Japanese Baseball Cards

Sunday, September 13, 2026

Card Of The Week September 13

The Hawks were leading Nippon-Ham 4-1 going into the bottom of the eighth inning last Tuesday night in Fukuoka when the wheels fell off for the Fighters. SoftBank battered reliever Shoma Kanemura for ten runs (only nine of which were earned) on seven hits and four walks, highlighted by Ukyo Shuto's inside-the-park grand slam. Kanemura faced 13 batters and had only retired two of them when manager Tsuyoshi Shinjo finally pulled him from the game. Instead of bringing in another reliever, however, Shinjo tapped catcher Yuya Shindoh to get the final out. Miraculously, Shindoh did that, getting Tatsuru Yanagimachi to ground out to second on his second pitch.

Having a position player pitch used to be fairly rare in Japan but it seems to be happening more often in the past few years. I know that first baseman Jose Osuna of the Swallows pitched in a game earlier this year and I think there have been other instances of it, although I don't know if there's a list somewhere. It was reported, however, that Shindoh was the first position player to pitch for the Fighters since September 29, 1974.

When looking over Shindoh's cards, I discovered another instance of two different card companies using the same photo. This is another thing that I'm not sure how often it happens although with four companies producing numerous sets, it's bound to happen more often than I realize.

2024 Epoch Fighters Premier Edition #10

2024 Topps Stadium Club NPB #156

Shintoh was a member of the 2023 Samurai Japan Collegiate team and, as such, was featured in the 2024 Panini USA Baseball Stars & Stripes set:

2024 Panini USA Baseball Stars & Stripes #JPN-YS

Finally, I want to add some details about the previous time that the Fighters had a position player pitch. It was part of catcher Hiroshi Takahashi's successful attempt to become the first player in NPB history to play all nine positions in one game. It was the second game of a double-header at home at Korakuen Stadium and the next-to-last game of the season. The opponent was also the Hawks, although they were owned by Nankai at the time and called Osaka home. With the Hawks up 7-0, Takahashi faced one batter to lead off the ninth and retired him, although I don't know any more details than that.

Takahashi is most known outside Japan, to the extent that he's known at all, as one of the other guys that Nankai sent to the San Francisco Giants minor league system along with Masanori Murakami in 1964. While Murakami pitched for Fresno in the Class A California League, Takahashi and Tatsuhiko Tanaka played for Magic Valley (Idaho) Cowboys of the Rookie Class Pioneer League. Takahashi had a long career in NPB, playing for the Hawks (1964-71), Flyers/Fighters (1972-76) and Lotte Orions (1977-82). He passed away in 2016.

2017 BBM Time Travel 1975 #39

Saturday, September 12, 2026

Raidel Martinez

On Thursday of this week, Raidel Martinez of the Yomiuri Giants became the second pitcher this season to reach the 250 career saves mark. Martinez did it in 411 career games, the fastest in NPB history - in contrast, Naoya Masuda, the last guy to reach the milestone, did it in 795 games, the most in history. (In fairness to Masuda, there's only four other guys with more than 250 saves in NPB). The Cuban Martinez has become only the third foreign player to meet the qualifications for the Meikyukai (2000 hits, 200 wins or 250 saves*). The others are Alphonso Soriano and Alex Ramirez although Soriano has never been invited to join as he only had two hits in NPB (where he began his career with the Hiroshima Toyo Carp).

* Stats posted in MLB count as well but the first hits, wins or saves must be in NPB. Ramirez's first hits were in MLB but he had 2000 hits in NPB as well.

Martinez was originally signed by the Chunichi Dragons as a development player (ikusei) in 2017. He was registered to the 70 man roster in early 2018 and made a few appearances with the top team as a starter before shifting to the bullpen. He replaced Hiroshi Suzuki as the team's closer at the end of May of 2019 and notched his first save on June 11. He led the Central League in saves in both 2022 and 2024 before leaving the Dragons as a free agent at the end of the 2024 season. He signed with the Giants and again led the Central League in saves in 2025 (and he's currently leading the league again this season).

Martinez was the first former development player to ever lead the league in saves and is the first one to make the Meikyukai.

He's played for the Cuban National Team in three World Baseball Classics (2017, 2023 and 2026) and two Premier 12s (2019 and 2024). I'm kind of disappointed that he has not yet appeared on a WBC baseball card.

Speaking of his baseball cards, I believe that his earliest card is 2018's Epoch One #190 which commemorates his first career win on May 15th. He also appeared in both BBM's and Epoch's comprehensive team sets that year (#D32 in BBM's set and #33 in Epoch's). His first flagship set appearances for BBM, Epoch, Calbee and Topps were in 2019, 2020, 2022 and 2023 respectively. Here's some of his cards:

2018 Epoch One #190

2018 BBM Dragons #D32

2019 BBM Dragons #D32

2020 BBM 2nd Version #368

2021 BBM Dragons #D33

2022 Calbee Series Three #174

2023 BBM Fusion #GR23

2024 Epoch NPB #151

2025 BBM 35th Anniversary/Shukan Baseball 4000th Issue #121

Monday, September 7, 2026

Samurai Japan WBC Team Members Who Have Played In MLB

I mentioned in my post the other day about the new Topps Chrome Samurai Japan set that I had researched how many players on Japan's six WBC team rosters have played in MLB. There are 37 so far (with more on the way, of course, possibly as soon as next year). It turned out that the new set has only 16 of these players with the remaining players all being currently active in NPB so I decided that I'd do a post featuring all 37 players.

I thought it was kind of interesting that there were five players who played in MLB BEFORE they played in the WBC. Two of these are kind of obvious - both Ichiro and Atsunori Ohtsuka were in MLB before the first World Baseball Classic. Lars Nootbaar is also somewhat obvious as he's never played in NPB (although it wouldn't surprise me if he did at some point). One of the others was Yusei Kikuchi which was kind of surprising - you'd have thought he might have played on either the 2013 or 2017 teams. The last guy was Shohei Ohtani which, when I thought about it, made a lot of sense. He'd intended to play on the 2017 team but ended up skipping the tournament due to an injury that kept him mostly sidelined that year, his final one in Japan before leaving for Southern California.

I tried to pick cards for each of the 37 players that were "official" WBC cards as much as possible but there were a couple players who it was impossible for. For most of those players, I used other Samurai Japan cards. A couple of them were from "unofficial" WBC sets (mostly the 2017 Calbee Samurai Japan set) but I was forced to use a different Calbee Samurai Japan set for Hirokazu Sawamura, one that was not from the same year as the WBC. And since Kikuchi NEVER played for any Samurai Japan team before this year*, I'm using a card of his from the Lions.

* He has WBC cards from this year but since I stopped getting new cards, I don't have any

I also tried to not have more than one card from a particular set but that proved impossible as well.

Anyway, enough with the process details that no one cares about. Here are the players: