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.

Meiji Jingu Stadium At 100

1992 BBM #482

 Last Friday marked the 100th Anniversary of the opening of Meiji Jingu Stadium in Tokyo.  The ballpark was "formally opened" by the Prince Regent - who would become the Showa Emperor a little over two months later - on October 23rd, 1926, and the first ballgame was played between two All Star teams of middle school students from Tokyo and Yokohama.  

While most people know the ballpark as the home field of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows, the team did not start playing there until 1964.  The first NPB team to call the ballpark home was the Toei Flyers, who played there in 1962 and 1963 after they had been displaced from their original home, Komazawa Baseball Stadium, due to that venue being demolished to make way for a facility for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.  The Swallows had shared Korakuen Stadium with the Giants through the 1963 season and the Flyers and Swallows basically switched ballparks after that year.  

Before the professional teams played there, the ballpark was mostly used for college baseball.  It was considered "holy ground for amateur baseball" and Matsutarō Shōriki suffered an assassination attempt for allowing professional baseball players from America to play on the field in the 1934 All American tour.  The ballpark was appropriated by the occupying US forces after the war and dubbed "Stateside Park" although Japanese teams were allowed to resume using it by the end of 1945.  The park reverted to Japan after the Treaty of San Francisco formally ended the US occupation in 1952.

The ballpark is supposedly slated for destruction as part of a renovation of the area but I'm not sure what the current time frame for that is.  I made it a point to go to games there on each of my three trips to Japan, just in case the ballpark is torn down before I get back there.  I've attended seven games there - two Swallows games, four Tokyo Bis Six games and one corporate league game - which is tied with Tokyo Dome for the most games I've seen at a ballpark in Japan.

I thought it might be fun to find some baseball cards that featured photos of the stadium.  The earliest ones I have are from the 1974/75 Calbee set when the ballpark was already almost 50 years old:

1974/75 Calbee #733

1974/75 Calbee #748

Both cards commemorate the Opening Day matchup between the Swallows and the Hiroshima Toyo Carp on April 5th, 1975.  The first card shows the smoke lingering from the pregame fireworks while the second one shows the two teams lined up on the field.

Obviously the ballpark doesn't look much like this anymore.  A series of renovations starting in the late 70's and continuing over the next ten years or so changed it into what we're now more familiar with.  The card at the top of this post - despite being 34 years old - shows the ballpark looking very similar to how it does now.  

I went through BBM's Nippon Series sets, looking for cards that had photos taken at Jingu.  While there were a number that were obviously taken there, I decided to only select the photos that showed the scoreboard as there wasn't anything distinctive about the other photos - you mostly knew they were taken at Jingu because the Swallows player was wearing the home uniform.  Most of these were the team photos for the victorious team but there were a couple cards for the award winners from the 1992 set that also had the scoreboard in the background:

1992 BBM Nippon Series #S52

1992 BBM Nippon Series #S53

1992 BBM Nippon Series #S56

1995 BBM Nippon Series #S64

1997 BBM Nippon Series #S63

The second game of the 1997 All Star series was held at Jingu and the 1998 BBM All Stars set included a card showing all the award winners from the game:

1998 BBM All Stars #A64

I think that's Kazuo Matsui (Lions) on the far left and Shinjiro Hiyama (Tigers) on the far right.  I'm much more confident of the other five players - from left to right is Ichiro (Orix), Dwayne Hosey (Swallows), Kazuhiro Kiyohara (Giants), Hideki Matsui (Giants) and Masahiro Yamamoto (Dragons).

Almost all the player cards in the sets that BBM did for the Tokyo Big Six college league between 2008 and 2013 feature photos taken at Jingu, but, like the Nippon Series cards, they really don't show anything distinctive about the ballpark.  The only ones that did were the team cards from the 2008, 2009, and 2010 Autumn Version sets.  All six team cards in each set show the scoreboard but I'm only showing one card from each set:

2008 BBM Tokyo Big Six Autumn Version #06

2009 BBM Tokyo Big Six Autumn Version #36

2010 BBM Tokyo Big Six Autumn Version #06

The other Tokyo Big Six sets either did not include team cards or had ones with photos taken at the team's training fields.

BBM has twice in recent years had an insert set in their 2nd Version set that showed off all twelve primary ballparks in NPB - "Franchise Builder" in 2019 and "Show Man" in 2021.  Tetsuto Yamada was the featured player on both of the cards for Jingu Stadium:

2019 BBM 2nd Version "Franchise Builder" #FB08

2021 BBM 2nd Version "Show Man" #SM12

I saved what's perhaps the best card for last.  This 2022 Epoch One card of Munetaka Murakami commemorates his 41st home run of that season and has the sky lit up with the sunset behind the Docomo Tower in Shinjuku:

2022 Epoch One #667

Card Of The Week October 25

Last week, the Yomiuri Giants announced that their new manager would be Hall Of Famer Hideki Matsui.  Matsui will be the first former MLB player to helm the Giants and will be their first "official manager" to have ever worn a professional baseball uniform OTHER than the Giants - although none of those uniforms were for other NPB teams.

I think this will make seven of the twelve current NPB managers to have played in the US.  Matsui, Rakuten's Masato Yoshii, Nippon-Ham's Tsuyoshi Shinjo and Hanshin's Kyuji Fujikawa all played in MLB while the Dragons' Kimiyasu Kudoh played for San Jose in the California League, Fumiya Nishiguchi of the Lions briefly played for Sioux City of the Northern League and the Hawks' Hiroki Kokubo played in the Hawaiian Winter League in 1994.

Here's a card of Hideki Matsui from the 2001 Upper Deck set (#66):

2026 NPB Draft

The 2026 NPB draft was held today and, as usual, I was interested in seeing which of the drafted players already had baseball cards.  I used my friend Deanna's annual draft post as a reference and reviewed all the corporate league players to see who had appeared in any of the JABA sets.  Here's who I found:

Kanta Aiba, Yamaha, Tigers 4th

2024 JABA #24JP072

2026 JABA #26JABA048

2021 JABA #21JP048

2022 JABA #22JP046

2024 JABA #24JP027

2024 JABA #24JP072

2025 JABA #25JABA036

2025 JABA #26JABA048

Ryosuke Fujisawa, Tokyo Gas, Swallows 1st

2026 JABA #26JABA095

2026 JABA #26JABA095

Shin Higuchi, Oji (Prince), Eagles 3rd

2026 JABA #26JABA027

2026 JABA #26JABA027

Masato Shibaski, Oji (Prince), Dragons 2nd

2026 JABA #26JABA086

2026 JABA #26JABA086

Kanta Aiba is a kind of interesting story.  He joined Yamaha in 2021 after graduating from high school.  After the requisite three years that a former high school player who joined a corporate league team instead of declaring for the NPB draft has to wait, he registered for the draft in 2023 but was not selected.  Undeterred, he registered for the draft again in 2024 but again was not selected.  The situation repeated in 2025.  Finally, after four tries, the Tigers called his name this year.  He is not the only player to have six cards in the JABA sets (each player had two cards in the 2024 set) but he's the first one to be drafted.  It would not surprise me if he actually had seven JABA cards but since I've never been able to assemble a checklist for the 2023 set, I don't know if he does. 

UPDATE 10/23/26 - I wanted to add that although Aiba has been playing for Yamaha for six years, he's only 24 so he's not particularly old for a corporate league draftee.  In fact, had he gone to college and then gone to Yamaha, he'd have been exactly the same age when he'd be eligible for the draft (as former college players in the corporate leagues only have to wait two years until they can register for the draft).  So instead of spending those six years with Yamaha, he would have spent four in college and two with Yamaha, which likely is what the other three players above did.

I'll make my usual comment that it's possible (and actually likely) that some of the indy league players who were drafted today had cards in their team's team sets but it's difficult to track down which teams did sets and who was in them.

2026 JABA Cards

The Intercity Tournament, the annual championship for the corporate/industrial leagues was held at the Tokyo Dome in late August and early September.  I'm not positive but I think that's when the Japan Adult Baseball Association (JABA) rolled out their 2026 card set.

This is the sixth year JABA has released a card set and, as usual, details about it are somewhat hard to come by.  I've used the latest pdf from JABA's website that the QR code on the packs sends you to and generated a list of players and then I started looking at card listings on Mercari to correlate the card numbers.  From what I can tell, the set has at least 104 cards although the pdf only lists 95 players - the additional nine players appear to be award winners from 2025 who weren't listed on the pdf.  The pdf is entitled "Prospect Players List" which is kind of misleading as there's a handful of players who've been on the list every year for six years.  Some of them are getting a little old to really be considered prospects.

The cards themselves look similar to the last few years.  The big difference between this year's design and last year's is that the names are in Japanese on the front of the card instead of English.  Here's the front and back of Motoki Mukoyama's card:

There are "kira" parallels available for the cards as well.

I'm still working on the checklist for the set but I've added the work in progress to the same Google spreadsheet that I've shared for the previous sets (UPDATE 10/22 - the 2026 checklist is complete):

I've been working on this post off and on for over a month now but I wanted to get it done before the NPB draft (which is tomorrow) as I anticipate there being players in the set who get picked.  Guess we'll know for sure tomorrow.