the Tigers tied for the Central League Hold Points title with 46 and therefore share the card.  This subset is numbered as part of the Fusion set itself (#103-126) (which is the same range of numbers that this subset had last year).

#105

#124

I don't know if Despainge is goose-stepping, being a one-man chorus line or warming up for a field goal attempt in that photo.

The remaining 102 cards in the set are the "regular" player cards.  These are split evenly between active and OB players.  Like last year's set, each of the active players (and manager) featured had some achievement that the card is commemorating and then there's a corresponding OB player who had accomplished some sort of related achievement.  For example, on April 7th of last season Takuya Katoh of the Carp nearly pitched a no-hitter in his first start.  This is featured on card #007.  Card #008 features OB player Shinichi Kondoh who threw a no-hitter in his first start in 1987.

#007 & #008

Honestly I'm not sure of the achievements on most of the cards - obviously not being able to read Japanese is a bit of a drawback here (and I'll point out that most of the obvious milestone achievements like 2000 hits were featured on the "Great Records" insert set).  But the cards themselves are attractive (even if the design is very similar to last year's set) and BBM uses a lot more interesting photos in this set then in their other sets.  The active players featured include pretty much all the big names in NPB last season - Shohei Ohtani, Tetsuto Yamada, Tomoyuki Sugano, Yusei Kikuchi, Dennis Sarfate, Yuki Yanagita, Yoshiharu Maru and Seiya Suzuki.  Three of the players in the "1st Version Update" subset also have regular player cards - Pena, Batista and Marrero.  Noticeably absent from the set however are Yoshitomo Tsutsugoh and Shogo Akiyama (who is in the Leader subset however).

#055

#061

#067

The OB players include Shigeo Nagashima, Katsuya Nomura, Isao Harimoto, Keishi Suzuki, Hiromitshi Kadota, Alex Ramirez, Koji Yamamoto, Gene Bacque, Masahiro Yamamoto, Atsuya Furuta and Tsutomu Wakamatsu.  It looks like BBM did a lot of searching for photos that haven't been used a lot of times before on cards.  There's also a couple players who haven't appeared on very many OB sets previously - Shinya Sasaki (only two other cards I know of in the last 15 years) and Takashi Suzuki (no other OB cards that I know of).

#046

#100

#039

#088

Because this is practically a flagship set, BBM did "secret versions" of nine of the regular player cards in the set - four active players and five OB players.  The active players were Shohei Ohtani, Hayato Sakamoto, Randy Messenger and Chris Marrero.  The OB players were Isao Harimoto, Koji Yamamoto, Katsuya Nomura, Keishi Suzuki and Gene Bacque.  The only card I have so far is Ohtani's:

Regular and Secret Versions of #097

I like this set a lot but I think I'd like it a little better with fewer OB cards and a larger "1st Version Update" subset.  You can check out all the cards over at Jambalaya and Ryan did a post on the set back when it came out.

Card Of The Week January 28

Marines pitcher Hideaki Wakui had been testing the international free agency waters this off season but he's apparently not received an offer from an MLB team that he's willing to take.  He's expected to resign with Lotte this week.

Wakui has pitched in the US previously in his career though.  He was a member of both the 2009 and 2013 Japanese World Baseball Classic teams and appeared in two games in San Diego in the 2009 tournament and in the semi-final game in San Francisco in 2013.  Here's a card of him from the 2009 Konami WBC Heroes set (#W09R088):