More New Items

I know it's only been a little over two weeks since the last time I did a round up of the latest set announcements but a there's been a couple more since then, one of which has kind of a short fuse, so I thought I should do another quick one.

- The short fuse item is that Calbee has finally announced that this year's Series Two will be released in late August.  Unfortunately, the set is pretty much the same size as every Calbee set from the past few years.  There's a 78 card base set - 60 "regular" player cards (5 per team), 12 "Hope" cards (featuring a young prospect from each of the 12 teams) and 6 checklist cards (featuring photos of team mascots).  There are three insert sets - the usual 24 card "Star" set, a single "Legend" for Hirokazu Sawamura's retirement at the end of last season (there were four similar "Legend" cards in Series One) and a 12 card "Opening Pitcher" set.  There are parallel versions of all the inserts.  Calbee has put the checklist of the set on line here.

- I keep forgetting that Bushiroad is still putting out their DreamOrder collectible card games this year.  The next release is called "Play Re:Style" and is due out on September 19th.  I'm not sure but I think there's 180 base cards (84 common, 48 rare, 36 "super rare" and 12 "zone rare") plus 30 Tactics cards (1 rare and 29 common) and the usual plethora of parallels.  I'm somewhat curious how much longer Bushiroad is going to keep publishing these as I kind of feel like they've been eclipsed by the Bandai FanStars cards.

- BBM will be releasing their annual "Rookie Edition Premium" set in late October.  Each box set will contain 38 cards - the complete 36 card base set plus two "premium insert cards".  The "premium insert cards" are all either autographed or memorabilia cards.  Since each box will most likely contain at least one autograph card, they aren't cheap.  The MSRP for a single box is 18,700 yen which is around $118.  The base set features three 2025 draft picks/2026 rookies from each team.  They won't necessarily be the top three draft picks but rather the three "best" (according to BBM) rookies for each team.

- Epoch has announced another of their "ultra high-end" combination active/OB player team sets under the "Stars & Legends" monicker.  This one is for the Hawks and will be released on October 10th.  The set will be sold in four card boxes that will retail for 18,700 yen (~$118).  The base set isn't quite set yet but will contain at least 75 cards including 37 cards for active players.  There are three flavors of the six "Decomori Signature" insert cards - gold (/25), green (/5) and "hologram" (1-of-1) - along with nine "Gem" premium insert cards which have a "Black Gem" parallel that are /5.  There are six different types of autograph cards available - "Authentic" (75+ cards), "Star" (8 cards), "Rookie" (4 cards), "Breakthrough" (8 types), "Remember 1999" (15+ cards) and "Remember 2011" (13+ cards).

Card Of The Week August 9

I'm on the road this weekend so instead of posting about something that happened in this past week, I thought instead I'd highlight a book I recently finished reading - "The Wax Pack - On the Open Road in Search of Baseball's Afterlife" by Brad Balukjian.  Balukjian decided to open a pack of 1986 Topps cards in the early 2010's and go talk to each player whose card was in the pack to see how their life was going now that they were no longer playing.  It's an interesting book, following his successes (Garry Templeton, Lee Mazzilli, Jaimie Cocanower, and Don Carman among others) and failures (Gary Pettis, Vince Coleman, Dwight Gooden and Carlton Fisk) at connecting with the players.  I think my only minor disappointment with the book was that only one of the players - Randy Ready - had played in Japan and it was only briefly mentioned.  

Ready signed with the Chiba Lotte Marines after a 13 year MLB career with the Brewers, Padres, Phillies, Athletics and Expos.  He ended up only playing in 30 games, hitting just .200 with one home run.  He was released relatively early in the season and played in Triple-A with the Padres affiliate in Las Vegas to finish out the year.  As far as I know, this card from the 1996 BBM set (#393) was his only NPB card:

Card Of The Week August 2

The NPB All Star games were this past week.  Game One on Tuesday in Tokyo Dome saw the Pacific League defeat the Central League 7-5.  Chusei Mannami of the Fighters was the MVP of game, getting four hits and two RBIs and finishing the game a home run short of a cycle (which I think would have only been the second cycle in All Star history after Atsuya Furuta's in 1992).  The Pacific League scored seven runs again in Game Two on Wednesday in Toyama, but lost when the Central League scored eight.  Seiya Hosokawa of the Dragons took the MVP Award after hitting two home runs in the game, including a two run one that put the CL ahead for good in the sixth inning.  

Here are cards of the two MVPs:

2019 BBM Fighters #F68

2024 BBM 1st Version #155

One other thing happened in Game Two that I wanted to highlight.  Orix Buffaloes catcher Kenya Wakatsuki stole home as part of a double steal.  He was the fourth player in history to steal home in an All Star game and the first to do it without having attempted one during the regular season.  Wakatsuki's been playing in at the top level of NPB for 12 years now and has only 13 steals over that time.  Surprisingly for a catcher, he's been success most of the times he's stolen as he's only been caught three times.

2023 Topps NPB #215

H/T to NPB Reddit for the details about both Game One and Game Two.

Summer To Fall Releases

I wanted to do a quick post on recent set announcements.  There haven't been a lot and I'm a little worried that I haven't heard about when Calbee's Series Two will be released.  Last year it came out in August but I've yet to see anything about it this year.

- I should mention that the Topps Finest set that was released in the US earlier this month included a 35 card "World's Finest" insert set that features players from this year's World Baseball Classic.  The set includes four players from Samurai Japan - Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Munetaka Murakami and Seiya Suzuki - along with one player from Korea - Lee Jung-hoo.  It's a bit disappointing that there aren't any players from either team who aren't on MLB rosters.  I took a quick look on Ebay to look at what the cards are selling for and the base versions aren't outrageously expensive.  The parallels are another matter, of course.

- Epoch has announced two more of their "Premier Edition" team sets.  The Lions set will be released on August 8th while the Tigers set will be out on the 22nd of that month.  The base set for the Lions will have 40 cards (39 for active players and one for an OB player - Orestes Destrade) while that of the Tigers will have 45 cards (40 for active players and five for OB players).  All the base cards in both sets will have a "hologram" parallel available.  Both sets have the usual large batch of inserts that all the "Premier Edition" sets have - three varieties of "Regular Foil Signature" ("silver", "gold" and "hologram") (18 cards each), two varieties of "Regular Decomori Signature" ("hologram" and "hologram parallel") (18 cards each), five varieties of "Time To Shine" ("A","B","C","D","E") (six cards each) and three varieties of "Decomori Signature" ("gold","green" and "hologram") (six cards each).  The Lions set has an additional three card insert set dedicated to Takumi Kuriyama.  I think all the inserts are serially numbered.  There are also the "GEM" and "BLACK GEM" "special insert cards" (nine cards in each) that I think are much more limited.  The Lions set has seven different kinds of autographed cards available - "Authentic" (39 cards), "Star" (6), "Rookie" (6), "Legendary" (1 - I assume it's Destrade), "Takumi Kuriyama" (3 - I think these are autographed version of the insert cards), "Rookie Combo" (1) and "Combo" (3).  The Tigers set only has five different kinds of autographed cards available - "Authentic" (38), "Star" (7), "Rookie" (5), "Legendary" (5) and "Combo" (3).  I have no idea who the two active players that are in the base set but didn't sign "Authentic" autographs.  This brings the count of teams that Epoch has done "Premier Edition" sets for to eight.  The only teams they're missing are the Marines, Hawks, Eagles and Giants.

- Speaking of the Giants, Epoch has announced the first of their "ultra high-end" combination active/OB player team sets for this year and it's for them.  The set has the somewhat unwieldy name of Giants Stars & Legends with Memorabilia and three card boxes of it will retail for 16,500 yen (roughly $100).  The base set will contain at least 55 cards - 22 active players and at least 33 OB players.  There are three flavors of the six "Decomori Signature" insert cards - gold (/25), green (/5) and "hologram" (1-of-1) - along with nine "Gem" premium insert cards which have a "Black Gem" parallel that are /5.  There's also a six card "Unbreakable Spirit" insert set.  The memorabilia cards referred to by the set title are bat cards for eight active players and batting glove cards (and a batting glove and bat combo card) for one player (Yuta Izuguchi).  The set also includes several different types of autographed cards.  All the autographed cards are for OB players because the Giants do not allow authentic autographed cards for any of their active players.  The set will be in stores on October 3rd.

- BBM issues a multi-sport set each fall since 2016.  This set is usually called "Infinity" except in years that end in either "6" or "1".  Since this year is 2026, the set is not "Infinity" but "Masterpiece" instead.  The funky naming pattern is because BBM celebrates the founding of their parent company - BBM Magazine Sha - in 1946 so this year is their 80th Anniversity (with 2021 having been their 75th and 2016 being their 70th).  To be fair, I've never really noticed much of a difference between the sets called "Infinity" and the ones called "Masterpiece".  BBM has not announced how many cards are in the set but, as usual, it looks like most of them are for baseball players.  The list only includes OB players - and OB players who are actually retired as opposed to active in MLB OB players.  Some of the players are Shigeo Nagashima, Sadaharu Oh, Isao Harimoto and one foreign player - Warren Cromartie.  Other sports represented in the set include softball, soccer, rugby, basketball, volleyball, tennis, table tennis, badminton, pickleball, bowling, gymnastics, diving, sumo, judo and pro wrestling.  The set will be released in late October.

Card Of The Week July 26

The big news this past week is that Samurai Japan has picked their new manager - former Fukuoka Daiei Hawk and Chiba Lotte Marine Tadahito Iguchi.  Iguchi was also the manager of the Marines from 2018 to 2022 and is the first manager of the National Team to have won a World Series title - in fact, he's the first Samurai Japan manager to have ever played in MLB.  He belongs to the rather select group of just 14 players who've won a both a World Series and an Nippon Series championship.

I was a bit surprised to discover that Iguchi only suited up for the National Team once as a professional.  It was in 2001 for the IBAF Baseball World Cup.  He did, however, play for the Collegiate National Team a couple of times in 90's as well as for the National Team for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

Here's a card of Iguchi from his stint managing Lotte:

2018 Calbee Series Two #M-06

1995 Maui Sting Rays Team Roster Poster

I was browsing Ebay recently, looking to see what was available from the Hawaiian Winter League, when I came across an interesting item.

Of course, before I get into that, I should probably quickly explain what the Hawaiian Winter League was.  It was a four team league in Hawaii that existed from 1993 to 1997.  Games were played each year between October and December.  The unique thing about this league is that it featured players from MLB, NPB and KBO.  Some of the big names from Japan who played in the league included Ichiro, Hiroki Kokubo, Kazuo Matsui, Atsunori Inaba, Kenji Johjima, Tsuyoshi Shinjyo, Hideki Okajima and Nobuhiko Matsunaka.  

Sadly, the only year that baseball cards exist for the league was 1996 (despite claims to the contrary) so there's only a handful of cards of Japanese players available.  So I was pleasantly surprised to come across a poster showing the roster of the 1995 Maui Sting Rays on faux baseball cards:

The key player on this poster is, of course, Hall Of Famer Todd Helton, so the asking price on it is nearly $600 (but down from the original $900).  What's of more interest to me, though, is that there are five Japanese players on it, all members of the Seibu Lions.

This is very much a case of "one of these things is not like the others" as the five Lions are Atsuhiro Chihara, Katsuhiko Miyaji, Koji Tahara, Hirofumi Teramoto and...Kazuo Matsui.  I thought I'd do some quickie bios of the five players and show baseball cards of each of them.

Actually, I can't show a baseball card of Atsuhiro Chihara because, as far as I know, he never had any.  He was a sixth round pick by the Lions in the 1991 draft which was before BBM started including cards of each team's entire draft in their flagship set each year (and before they started doing "comprehensive" team sets featuring all the players on a team's 70 man roster).  He was with the Lions from 1992 to 1997 but never played for the ichi-gun team.

1998 Calbee #092

I suspect that Kazuo Matsui needs no introduction here but you can check out the post I did for him when he retired in 2018 after a 25 year career split between NPB and MLB.

2002 BBM Lions PL Champs #L25

Katsuhiko Miyaji probably had the second best career out of these five players after Matsui.  He was the Lions fourth pick in the 1989 draft and had a 17 year career between the Lions (1990-2003) and Hawks (2004-06).  He blossomed with the Hawks in 2005 at age 33, making the Opening Day lineup for the first in his career.  He played in 125 games and hit .311, making the All Star team and winning a Best 9 award.  Sadly, he hurt his wrist on Opening Day of 2006 and didn't play much.  He was released after the season and hung up his spikes after one year in independent ball.

2006 Lions Original Player Card #68

Koji Tahara, Seibu's sixth pick in the 1992 draft, had a fifteen year career with the Lions as a backup catcher, mostly on the farm team.  He only played in 99 games with the top team over the course of his career and 46 of those were in 2005.  He retired as a player after the 2008 season and, appropriately enough, has been a bullpen catcher for the Lions ever since.

1995 BBM #527

Hirofumi Teramoto was Seibu's fifth pick in the 1994 draft he played for the team through the 2001 season.  A shoulder injury derailed his career in 1997 and he ultimately only pitched in 16 games at the ichi-gun level, none of which were after 1998.

Samurai Japan Crosses Over

For the second time this year, I've been made aware of a card of Shohei Ohtani that I previously didn't know about.  But unlike the Konami Baseball Collection Location Test cards, this is a card that I would have liked to have picked up had I known about them when they were issued.

Late last week I got an email from William, a reader that I've exchanged messages with a few times in the past.  William was letting me know that he'd picked up a card of Sho Nakata from a "crossover set with the anime My Hero Academia":

The front, obviously, shows Nakata in his Samurai Japan uniform while the back shows Katsuki Bakugo, one of the characters from "My Hero Academia", wearing a Samurai Japan uniform.

William mentioned that there was a card of Ohtani in the set as well.  I tracked down completed sales for both a Nakata and an Ohtani on Mercari - the Nakata had sold for 800 yen while the Ohtani went for 225,100 yen ($4.92 and $1385.44 respectively).  I swiped the images from the Ohtani listing to share here:

The back of Ohtani's card shows Izuku Midoriya, the main protagonist from the anime.

William also came across a photo of a Tetsuto Yamada card from the set as well:

The "2013 Samurai Japan" text on the cards is very misleading.  I was pretty confident that these cards were NOT from 2013 for a couple reasons.  The Japanese National Baseball Team didn't adopt the name "Samurai Japan" until mid-2013 so these cards would not have been associated with that year's World Baseball Classic team.  In fact, the uniforms worn in the WBC that year were different that what's on these cards.  The first team to play under the name "Samurai Japan" was the team that took on the Taiwanese National Team in a three game set in Taiwan in November, 2013.  Neither Ohtani nor Yamada were members of that team although Nakata was (Nakata was also on the WBC team that year*).  So it seems unlikely that a 2013 Samurai Japan set would include the two of them.

*Just to be clear, neither Ohtani nor Yamada were on the 2013 WBC team either.  Yamada's breakout year wouldn't come until 2014 and Ohtani had just been drafted.  It'd have been really unlikely that he'd have made his professional baseball debut as a member of the WBC team. 

Of course, the biggest reason that it's unlikely that there'd be a crossover set between Samurai Japan and "My Hero Academia" in 2013 is that the anime didn't debut until 2016.  And the manga that it's based on wasn't published until 2014.

So when did the cards come out?  I did some searching on-line using the Japanese text for "Samurai Japan My Hero Academia" (僕のヒーローアカデミア 侍ジャパン) and pretty quickly got some answers.  The crossover event was announced in January of 2017 and was scheduled to take place at the "WBC Team Sendoff matches" on Feburary 28th and March 1st of that year where Samurai Japan would take on the Taiwanese WBC team in Fukuoka.  A number of items depicting characters from the anime wearing Samurai Japan uniforms would be available for sale at the games.  

Most importantly, baseball cards would be distributed to fans attending the games.  Each of the first 3000 fans for each game would receive a single card from the ten card set.  Quickly doing the math, that means there were a total of 6000 cards given away those two days.  If we assume that they printed the same number of copies of each card, there's 600 copies of each card.

Only nine of the ten cards in the set depict an individual player.  In addition to Ohtani, Nakata and Yamada, the set included cards of Nobuhiro Matsuda, Hayato Sakamoto, Shogo Akiyama, Ryosuke Kikuchi, Yoshitomo Tsutsugoh and manager Hiroki Kokubo.  

I'm not positive, but I think the tenth card depicted all nine players (ok, the manager and eight players) and looked like this:

The back of this card depicted all nine of the anime characters that were paired with the players on their cards:

So I think we've pretty much definitely established that these cards are, in fact, from 2017 and not 2013.  So why do they say 2013 on them?

As I mentioned before, the Japanese National Baseball Team didn't officially adopt the name "Samurai Japan" until mid-2013.  And, more importantly, they didn't just adopt the name - they copyrighted it.  So that line of text is simply acknowledging that the name (and, more importantly, the logo) was copyrighted in 2013.  

It turns out that these aren't the only Samurai Japan cards that have this copyright line on them.  Check out the back of Ohtani's card from the 2016 Calbee Samurai Japan set, released just a couple months before these cards:

Just to be clear, I digitally added the red oval around the text.

I was somewhat surprised that there are two of the Ohtani cards up on Ebay right now.  They're both graded by PSA and are selling for $24,000 and $25,000 respectively.  Both cards are incorrectly labeled as "2013" issues.  I guess I'm not terribly surprised that PSA has it wrong (given some of their previous work with NPB cards) but I had been under the impression from Dan Skrezyna (aka Korean Cardboard) that PSA needed some sort of documentation about a set, like a checklist on TCDB, before they'd slab a card and id it.  I did a quick search on TCDB but didn't find this set listed.  So I don't know what basis PSA used to id the cards but they pretty clearly got it wrong.

I suspect that the fact that if the cards really were from 2013 they'd include a really rare Ohtani rookie card probably played into PSA being sloppy here but perhaps I'm being a little cynical.

My thanks to William for bringing these cards to my attention.  I wish I'd seen them in 2017!

UPDATE - William came across a listing for the tenth card on PSA's registry.  I was close on what I thought it would look like:

And, once again, they've got it mislabelled on which year it was.