Winding Down The Old Year And Starting Up The New One

We've got yet another case of me waiting so long to do another round up of upcoming sets that one of the sets will be released in a couple of days.  Let's get caught up, shall we?

- This Friday will see the release of Topps' third NPB product of 2026 - NPB Finest.  Boxes containing 15 packs of four cards will retail for 9900 yen (~$63) and will be released on November 13th.  As usual, the base set contains 216 cards which breaks down to the usual 18 cards per team.  Those 18 cards will contain cards for the team's manager and top three 2025 draft picks (also as usual).  There are four insert sets - "Arrival", "1994 Finest Baseball", "Power Zone" and "Finest Chants".  "Arrival" and "Finest Chants" have 24 cards each while the other two have 28 - each set has two active players per team but the 28 card sets have four "Legend" players each.  According to the checklist for the set, there are a ton of autographed cards available.  Looks like ten players for each team (except the Giants who have none as usual) along with a bunch of NPB Legends.  The Legends include a number of current MLB players like Shohei Ohtani, Masataka Yoshida, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Yu Darvish, Yuki Matsui, Roki Sasaki, Kodai Senga, Munetaka Murakami and Kazuma Okamoto along with Ichiro, Sadaharu Oh, Hideo Nomo, Yutaka Entatsu and Rich Gossage.  There are relics for a number of active NPB players although they surprisingly are not evenly split between the teams or even have all 12 teams represented.  There are also relics for Ichiro and Sadaharu Oh.  I should mention that while I frequently point out that Topps doesn't bother attempting to keep their sets up to date, they did replace Shinnosuke Abe as Giants manager with interim manager Hideki Hashigami in this set.  On the other hand, Hajime Miki still has a card as Eagles manager (he was let go in mid-June) and there's no card of Yuudai Yamamoto with the Hawks (he was traded to them in May) although at least there's no card of him still with the Baystars.  I do not know if Topps will be doing an NPB Chrome set this year as I have not seen anything about it.  If they don't, it'll be the first time in the six years Topps has been doing NPB cards that they did not.  It is possible that set won't be released until 2027 - their first Chrome set for 2021 wasn't released until 2022 (although in fairness, Topps didn't get their NPB license until October of 2021).

- Epoch is releasing another of their "ultra high-end" combination active/OB player "Stars & Legends" team sets on November 28th.  Boxes for the Marines set will retail for 18,700 yen (about $120) and contain just four cards.  The base set will have at least 44 cards, all of which are serially numbered.  The set also has the usual three six card "Decomori Signature" insert sets ("Gold", "Green" and "Hologram") along with a six card "GEM" special insert set and a six card "BLACK GEM" special insert set.  There are also six different varieties of autographed cards - "Authentic" (one for each player in the base set which, again, there are at least 44), "Star" (5 cards), "Rookie" (7 cards), "Legendary" (at least 12 cards), "Baseball" (20 cards) and "Combo" (2 cards).

- BBM's "ultra high-end" "Glory" set will be out on November 30th.  Boxes will contain just six cards and retail for 28,600 yen or about $180.  There are 36 cards (three active players from each NPB team) in the base set, each of which has a parallel.  I think the base cards are /2000 but I don't know what the parallels are.  There are two possible inserts - "MIYABI" (36 cards, each /50 with an even more limited parallel) and "Glorious 3D" (12 cards, each /25).  The big attraction is, of course, the memorabilia and autographed cards.  The memorabilia cards include "super patch" cards as well as combo and triple ones.

- BBM's other "ultra high-end" set is a multi-sport set called "Crown" which will be released at the end of December.  It's not quite as expensive as "Glory" as a six card box will "only" be 27,500 yen (around $174).  All the cards in the set are serially numbered but I don't know what any of them are numbered to.  The base set has 48 cards.  There are four insert sets although two of them - "Refinement" and "Jet" - could be considered parallels of the base cards as there are 48 cards in each of those sets.  The "Refinement" cards are made with "Japanese paper" while the "Jet" cards are made with "special jet-black paper".  The other two insert sets are "Foil Autumn" (23 cards on "hologram paper") and "Sparkling" (12 3D cards).  And, of course, there are tons of autographed cards although no memorabilia cards.  Each box is guaranteed to include at least one autographed card.

- On the more reasonably priced side of things, for the third year in a row, BBM is releasing a box set for the Lions that highlights the player's "fashions" - specifically a couple alternate uniforms the team wore this year as well as some street clothes worn for a team event.  "Lions Parade Black & Blue" sets will hit the shelves on December 2 and will retail for 6,600 yen or roughly $42.  Each box contains 61 cards - a 60 card base set plus one "special" insert card.  The base set is split into three subsets - "Dress-up Style" (13 cards featuring players in street clothes from a "blue denim" fashion event in May), "Lions Black Mode" (23 cards featuring players in their "Lions Black Mode Uniform" which was worn during home interleague games) and "Aofes 2026" (24 cards featuring players in their blue alternate uniforms from home games in August).  The "special" insert card could be a foil autographed card, a "cheki print" card or one of four different autographed cards (including one with a player illustration from the "Peko-chan Milky Mother's Day" event rather than a photo).  Boxes will also contain one "special pin badge" featuring either "Peko-chan" (the "girl with pigtails" mascot for the Fujiya candy company) or a player illustration.

- Also for the third year in a row, Calbee is issuing baseball cards during the off-season that are tied into  the "Pro Yakyu Spirits A" mobile game (but for the first time, I'm not getting caught by surprise by it).  The set will contain 24 cards (two per team) and there are "kira" parallels available.  The checklist is already out and bags of chips with one card packs will officially be in stores on December 7th although it would not be a shock if they were available a little earlier than that.  It also wouldn't be a shock if Calbee issued yet another set like this in late January/early February.  I just wish I understood why Calbee is doing sets like this in the off season rather than publish a third series of their regular cards.

- BBM has announced their first set for 2027 and I'm not exactly sure what to make of it.  It's called "Baseball Card Encyclopedia Edition" and is apparently some sort of tie-in to an NHK TV show called "Kyujien".  The text of the ad says that BBM has "picked out players who are experts in 9 themes, including opposite-field hitting and side-arm pitching".  The base set will contain 81 cards split into three as yet unnumbered subsets - "regular", "IKIJIBIKI" and "Editorial Department".  There will also be two nine card insert sets called (I think) "Symbolic" and "Essence" and autographed cards (including combo ones).  Some of the photos on the cards will come from old footage from the show.  The ad says that the set will have both OB and active players but, so far, the list of players are only retired ones (including deceased ones) such as Katsuya Nomura, Shigeo Nagashima, Choji Murata, Masa Yamamoto, Koji Uehara, Masumi Kuwata and Hisashi Iwakuma.  The set will be released in early February.

Card Of The Week November 8

The 2026 Korean Series wrapped up today in Daegu with the Samsung Lions being crowned KBO Champions.  The Lions, who finished in second place during the regular season, knocked off the first place KT Wiz in five games for their first championship since they won four straight Series in 2011 to 2014.  Lions outfielder Koo Ja-wook was named Series MVP.  Here's a card from his rookie year of 2015 (although I don't think it's his first card):

2015 Superstar Baseball Season Two #SBC1502-081-N

Florida Project Addendum

I wanted to do a quick coda to my post about completing the subset from the 1974/75 Calbee set showing the Yomiuri Giants at Vero Beach for spring training in 1975.  Calbee was not the only card company to include cards showing the Giants in Florida - NST did too.  Unfortunately I can't say for sure how many such cards there are in the set.

If you're not familiar with NST, they issued four sets of baseball cards between 1975 and 1983.  Although to be completely accurate, they issued four sets of baseball "stamps" that were intended to be pasted into books.  Their first set - the one from 1975 - was entitled "Mr. Baseball" and was centered on Shigeo Nagashima.  A large number of the cards in the set featured Nagashima's recently completed playing career as well as his first season as the Giants' manager.  Other cards featured the players on the 1975 Giants as well as stars (and managers) of other teams.

I haven't seen all the cards in the set but I think there are two sections of the checklist that include photos that were taken in Florida in the spring of 1975.  I don't have all of these cards but I found a number of them over at COMC.  It'll be pretty obvious which are which.

The first section is cards #182 to #191 which appear to mostly be photos of Nagashima during spring training both in Japan and Florida.  This card is one of the exceptions which shows the Giants players lined up on a baseline.  It resembles the photo on the 1974/75 Calbee card #694 which was taken at Daytona City Island Ballpark although I don't think this one was taken there.  The caption for this card in the stamp booklet for the set says that this photo is from Vero Beach although I don't think those captions are always accurate.

#186

This next card features Nagashima with Stan Wasiak, the manager of the Dodgers' Triple-A team in Albuquerque at the time.  The caption in the stamp book implies that this is Dodger manager Walt Alston but that's not correct - Alston wore #24 not #75.  That's Giants catcher Takashi Yoshida (#9) lurking in the background.

#188

This next card is one of my favorites.  It features Nagashima and Expos manager Gene Mauch starting to exchange hats.  The text in the stamp book again implies that this is Walt Alston again but it clearly is not.

#189

Gary Engel had labelled this as Gene Mauch in his checklist but I always wondered if it really was him.  But a few months back I was spelunking through SABR's photo archive and I came across this which confirmed it:

The final card from this section of the checklist shows Nagashima talking to uniformed person wearing a blue coat.  The stamp booklet does not identify the other person.  The card looks very similar to the 1974/75 Calbee card #713 although it is not the same photo.

#190

Engel lists the other person as Jack McKeon, who was the manager of the Kansas City Royals at the time, although he adds a "?" to indicate that he's not sure.  I don't know why Gary decided it was McKeon although I don't see anything obvious to confirm it one way or another.  It'd be kind of ironic if it turned out that the one time NST didn't claim it was Walt Alston with Nagashima, it turned out that he was.

The other section of the checklist that has photos taken in Florida is cards #224 to #239.  I'm fairly certain that not all of these cards do but here are the ones that I've seen that I think were.  The first one features an American player who is instantly recognizable to anyone who was a baseball fan in the 1970's (or reads the Night Owl regularly);

#224 Tsuneo Horiuchi/Ron Cey

BTW - I sent the Night Owl a copy of this card a few years ago so he's already aware it exists.

 

Here's the rest of the cards:

#226 Sadaharu Oh

#227 Toshimitsu Suetsugu

#229 Isao Shibata

#230 Shozo Doi

#234 Kazumi Takahashi

#235 Shigeru Kobayashi w/coach Yukinori Miyata

#236 Yoshimasa Takahashi

#239 Shitoshi Sekimoto

A couple of comments on these cards:

• If you look at the background of Shibata's card, you'll see a bunch of Atlanta Braves players in the dugout
• I briefly got excited that there was a Pittsurgh Pirates player in the background of Doi's card as it looked like there was a guy with an afro wearing a yellow hat on the far right of the card.  After closer examination I realized that what I thought was a hat on top of a bushy head of hair was actually the arm of a player just out of frame - you can see that player's shin in the bottom right of the photo.  Everything lined up just right that it looked like that arm made up the head of the player in the background.
• It was only while I was researching this post that I realized that the Shigeru Kobayashi card was from this set.  I had thought it was from the JCM 2003 set that I wrote about recently.

These and the Calbee cards are all the ones I know of from the Giants' visit to Vero Beach in 1975.  I don't know of any from their 1981 visit - I had previously thought some of the cards from the 1983 NST set were from Florida but they're actually from Guam, where the team did spring training that year.

RIP Kojiro Ikegaya

The news broke late last week that former Hiroshima Toyo Carp pitcher Kojiro Ikegaya passed away from multiple myeloma at age 74.

Ikegaya joined the Kanazashi Shipbuilding industrial league team after graduating from high school and played for the team for two years.  He was drafted in the seventh round of the 1971 draft by the Kintetsu Buffaloes but refused to sign.  Kazazashi Shipbuilding decided to disband their team at the end of that year and Ikegaya transferred to Nippon Gakki (which is now Yamaha).  He played for the Japanese team in the IBAF Amateur Baseball Championship in 1972 and drew some interest from the Pittsburgh Pirates although nothing ever came of it.  He was the first pick of the Carp in the 1972 draft and, while he signed with them, he didn't actually join the team until the end of 1973.  The reason for this was that the Flyers had drafted another Nippon Gakki pitcher - Satoshi Niimi - and the team objected to losing two key players at the same time.  

He debuted with the Carp in 1974 and really came into his own the following year, going 18-11 while helping the team win their first ever Central League pennant.  He followed that up with an even better year in 1976, going 20-15 with a league leading 207 strikeouts.  He won the Sawamura Award that year.  He led the league in strikeouts again in 1977 although his record dropped to 11-16.

He spent the next few seasons as a solid member of the Carp's starting rotation, helping them to back-to-back Nippon Series championships against the Kintetsu Buffaloes in 1979 and 1980.  He hurt his shoulder in 1982 and never really recovered from it.  His playing time with the top team decreased over the next couple seasons and he retired in 1985.

He made the All Star team twice (1975 & 1976) and won both the Best 9 (for pitcher) and Best Pitcher awards in 1976.  On the negative side, he gave up an NPB record 48 home runs in 1977.

After retiring he coached for Carp from 1989 to 1992 and for the Giants from 1998 to 2001 and again in 2004.  He was also a baseball commentator on both TV and radio.

Ikegaya's first baseball cards were in the 1974/75 Calbee set and he showed up in various sets from Calbee, Yamakatsu, NST and Takara during his playing days.  He also appeared regularly in various OB sets from BBM and Epoch over the past 20 years or so.  Here's a bunch of his cards:

1974/75 Calbee #767

1975/76/77 Calbee #1402 (w/Hisashi Yamada)

1977 Yamakatsu JY4

1978 Pino Ice Cream 

1979 TCMA #26

1984 Takara Carp #11

2006 BBM Draft Story #068

2009 BBM The Premium Malts #06

2014 BBM Pitcher Spirits Of Carp #04

2015 Epoch Red Helmets 40th Anniversary #33

2020 BBM Time Travel 1985 #73

2020 BBM Carp History 1950-2020 #27

Card Of The Week November 1

The 2026 NPB season drew to a close on Wednesday as the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks successfully defended their status as NPB champions by completing their four game sweep of the Yokohama DeNA Baystars.  The Series was closer then it sounds with the first three games all going into extra innings.  Game Three featured a walk off home run by the eventual Series MVP Tomoya Masaki who was the 18th player to ever hit one.  It was the 13th championship for the Hawks which ties them with the Lions for second place in NPB history (behind the Giants' 22).  Amazingly it was SoftBanks' ninth in the past 16 years - they won in 2011, 2014-15, 2017-20 and 2025-26. 

BBM used to issue a box set for the Nippon Series from 1991 until 2012 that included all the players who appeared in the Series as well as cards for the the Series MVP, the "Fighting Spirit" award winner (kind of a "MVP for the losing team" award) and the three "Outstanding Player" award winners.  Since BBM no longer publishes this set, I've been featuring those award winners in the first "Card Of The Week" post following the end of the Series since 2014 (since I didn't know they weren't going to do a set in 2013):

Series MVP Tomoya Masaki (2024 Hawks 2025 Season Vol. 1 #24SBH105)

"Fighting Spirit" Katsuki Azuma (2022 BBM 1st Version #137)

"Outstanding Player" Kazuki Sugiyama (2022 BBM Hawks #H19)

"Outstanding Player" Yudai Yamamoto (2024 Topps Now Samurai Japan #5)

"Outstanding Player" Yudai Shoji (2025 BBM 35th Anniversary/Shukan Baseball 4000th Issue #233)

Yudai Yamamoto presented a bit of a challenge as he'd been traded by the Baystars to the Hawks in the middle of the season and so far there's only a couple cards of him with SoftBank.  Needless to say, I don't have any of them.  But I didn't want to share any of his Baystars cards since I didn't want to mislead anyone that one of the "Outstanding Player" awards went to a member of the losing team (which is rare but happens sometimes).  So I decided to use a Samurai Japan card of him instead.

Yudai Shoji presented a different issue which I'm sure is going to become more and more common.  Since his rookie season was 2025, the year after I stopped getting new cards, I only have two cards of him.  I shared one of them a few weeks back and so I shared the other one here.  I expect that there will be more and more players doing things that I'd feature in posts like this that I'm going to have few or no cards of.  Not sure yet how I'm going to meet this challenge.

Wes Westrum In Tokyo

I came across an interesting item on Ebay recently - a set of seven photographs of Wes Westrum in Tokyo.  Westrum had been a catcher for the New York Giants from the late 40's to the late 50's and then had coached for them for a few years after they moved to San Francisco.  He then moved to the Mets and took over as manager after Casey Stengel, the Mets' original manager, broke his hip.  After the Mets dismissed him a few years later, he returned to the Giants, working as both a coach and a scout (not sure if he did that at the same time).  He had a second shot at being a manager when the Giants had him replace Charlie Fox in the middle of the 1974 season but his tenure only lasted until the end of 1975.

So what was Westrum doing in Tokyo?  He was a coach with the Giants when the team spent part of March, 1970, in Japan as the spring training guests of the Lotte Orions.  It was not a particularly good experience for the team as they experienced a packed schedule spread across Japan (nine games in nine days from Shimonoseki at the western end of Honshu along with Osaka, Nagoya and Tokyo) and bad weather (including snow in Osaka).  The Giants went 3-6 on their trip and started the regular season back in the States poorly enough that they fired manager Clyde King in late May.  (Lotte, on the other hand, won the Pacific League pennant that season before falling to the Yomiuri Giants in the Series - becoming the sixth of the Giants' nine vanquished teams on their V9 run.)

Six of the seven photos in the auction appear to have been taken at Tokyo Stadium, the then-home of the Orions.  The remaining one was taken at a dinner somewhere - it's not entirely clear that the photo was from the Japan trip.  These are among the very few color photos I've ever seen of Tokyo Stadium.

I will confess to feeling a little guilty that I've swiped the images from the auction but the asking price of $100 is a bit steep.  I'm feeling less guilty by at least including the link to the auction above.

I thought I'd take a shot at trying to identify everyone in the photos but, to be honest, I don't think I've done a very good job.

The "70" on the sleeve of the guy on the right indicates that Westrum is posing with Hall of Famer Hiroshi Nakao, who was the Giants' farm team manager that year.

I'm guessing that this is Orions' manager Wataru Nonin with Westrum.  I've only been able to track down one photo of Nonin (from a 2014 Baseball Magazine mook about NPB managers) but I think it's him:

Their relative heights support this guess.  Westrum was 5-11 while Nonin was 5-6.  I can buy that there's five inches between the tops of their heads.

It's kind of amazing how there can be ten players in a photo and almost all of them are positioned in just the right way that their uniform numbers and faces can't be seen.  The one exception is the guy on the right side who's partially obscured by the guy in street clothes.  It looks like the name on the uniform starts with "Sato" and his uniform number starts with "3".  I think this is Susumu Satomi, a back up catcher who wore number 39.  There were two players on the team with the surname "Sato" - both pitchers - but Motohiko wore #17 and Keiji wore #41 so I don't think it's either of them.

The catcher on the left appears to have a name that ends in "A" and a uniform number that ends in "6".  Not positive but I think he's Yasuo Otsuka who wore number 26.

That's clearly Otsuka on the far right.  Not sure who anyone else in the photo (other than Westrum and Nonin) are.

Of the ten players visible or at least partially visible in this photo, there's only one whose uniform number is visible.  Problem is that there's no #83 on the roster for the team on Japanese Wikipedia and the listing for #83 for Lotte at the "Player Number History" website starts with a pitcher named Masao Nara in 1971, a year after this.  I'm going to guess that this was a batting practice pitcher but I don't know who it is - especially since there doesn't appear to be a name on the back of the uniform.  It's also entirely possible that someone decided to change their number during spring training.

Of a little more interest is who the guy next to Nonin is.  I'm guessing it's one of the coaches for the team as opposed to a player.  If I have to pick someone, I'd go with Hall of Famer Sadao Kondo, who was the Orion's pitching coach.  He wore glasses and was almost as tall as Westrum (5-9).

Of course, I could be wrong about any of these identifications.  If anyone has any better guesses, let me know.

Giant Baba Menko Card

I got a message a few weeks back from someone on Reddit who was asking me if I had any suggestions about where they might be able to track down Giant Baba's menko card.

Wait, Giant Baba had a menko card?

Let me explain who this is.  Shohei "Giant" Baba was a famous pro wrestler in Japan, starting in the 1960's and continuing until his untimely death at age 61 from colon cancer in 1999.  His nickname came from the fact that he was about six feet, ten inches tall.  Before he became a wrestler, however, he was a baseball player!  He dropped out of high school to sign with the Yomiuri Giants  in 1954 and spent five seasons (1955-59) with the club.  He spent most of his time on the farm team, only getting in three games with the top team in 1957, going 0-1 with a 1.29 ERA in seven innings, striking out three while only giving up five hits and one run along with no walks.  Oddly enough, his one loss was Shigeru Sugishita's 200th career win.  After being let go by the Giants, he was picked up by the Taiyo Whales but he suffered an arm injury when he stumbled in the shower and shattered a glass door.  He needed 17 stitches and had issues with numbness in his fingers which ultimately resulted in his retirement from baseball.  His wrestling career began shortly afterwards.

Given his lack of time at the ichi-gun level, I think I can be forgiven for thinking there weren't any baseball cards of him issued during his career.  I had thought that the only card showing him as a baseball player was from the 2000 BBM All Japan Pro-Wrestling set which had a large subset dedicated to him including this card:

2000 BBM All Japan Pro-Wrestling #64

The message from the Reddit member explained that they'd come across the card in an old Prestige Collectibles Auction.  The card is from a set that Engel refers to as "JCM 36: 1958 Yamakatsu Black and White w/Blue Diagonal Line Back"  Here's the front and back of the card (the images were swiped from the auction site):

Gary lists the value of the card at $800 even though it sold at the auction for $172 (although that was in May of 2013).

Gary does list three other cards for Baba in his latest guide but those cards are all from multi-sport sets that depict him as a wrestler, not a baseball player.