Card Of The Week June 21

Normally this week I'd be doing a post for the Interleague MVP but I am currently on the road so I've had to prepare this post a week early.  Last Monday, the Eagles named former Chiba Lotte Marines manager Masato Yoshii as their new manager, replacing interim manager Tatsuya Shiokawa after just a week.  I thought I'd share what I believe to be Yoshii's first ever baseball card from the 1988 Takara Buffaloes set (#36):

Summer Offerings

As usual, I feel like I blinked and a month passed since the last time I did a round up of the recently announced sets.  So let's get to the new batch of announcements...

- I'm somewhat astonished but Topps is actually releasing a second 2026 NPB set while the baseball season is still happening.  Hell, the release date for this year's edition of the Stadium Club NPB set is July 10th, so it'll hit the stores before the All Star break.  Considering that the 2024 edition didn't come out until December of that year and last year's wasn't until September, this is a major development for them.  Like their flagship set, the details for the set are a little sparse but again, I'm assuming it's a 216 card set.  There are at least "Beam Team" insert cards and I assume there are a couple other insert sets but, again, they're not listed.  There will be relic cards for active NPB players and autographed cards for both active and retired NPB players as well as active Japanese MLB players.  The big new gimmick that Topps has added for this set is image variations for 24 players (which I assume means two per team).  I mock Topps' NPB sets quite a bit but I have to admit that Stadium Club NPB is pretty good (at least the 2024 edition was).

- BBM's annual cheerleader/dance squad set - "Dancing Heroine" - will be released in mid August.  The set will be around 180 cards.  As usual the set only includes members of the squads from the Giants, Tigers, Swallows, Dragons, Hawks, Fighters, Marines, Eagles and Lions and, as usual, I have no idea why the ones from the Buffaloes and Baystars are not included (the Carp don't have cheerleaders).  There a holo parallel of all the base set cards and an 18 card "Two-shot" insert set.  There are also autographs and "cheki" cards available.  

- Genesis, BBM's annual high-end set will be released in late September.  As has been standard for the entire run of the set (since 2012), the base set will contain 120 cards - ten per team which splits up as nine player cards and a team checklist.  No one really cares about the base set though as the attraction of Genesis is the autograph and memorabilia cards available in the boxes.  The different varieties are too numerous to list but there are booklets, super patches, ball autographs and multiplayer autographed memorabilia cards.  There's also a myriad of parallel versions of all the base cards and six "High-grade insert card" sets - Elite Of Nine, Game Changer, Unrivaled, Cross Forest, Combo Cross Foil Signing and Treasure.  

- The latest "Premier Edition" team set from Epoch is for the Dragons and will be released on July 11th.  The base set will contain 45 cards - 42 for active players, one for Doala, the mascot and two for coaches Takuya Asao and Nobumasa Fukuda (using photos from when they were players) - and there is, of course, a "hologram" parallel available for each of the base set cards.  The set has 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).  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.  There are seven different types of autographed cards - "Authentic" (43), "Star" (3), "Rookie" (9), "Legendary" (2) and three types of multiple player autographed cards -  "Combo" (1), "Dragons Combo" (4) and "Rookie Combo" (5).  I don't know what the difference between "Combo" and "Dragons Combo" is.  

- Epoch will be releasing their annual Pacific League Rookies box set on July 25th.  This year's edition will have 38 cards - a 35 card base set, two "special" cards that may be either foil facsimile signature parallel cards or GEM insert cards (both of which would be serially numbered) and one autograph card.  The base set is made up of all of last fall's draftees from the six Pacific League teams (regular phase of the draft only - there are no development players included).  There are three types of autographed cards available of all 35 players and the first round picks also have a "baseball" autograph.

- I missed that SCC had issued their 2026 KBO Collection set on the 20th of last month, just three weeks before their Festa set that I erroneously said was the first KBO set for 2026.  The base set (or at least the "normal" portion of it) will contain 290 cards which will include 10 cards for retired players.  The other 280 cards feature two cards for 14 players on each of the ten KBO teams - one showing the player in their home uniform and one showing them in their away uniform.  There are 112 "Alphabet" cards which each feature a player superimposed on a letter that spells the team's name.  There's two versions for each letter for each team, one showing a pitcher and one showing a batter.  So for the LG Twins, there's two cards with a player superimposed over a letter "T", two cards with a letter "W", etc.  Obviously each team has a different number of these cards although each team has at least 10 (I'm guessing they did the full name of the "KT Wiz") and the SSG Landers having 14.  There are 80 "Hologam" cards - 7 for each team plus the 10 retired players - and each "Hologram" has a parallel version available.  There are 30 "Victory Charm" cards - three from each team.  These appear to be some sort of partially transparent card.  I think there's 77 autographed cards available - 67 for active players (with either six or seven per team) and one for each of the OB players.

Card Of The Week June 14

There were two things that happened last week in NPB that I wanted to highlight.  On Wednesday, the Rakuten Eagles announced that manager Hajime Miki was stepping down and Tatsuya Shiokawa was taking his place on an interim basis.  Shiokawa had had a seven year playing career, all with the Eagles and has been a coach for the team since 2018.  It's kind of funny but by replacing Miki, who had never played for the Eagles, with Shiokawa who had, all the NPB teams are now managed by former players for that team with the exception of the Giants - who've NEVER had an "official" (non-interim) manager who didn't play for the team.  The Eagles have now had twelve managers in 22 seasons if you treat Miki's two stints as separate managers, 11 in 22 if not. Orix is the only other team to have double digits in that time period and that was partly because Akira Ohgi passed away after one season.  The Eagles had also had an odd habit of having a manager serve only one season every year ending in a "5" or "0" - Yasushi Tao in 2005, Marty Brown in 2010, Hiroki Ohkubo in 2015 and Miki in 2020 - which Miki had avoided last year but apparently for only a few more months.

The other thing that happened last week was that Shinya Hasegawa of the Lions had sayonara hits on back-to-back days, walking it off against the Carp on both Tuesday and Wednesday.  It was the first time a Lions player had had back-to-back walk offs since Kazuo Matsui did it in 2002.  (H/T NPB Reddit)  Hasegawa had been drafted by the Lions as a development player in 2020 and wasn't added to the 70 man roster until the following year.

Here are the Rookie Edition cards for both guys.  Shiokawa was the fifth round pick in the Eagles' initial draft class in 2004 and I don't think they'd unveiled their uniforms by the time the photos were taken for the set.  You can see that Hasegawa's uniform number has three digits due to his ikusei status.

2005 BBM Rookie Edition #32

2021 BBM Rookie Edition #031

New Acquisitions

I thought I'd do a quick post about some cards I recently picked up.  It's been about 18 months since I stopped buying new stuff but I do get a hankering every so often to get some new ones.

I put in an order with COMC in mid-April but, of course, I didn't actually receive the cards until late May.  I had decided to get serious about replacing a couple old Calbee cards that I'd picked up on my last trip to Japan two years ago but I was only able to find one of the cards.  I'd brought home this card of Shitoshi Sekimoto from the "Florida Project" subset of the 1974/75 Calbee set (#708) that someone had used a pencil to highlight Sekimoto on:

The new version looks much better:

Since I was already ordering from COMC, I figured I'd look around and see if there was anything else I wanted at a reasonable price.  I decided to pick up this card of Masato Morishita because (1) I've been a fan of Morishita since seeing him pitch for Meiji back in 2019 and (2) I wanted to have an example of the 1990 inserts from last year's Topps NPB set (#90-7):

I also picked up a couple cards from the 2023 Topps World Baseball Classic set.  I picked up the "image variant" of Masataka Yoshida's card (#91):

I already had the base version:

I also grabbed the "Captains Of The World Baseball Classic" insert card of Ha-seong Kim (#CC-14):

Moving on to some stuff I ordered from Ebay...

I'm kind of low key trying to get one of each of the autographed cards for the Samurai Japan Collegiate team that were in the 2024 Panini USA Baseball Stars & Stripes set.  This card of Ryuta Hirose got me halfway there:

Since the remaining 14 cards I need to complete the set include Misho Nishikawa, Seiya Watanabe, Rui Muneyama and Natsuki Takeuchi, I'm not expecting to ever actually finish the set.  As I've always said, I'm cheap, so I'm not willing to pay what it'd take to get those cards.  But I'll keep trying to get the low hanging fruit when I can.

The last two cards are for Rintaro Sasaki of Stanford University.  Sasaki was drafted last fall's NPB draft by the Hawks and is potentially going to get taken in next month's MLB draft.  The Hawks' rights for him expire at the end of July so he can see if any MLB teams are interested before deciding if he wants to join Softbank.  Panini has done about a gazillion cards of him (with another two gazillion parallels) so I decided to pick up a card of him from each of the past two years.  Generally I find Panini's cards kind of hideous but I was able to find two that weren't too bad.  This 2024 Onyx Vintage Extended card (#OVRISA) show him in what I think is a Trenton Thunder uniform with all the logos airbrushed/photoshopped off:

The 2025 Prizm card (#271) shows him in his Stanford uniform:

This batch of cards scratched an itch for a bit.  Ryan's still picking stuff up for me and, while I try not to take him for granted, Kenny's probably preparing another envelope of goodies for me, so I'm sure to be getting some more new stuff soon.

Card Of The Week June 7

I've had a busy last couple of days so I haven't been able to track the recent events in NPB very closely so this week I thought I'd do a topic I've wanted to look into for a while.  I've known that former Fighter and Giant (not to mention Lake Country Dockhounds, Brisbane Bandits, High Point Rockers and Oisix Niigata Albirex BC) outfielder Daikan Yoh had changed his name a couple of times during his career but I wasn't sure of how many times or when they happened.  

Yoh is Taiwanese but since he attended high school in Japan, he was subject to the NPB draft.  He was taken by both the Fighters and Hawks in the first round of the high school portion of the 2005 draft and the Fighters won the lottery for his rights (the Hawks had to settle for Yuta Arakawa).  His name in kanji at the time was 陽 仲壽 which was rendered as "Chung-Shou Yang" on his baseball cards in 2006:

2006 BBM Rookie Edition #32

From 2007 to 2009, his name was rendered on his baseball cards as "Chonso Yoh" although the kanji version of his name remained unchanged:

2008 BBM Fighters #F49

He changed his name to 陽 岱鋼 in 2010 which was rendered as "Daikan Yoh":

2014 BBM Speed & Smart #07

He's stayed with that name ever since.  So I guess that technically, he's only had two names but one of those got rendered in two different ways.  I don't pretend to know enough about why that would be or why he changed his name in the first place.  And I'll avoid the obvious "player to be named later" joke since that's been done any number of times - I think I first heard it when Harry Rasmussen changed his name to Eric in 1976.

While reading up about Yoh, I discovered that his older brother Yao-Hsun Yang had pitched for the Hawks from 2006 to 2013.  The elder brother had not gone to school in Japan and was considered a foreign player in NPB while the younger brother was a domestic player.  After being let go by the Hawks, he played briefly in the Pittsburgh Pirates organization in 2014 before joining the Lamigo Monkeys of the CPBL in 2015.  A shoulder injury ended up forcing him to give up pitching and become an outfielder.  He stayed with the Monkeys through 2021 (by which time they were owned by Rakuten) and spent 2022 with the Fubon Guardians.  He signed on with an amateur team after Fubon released him but I don't know if he's still playing for them (he's now 43 years old).

2006 BBM Hawks #H034

The brothers Yang were teammates on the Taiwanese WBC team in both 2006 and 2013.  They both appeared in the 2013 Topps Tribute WBC set (with Daikan getting yet another rendering of his name):

2013 Topps Tribute WBC #55

2013 Topps Tribute WBC #6

More Japanese Pitchers In Korea

I wanted to do a quick update on some Japanese pitchers playing in South Korea, three who I hadn't realized were there before and two that just recently signed.

Let's start with the two newcomers - or one newcomer and one returnee.  The Doosan Bears released their Asian quota player - Ichiro Tamura - last week and replaced him with Takuto Takada.  Takada was the sixth round pick of the Baystars in the 2020 draft and played for them through the 2024 season.  He signed on with the Oisix Niigata Albirex Baseball Club, one of the two independent teams in NPB's farm leagues, after being released by DeNA and has been playing for them until Doosan signed him.

2023 BBM Baystars #DB30

The other pitcher is Keisho Shirakawa, who's been playing for the Tokushima Indigo Socks of the independent Shikoku Island league since 2020.  Shirakawa is joining the KIA Tigers who released their Asian quota player, Australian infielder Jarryd Dale, a few weeks back.  Shirakawa had previously briefly played in KBO as an "injury replacement player" in separate stints with two different teams (SSG and Doosan) in 2024.  He missed the 2025 season due to Tommy John surgery.  I do not have any baseball cards for him but I suspect there are cards of him with Tokushima.

The three pitchers I hadn't realized were in Korea are playing for the Ulsen Whales, an independent team playing in the KBO Futures League, the farm league for KBO.  This is the Whales inaugural season and notable players on their roster besides the Japanese pitchers are eight year MLB veteran Ji-man Choi and Alex Hall, one of the catchers on Australia's WBC teams in 2023 and 2026.  

Jui Kobayashi was the Hawks fourth pick in the 2019 draft.  He was an infielder for his first three years with the team but switched to pitching after being released and resigned by the team as a development (ikusei) player. He signed with Niigata after being released by the Hawks for a final time after 2024 and spent 2025 with them.  I don't have any cards of him as a pitcher, only as an infielder:

2020 Epoch NPB #071

Taisei Naga has spent the past four years playing for independent league teams after graduating from Hokkaido University.  He spent 2022 and 2023 with the Bibai Black Diamonds of the Hokkaido Baseball League and 2024 and 2025 with Gunma Diamond Pegasus of the Baseball Challenge League.  I do not know if he has any baseball cards from either of those teams.

Akitake Okada was the first pick of the Carp in the 2015 draft and was a member of their V3 team which finished in first place in three straight years from 2016 to 2018.  He pitched in the Nippon Series in both 2016 against the Fighters and 2018 against the Hawks but his best season was probably 2017 when he went 12-5 and made the All Star team.  He got injured late in the 2018 season and spent almost the entire rest of his time with the Carp on their farm team.  He missed the entire 2022 season recovering from Tommy John surgery and was an ikusei player in 2024, his last year in Hiroshima.  He spent 2025 playing for Meiji Yasuda of the corporate leagues before giving professional baseball another shot with Ulsen.

2019 BBM 1st Version #166

Who Is Kippei Mikawa?

The Cubs announced that they had signed a Japanese pitcher named Kippei Mikawa this week and I have been obsessed with answering one simple question:

I had never heard of this guy before.  Here's what the article on Cubs HQ said about him: 

A former Rikkyo University pitcher, Mikawa, briefly retired from Baseball only to leave CyberAgent 3 a few months ago to pursue a dream in American Baseball. That dream has officially become a reality, as Mikawa is joining the Cubs and will await his system placement. Before his brief retirement, Mikawa was part of the Yomiuri Giants Jr. squad, which is equivalent to a Minor League affiliate in the U.S.

Hmm, I've never heard of the Giants farm team being referred to as the "Jr. squad" before, but, OK, I'll take that at face value.  But if he went from Rikkyo to the Giants, he must have been drafted, right?  But I looked through the last few years of the NPB draft and I don't see a player by that name being drafted by the Giants (or anyone else).  And I looked through the Giants rosters for the past four or five seasons as well (both 70 man and ikusei) and I didn't find him there either.  

I did some Google searching and once I found the kanji for his name (三河吉平), I started finding some information for him.  He did pitch for Rikkyo but it looks like he only appeared in three games over his four years there.  He pitched 1/3 of an inning against Keio on September 10th, 2023, facing three batters and giving up no runs.  His next outing didn't go as well - one inning against Meiji on September 30th of that year in which he gave up two runs on a hit and a walk.  It would be 13 months before he'd appear in another game and it was a disaster.  He recorded no outs against Tokyo on October 27th, 2024, facing seven batters and walking four of them, hitting one of them and giving up two base hits.  He was charged with five earned runs.  Keep in mind that Tokyo University is traditionally the doormat of the Tokyo Big Six league so read into that what you may.  (I got the stat lines from his college games here.)

Rikkyo University's web page for the "career paths for 2024 graduates" does indicate that he went to work at a company called "CyberAgent" but does not indicate that he'd be playing baseball for them - which more or less matches what the above blurb said.  

OK, so his story is more or less checking out.  Except for the thing about the Giants.  Seems a weird thing to lie about since it's relatively easy to check it out.  But then I found this web page listing all the teams he played for and it all fell into place.  He did indeed play for the "Yomiuri Giants Jr." team but it was in 2014 when he would have been 12 years old.  The "Yomiuri Giants Jr." team is apparently a youth team that I assume has some connection to the NPB club but is not in any sense "equivalent to a Minor League affiliate in the U.S.".

I'm somewhat baffled about why the Cubs signed this guy.  He hasn't pitched competitively in 18 months and he didn't pitch particularly effectively or often before that.  I mean, I wish him the best of luck and it's not my money, but he's certainly a long shot.  I would think there would be other guys playing in the corporate or indy leagues in Japan that would be more likely to pan out (although we're still talking long odds).

I can't imagine that the Cubs thought he'd actually been in the Yomiuri Giants' organization.  If they did, that's really embarrassing.

It should go without saying but I'll mention it anyway - as far as I know, Mikawa doesn't have any baseball cards.