Japanese Baseball Cards

Sunday, February 15, 2026

Card Of The Week February 15

Someone on the Japanese Baseball Card Discord group was showing off their recent card acquisitions a few weeks back and one of the cards they'd picked was Hideki Matsui's rookie card from the 1993 set. Another member of the group asked if it was an original card or a reprint and the poster confirmed that it was an original.

That got me thinking about what reprints exist for Matsui's rookie card. I only know of two "official" reprints - ones that were issued by BBM. The first was an insert from the 2000 BBM "flagship" set. To celebrate their tenth year of publishing baseball cards, BBM included 12 card insert set featuring reprints of one rookie card from each of the twelve teams. Matsui was the Giants representative.

The second card was included in the 2003 BBM "The Legend Of Hideki Matsui" set. It was part of the base set, along with reprints of his 1997 Diamond Heroes Jersey card (sans jersey) and one of his cards from the 1999 Yomiuri Shimbum Giants set.

I have both of these reprints along with the 1993 original so I thought I'd share them here. The 2000 reprint is pretty clearly marked on both the front and back as a reprint but the 2003* card is only marked as a reprint on the back. Despite BBM having adopted the standard 2 1/2" x 3 1/2" card size in 1995, both reprints are the original 2 2/8" x 3 3/8" size that BBM's used for their 1991-94 cards.

Here are the fronts and backs of all three cards:

* The set was released in early 2003 but the cards all have a 2002 copyright on them

1993 BBM #423

2000 BBM "Rookie Reprint" #R8

2003 BBM "The Legend Of Hideki Matsui" #52

I don't know of any other reprints of Matsui's rookie cards. BBM did another "Rookie Reprint" insert set in the 2017 1st Version set but it only included active players. BBM did another tribute set to Matsui when he retired in 2013 but it did not contain any reprint cards.

Sunday, February 8, 2026

Card Of The Week February 8

There was an interesting story on the NPB sub-reddit a week or so ago. The Rocket City Trash Pandas of the Southern League will be hosting a three game "Global Baseball Series" from March 30th to April 1st, just before the regular season begins. One of the teams taking part will be the Toyota Red Cruisers of the Japanese corporate leagues. Toyota will be playing in two of the three games - they'll take on the Alabama A&M team on March 30th and the Trash Pandas on April 1st. The Trash Panda's ballpark is just outside of Huntsville, Alabama in the town of Madison and the car company (which has a joint manufacturing plant with Mazda in that town) owns the naming rights to it.

Much as I'd love to see this Series, I don't see any way that I can make it to Huntsville for it. But I can share a couple baseball cards of Toyota players from a couple of the JABA sets of corporate league players. There's a number of Toyota players in the sets but I only have four cards that feature three players. I have no idea of any of these guys will be in Huntsville or if they're even still with the team.

2021 JABA #21JP012

2022 JABA #22JP012

2022 JABA #22JP055

2022 JABA #22JP071

If Ryosuke Aizawa's name sounds familiar to you, it's probably because he's in the Japanese Collegiate Samurai Japan cards in the 2019 Panini USA Baseball Stars & Stripes set. The 29 year old at least played for Toyota last year as he's in the 2025 JABA set.

Sunday, February 1, 2026

Card Of The Week February 1

Last summer, the Baltimore Orioles (my local MLB team) inducted Adam Jones into their Hall of Fame. Jones had finished his career in Japan, spending two seasons in Osaka with the Orix Buffaloes in 2020-21. It made me wonder at the time how many members of the Orioles Hall of Fame had played in NPB.

I finally took a look at the list and I think the answer is four. In addition to Jones, there's Don Buford (Taiheiyo Club Lions 1973-75, Nankai Hawks 1976), Davey Johnson (Yomiuri Giants 1975-76) and Doug Decinces (Yakult Swallows 1988). Here are Japanese cards of all four of them:

2010 BBM Lions 60th Anniversary #76

1975/76/77 Calbee #1222 (Johnson)

1988 Takara Swallows #15 (Decinces)

2021 Topps NPB #76

There's an additional Orioles Hall of Fame member who played in the Far East. Melvin Mora spent a portion of the 1998 season in Taiwan, playing for the CPBL's Mercuries Tigers. I used to have his CPBL card but I traded it to Ryan years ago when I purged my collection of all my Taiwanese cards. I was kind of surprised to discover I'd never put it in a post here on the blog but luckily, TCDB has it.

2026 Epoch One Cards

Today is February 1st which means that all the NPB teams opened their training camps today (although since it's already the 2nd in Japan, technically they did it yesterday). For the third year in a row, Epoch is commemorating the event by releasing the first batch of their on demand Epoch One cards. There are 71 2026 cards now available, the bulk of which (61 cards) are for the 2025 draft picks for the ten teams that Epoch issues these cards for - the Marines, Dragons, Hawks, Tigers, Fighters, Lions, Eagles, Swallows, Baystars and Giants or everyone other than the Carp and Buffaloes. For everyone except the Tigers, it's just the draftees from the "regular" phase of the draft but the Tigers players include the two players they took in the ikusei portion. These will be the first cards for many of these players, beating out their BBM Rookie Edition cards by several weeks. And no, there's no card for Rintaro Sasaki, the first round pick of the Hawks as he has not signed with the team.

The remaining ten cards are for players who changed teams over the winter. This includes Kenta Maeda, who returned to NPB after ten years in the US and signed with the Eagles as well as Hikaru Itoh (joined the Eagles), Toshiki Abe (Dragons), Go Matsumoto (Giants), Takahiro Norimoto (Giants), Hiroya Shimamoto (Fighters), Haruki Nishikawa (Fighters), Kohei Arihara (Fighters), Hiyu Motoyama (Tigers) and Torai Fushimi (Tigers).

This is the ninth year that Epoch has issued their Epoch One cards and I'm kind of amazed that everything about them has remained the same. They're still just 500 yen apiece (including domestic shipping) and are only available for three days. What's also apparently remained the same, unfortunately, is that there's no way to order these directly from overseas.

Tuesday, January 27, 2026

Spring Is Coming...Isn't It?

My part of the world got dumped on with a bunch of snow and ice on Sunday and the temperatures have dropped into the Arctic range so I want to focus on some recent announcements for card sets that will be coming out when the weather will hopefully be a bit warmer.

- I had made a prediction in my wrap up of Epoch's 2025 card sets that last year's edition of the Holographica set, one of their annual collaborations with the OB Club, was going to be delayed until March of 2026. I was correct - the set will be released on March 14th. This is another of Epoch's "ultra high end sets" with each six card box retailing for 16,500 yen (about $107). Each box is guaranteed to include two autographed cards. I don't think the full checklist has been settled on yet but there are at least 59 cards in the base set, each with a parallel version, and something like four different varieties of autographed cards. Players in the set include Sadaharu Oh, Ichiro, Koji Uehara, Koji Yamamoto and Tsutomu Wakamatsu.

- BBM is issuing a box set dedicated to Munetaka Murakami called "Kiseki". Each box will contain 37 cards which will include the 36 card base set plus one "special" insert card which could be a parallel card, one of ten different memorabilia cards or one of five different autographed cards. The set will be out in mid-March.

- Jumping ahead a few months, BBM is releasing the 2026 edition of their 1st Version set in early May. The details for the set look pretty much the same as it's been for every year since 2015. There's the usual 324 player/manager cards (27 for each team), the 12 team checklist cards and the 36 "Cross Something" cards that will be continued in the 2nd Version set later in the year - this year the Something is "Forest". That makes a total of 372 cards in the base set. Nine cards for each team have several different facsimile autograph parallels. There are also parallel versions for 71 of the rookie cards (or all the rookie cards). There are three varieties of short printed photo variants - each team has a card with a rare "secret" version, a card with a rarer "ultra secret" version and a card with an even rarer "super ultra secret" version (and they could all possibly be variants for the same player). There are two non-premium insert sets - "New Wonder" (12 cards - one rookie per team) and "Japonism" (12 cards - one per team) - and four serially numbered premium insert sets - "Amazing" (12 /50 cards - one per team), "Promising" (12 /50 cards - one per team) "Cross Foil Signing" (6 cards - all members of the Giants) and "3D Cross Forest" (12 cards - one per team as you probably guessed). Some of the insert sets will probably have parallel versions but I don't see anything about them yet. There are both autograph and memorabilia cards available, including cards with multiple autographs and cards with memorabilia from multiple players. There will also be "buyback" autographs available.

- Bandai is returning to the NPB Collectible Card Game market for the first time since their final Owners League set back in 2015. The new game is called "Professional Baseball Fan Stars" and appears to be a mobile game. Bandai will be releasing two sets of cards in late March - a Central League Vol.1 set and a Pacific League Vol.1 set - in boxes containing ten packs containing seven cards each. Both sets will have 120 cards - 48 "Normal", 36 "Rare", 24 "Star Rare" and 12 "Super Star Rare" (which will break down to 4 "Normal", 3 "Rare", 2 "Star Rare" and 1 "Super Star Rare" for each team). I'm assuming there will be additional "volumes" released as the year goes on. I don't know if this means that Bushiroad will not be continuing the "DreamOrder" cards but I kind of think it does - there are no new releases mentioned on their website.

- Bandai, of course, collaborated with Namco the past two years to produce the very fun "Pro Baseball Deforme Card Collection" sets which were distributed with bags of kaki no tane, a snack food. The two are teaming up again this year to release more of the Collectible Card Game "Fan Stars" cards. There will be 36 cards in the set - 12 "Normal", 12 "Rare" and 12 "Star Rare". There are parallel versions of the "Star Rare" cards available. The set will be released in April.

Monday, January 26, 2026

More Secrets

I got a nice little envelope full of baseball cards out of the blue last week from my friend Jason who used to run an Ebay store called "JK's Card Shoppe". Jason knows that I really like BBM's the "secret version" image variations so he sent me a handful of them - along with the original version of the cards in all but one case.

I'll show that one case first - this is the "secret" version of Brandon Tysinger's rookie card from the 2021 BBM 2nd Version set:

2021 BBM 2nd Version #422 (SV)

The other cards were all from 2024. Jason sent me three pairs of cards from the 1st Version set - I'm showing the original card first followed by the "secret version". You can tell it's the "secret version" because the BBM logo is grey as opposed to red or green - I think BBM started doing this in 2022.