Sunday, August 3, 2014

Card Of The Week August 3

On Friday, Giants third baseman Shuichi Murata hit his 300th career home run off of Kenta Maeda of the Carp:



251 of Murata's home runs came when he was a member of the Yokahama Baystars between 2003 and 2011.  I always mentally pair up Murata and Seichi Uchikawa as the two of them were the main offensive threats in the Baystars lineup through much of the late 00's.  Uchikawa left as a free agent before the 2011 season and won a Nippon Series championship that year with Softbank.  Murata left a year later and immediately won the Nippon Series with the Giants.

Here's an insert card of Murata from the 2004 BBM Baystars team set (#BN5) .  The insert set was called "Baystars Nine" and it paired each member of the set with one of the "traditional" nine planets - Mercury, Venus, Earth, etc including Pluto.  Murata (obviously) was paired with Jupiter.  Assuming the other cards are paired in number order to the planets, Kazuhiro Sasaki was Mercury, Ryoji Aikwa was Venus, Tyrone Woods was Earth, Uchikawa was Mars, Takuro Ishii was Saturn, Tatsuhiko Kinjoh was Uranus, Takanori Suzuki was Neptune and Hitoshi Tamura was Pluto.  The only card I have from this set other than Murata is Suzuki so that's the only other pairing I know for sure.


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