RIP Yukihiko Machida

This past Monday former Kokutetsu Swallows slugger Yukihiko Machida passed away from bile duct cancer at age 91.  Machida had signed with the Swallows in 1952 after graduating from high school in Nagano.  He moved into the lineup as a regular in 1953 and hit a team leading 20 home runs in 1954.

He had his best and most memorable season in 1955, hitting a career high .280 while leading the Central League in home runs with 31.  At 21, he was the youngest home run leader in Central League history.  It sounds impressive until you realize that 1955 was only the sixth season ever for the Central League.  But the record held until 2021 when Munetaka Murakami tied it*.  In addition, he had been tied with Futoshi Nakanishi and Kazuhiro Kiyohara for most home runs by a 21 year old although Murakami now has that record with the 39 he hit in 2021.

* I'm not sure there's been a determination of which player was actually younger when they won the home run crown.  Both are simply listed as 21 years old.

Much was expected of him in 1956 but injuries limited him to only 57 games.  He bounced back in 1957 to hit 21 home runs but that would be the last time he had 20 or more in a season.  He'd remain healthy enough to get over 400 plate appearances per season the next four seasons but his power disappeared for some reason, hitting at most ten home runs in a season (which he did twice - 1959 and 1960).  His playing time started to fall off in 1962 with him eventually only getting 128 at bats in 81 games in 1964.

The Swallows were sold to Sankei in 1964 and the team took it upon themselves to "remove players with low contributions and high salaries".  Machida and a number of other players were released.  Machida joined the Yomiuri Giants for the 1965 season, which could have been a great opportunity for him to cash some Nippon Series checks.  He struggled at the plate, however, hitting just .095 in 27 games before calling it quits.  He ended his career at age 31 with a .233 average and 133 home runs - the most ever for a player from Nagano prefecture.  He had won a Best 9 award in 1955 and was selected to three All Star teams (1955, 1957 & 1961).

He spent much of the next 25 years or so as a coach, first for the Giants (1967-79), then the Swallows (1980-82) and finally back to the Giants (1983-91).  He also coached for the Uni-President Lions of the CPBL from 1995-97.

Machida's list of baseball cards has always struck me as somewhat odd.  He had many cards during his playing career.  Gary Engel lists 41 cards for him in the latest "Japanese Baseball Cards Checklist And Price Guide" - mostly menko but there's some bromides and gum cards as well as a couple NST cards of him as a Giants coach.  But he's made very few appearances in OB sets from BBM or Epoch over the past 30-ish years.  As far as I can tell, he only has five "modern" cards - 2002 BBM All Time Heroes, 2003 BBM Sluggers, 2012 Epoch History Of Best 9, 2021 BBM Fusion and 2022 BBM Swallows History 1950-2022.

Here are all the cards I have for him:

1958 Who Am I? JCM 54

1960 Maruten JCM 137

1978 NST #241

2002 BBM All Time Heroes #061

2003 BBM Sluggers #018

2021 BBM Fusion #99

2022 BBM Swallows History 1950-2022 #09

That "Who Am I?" menko is apparently uncataloged - I'm not seeing it in Engel's listing for the set.

I'm kind of amused that his four BBM cards only have three photos between them.  I'm also amused that the back of his "All Time Heroes" card uses a photo of him in street clothes:

2024 BBM Team Sets

It's the last week of the 2025 regular NPB season so, of course, it's time for a post about the 2024 BBM team sets.  For over twenty years now, BBM has issued a "comprehensive" team set for each of the 12 NPB teams.  By "comprehensive", I mean a team set that contains a card of every player on the team's 70 man roster at the time the set went to press.  The 2024 version of the sets were issued between April and July of last year.

I had brought home five of the team sets - the Marines, Hawks, Tigers, Lions and Baystars - from my Japan trip last year and picked up the Eagles set from ZenMarket later that summer (due to the 20th Anniversary portion of the set).  The remaining six sets were in the box I got from Ryan towards the end of July.  (This is the traditional last post about each box of cards Ryan has sent me - there was enough in this last box that it's taken me two months to get to everything!)

Each set except the Eagles had a base set of 81 cards which included 63 to 69 "regular" cards featuring the players on the 70 man roster along with the team's manager.  The Eagles set had 117 cards - it was essentially a "franken-set" combining the "traditional" 81 card team set with a 36 card "20th Anniversary" set.  Most of the sets also had a single card dedicated to its mascot or mascots (the exceptions are the Swallow which have two and the Giants and the Eagles had none) and then the remainder of the set was made up of three to five subsets containing one to seven cards.  Some of the mascot cards double as a checklist for the set.  Here's the break down for each set:

Team	Player/Manager Cards	Mascot Cards	Subsets
Chiba Lotte Marines	67	1	Home Grown (4), Above All (4), Sonic Boom (3), The K (2)
Chunichi Dragons	69	1	Year Of The Dragon (5), New Dynamics (2), Native-Born Aichi Hero (4)
Fukuoka Softbank Hawks	63	1	Top Prospects (3), Keio Trio (1), Stellar Newcomer (2), Great Presence (5), Featured Players (6)
Hanshin Tigers	66	1	Newcomer (3), Titleholder (7), On The Rise (4)
Hiroshima Toyo Carp	69	1	Red Hot (3), Focal Point (5), Link (3)
Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters	67	1	Newcomer (4), Complete Control (4), Fight On (5)
Orix Buffaloes	67	1	Orimen Favorite Five (5), Combo (5), Bringer (3)
Saitama Seibu Lions	64	1	Connection (6), Fresh Face (4), Blue Blast (4), Another Scene (2)
Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles	66	0	Interleague Champs (1), Brightest Hope (2), Break The Limit (5), Unstoppable (5), Record Makers (2), 20th Anniversary (36)
Tokyo Yakult Swallows	68	2	Rising Stock (3), Talking Point (4), Amp Up (4)
Yokohama DeNA Baystars	66	1	Boost (3), Yokohama Bound (6), Discovery (2), Headliner (3)
Yomiuri Giants	65	0	Fielder Of Dreams (4), Rise Again (3), Smile On (3), Combo (3), Grade Up (2), Giants Pride! (1)

There's a total of 797 individual "regular" cards in all of these sets - 785 players and 12 managers.  As you might guess, there's a lot of players who show up in the team sets who did not appear in BBM's flagship sets - 1st Version, 2nd Version or Fusion.  This includes foreigners like Humberto Mejia, Christian Rodriguez, Carter Stewart, Jeremy Beasley, Robert Corniel, Bryan Rodriguez and Elvin Rodriguez along with somewhat big named players who maybe in a rough stretch or past their prime like Yasunobu Okugawa, Eigori Mogi, T-Okada, Yusuke Nomura, and Seiya Inoue.  Here's a card of a player from each set who was not in any of BBM's flagship sets:

2024 BBM Marines #M52

2024 BBM Dragons #D53

2024 BBM Hawks #H03

2024 BBM Tigers #T32

2024 BBM Carp #C09

2024 BBM Fighters #F02

2024 BBM Buffaloes #B65

2024 BBM Lions #L63

2024 BBM Eagles #E044

2024 BBM Swallows #S07

2024 BBM Baystars #DB07

2024 BBM Giants #G45

Card Of The Week September 21

Shunpeita Yamashita of the Buffaloes had a really good first couple innings against the Lions on Thursday evening in Tokorozawa.  He struck out the first six batters to start the game, tying the Pacific League record set by Fumiya Nishiguchi.  Nishiguchi, who was at the game since he's the Lions manager, had done it back in 2002, coincidentally against Orix (then the BlueWave).

Unfortunately for Yamashita and the Buffaloes, things kind of went downhill after that, although it took a while.  Tatsuya Imai was pitching pretty well for the Lions too, and the two teams were scoreless through the first seven innings.  Orix scored an unearned run in the top of the eighth after Imai came out of the game but the Lions tied it back up in the bottom of the inning, driving Yamashita from the game.  He only had two strikeouts after the first two innings.  

The game went into the bottom of the ninth before 38 year old Ginjiro Sumitani came up with two out and a runner on second and ended things (with the help of a misplay by Buffaloes left fielder Taishi Hirooka):

Here are cards of Yamashita, Nishiguchi and Sumitani:

2024 BBM 1st Version #164

2002 BBM 1st Version #241

2024 BBM Lions #L35

Baystars Fan Club Cards

I frequently mention that the biggest unknown area of Japanese baseball cards are the team issued/fan club cards.  Case in point - Ryan threw a bunch of such cards for the Baystars in the box he sent me back in July - 62 in all, dating from between 2016 and 2019.  Now I had a lot of Baystars team issued cards from this time period already so imagine my surprise that not only did I not have any of these cards, I only had one card that appeared to even be from one of the sets these cards were from!  It was even more surprising because, as far as I could tell, the cards appeared to be from 22 different sets!

It's hard sometimes to tell which set the cards just from the front of it so I figure the best way to do this post is to show the front and back of one card from each set.  I will point out that the majority of these cards have a "kira" finish on the front which doesn't always show up will in the scans.

I need to also point out that whoever Ryan got these cards from was apparently a big fan of pitcher Kenta Ishida as he's on 13 of the cards.  

Keep in mind that the names I'm giving the sets should in no way be considered the "official" name of these sets.  On the advice of a card collector on Reddit, I did some poking around the news archive on the Baystars' website to see if I could find anything about any of the sets.  I specifically was looking at the 2017 archive and while I did find some stuff about cards, they didn't seem to be talking about any of the cards I had.  So these names are simply ones I've given the sets to differentiate them from each other.

We'll do this year by year.  Ryan sent me five cards from 2016 that appear to be from four different sets.  I'm calling this first one the "Fan Club" set:

I'm calling this next one "Fan Club Kira":

"Fan Club Star Night":

This last one is "Fan Club Climax":

Almost half of the cards I got were from 2017 - 29 cards representing what I think is nine sets.  I again am calling the first one the "Fan Club" set.  This is the only one of all of these sets that I already had a card from:

"Fan Club Kira":

"Fan Club Kira Gold":

"This Is My Era" (it's not just pitchers so I assume they didn't mean "ERA"):

"I * Yokohama Day":

"Victory Festival 2017":

"Fan Club Star Night":

"Fan Club App Card Collection"  The lines of text on the back of the card says that Ishida came in 13th in the fan vote of the App Card Collection with 668 votes:

"Highlights" I find these the most interesting as they feature events from the season.  I don't know if these were released the same way that teams like the Giants issued "Winning Game Cards" or if they were released after the season.   I do know that there can be multiple cards for the same game.  All of the cards I have between this set and the similar sets from 2018 and 2019 feature Baystars wins at home:

Moving onto 2018, there were 17 cards from five sets.  This first set is "2018 Spring Camp":

"Fan Club Kira":

"Fan Club Kira Silver":

"Get The Flag!"  I think this was tied into the 20th Anniversary of the Baystars' 1998 Championship.  Besides the explicit mention of "'98" on the back of the card, Tanaka is wearing a throwback uniform:

"Highlights":

Finally for 2019, there were 11 cards in just four sets.  The first one is "2019 Spring Camp":

You could switch the names of the next two sets and they'd still fit.  Here's "Fan Club Kira":

And for lack of a better name, "Fan Club Kira Signature":

And, to wrap things up, "Highlights":

Whew!  That was a lot of cards and sets.  I don't think this is a comprehensive list of the sets for any of these four years and I have no idea what the total number of cards and sets the Baystars issued during this time period (or any other years for that matter).  I also don't know if other teams also have the bewildering number of fan club/team-issued sets.  I know there's a couple years that I have cards from multiple Lions sets but that's still on the order of three or four at most, not nine.