Card Of The Week December 2

Yoshihiro Maru of the Carp was named Central League MVP last week and by the end of the week he was no longer a member of the Carp.  Maru announced that he was signing with the Yomiuri Giants as a free agent, disappointing Hiroshima fans who had hoped he would remain with the team and Marines fans who hoped he would sign with his home prefecture team (and disappointing the large number of people like myself who don't like Yomiuri).

This is the third time in the past 20 years that the Giants have picked up a reigning MVP as a free agent.  Kimiyasu Kudoh won the 1999 Pacific League MVP after helping the Hawks win their first Nippon Series in 35 years (and their first in Fukuoka) and signed with the Giants that off season.  He subsequently helped the Giants beat his former team in the 2000 Nippon Series.  In 2006 Michihiro Ogasawara helped the Fighters win their first Nippon Series since 1962 and picked up the PL MVP award in the process.  He signed with the Giants that offseason and, like Kudoh, helped Yomiuri defeat his old team in the Nippon Series, although it wasn't until 2009 (and again in 2012).

BBM used to include a subset in their flagship set each year that featured the statistical leaders and award winners from the previous year.  They stopped doing this in 2013 - they've included a statistical leader subset in the Fusion set they've released in November of the past few years but that set goes to press too early to include the award winners.  Here are the cards commemorating the MVP awards for Kudoh and Ogasawara from the following year's BBM set along with their regular player cards from that set showing them with the Giants:

00 BBM #1 ("Readers" error version)

2000 BBM #185

2007 BBM 1st Version #445

2007 BBM 1st Version #338

There was only two other times in NPB history* that a reigning MVP did not return to his team the following season.  Hiromitsu Kadota won the 1988 PL MVP while playing for the Nankai Hawks.  1988 was the Hawks' final season in Osaka as Nankai sold the team to Daiei who moved them to Fukuoka.  Kadota didn't want to leave Osaka and convinced the Hawks to trade him to the Orix Braves who played in Nishinomiya.  Masahiro Tanaka won the PL MVP award in 2013 and moved to MLB and the Yankees the following season.  Maru is the first CL MVP to switch teams for the following season.

*NPB history starts in 1950 - I didn't look at the Japanese Baseball League (JBL) MVPs between 1937 to 1949