Sunday, February 17, 2019

Card Of The Week February 17

The Fighters wrapped up the Arizona portion of their 2019 training camp last Tuesday.  I was not able to make it down there this year (I'm saving leave for another long vacation in May/June) but Deanna Rubin was there and she posted a lot of interesting photos to her Twitter feed.

One tweet in particular that caught my eye concerned Po-Jung Wang, the outfielder Nippon-Ham signed out of the CPBL via the posting system.  Deanna reported that Wang's translator was a former first round pick of the Hanshin Tigers - a pitcher named Ikketsu Shoh.

Actually (as Deanna mentions) his real name is Yi-Jie Hsiao.  According to this NPB Tracker post, Hsiao is from Taiwan originally and moved to Japan at 16 because he wanted to pitch in the Koshien tournament.  He attended Nichinan Gakuen High School and appeared in two tournaments - the 2003 summer one and the 2004 spring one.  He went onto Nara Sangyo University and was the top pick for the Tigers in the fall 2008 draft.

He remained property of the Tigers for the next four seasons although he did not appear with the ichi-gun team until August of 2011.  He got into two games that month, going 0-1 with a 2.16 ERA (and 4.32 R/9 innings).  Those would be the only NPB games he would appear in.  The Tigers released him after the 2012 season and the Hawks picked him up as an ikusei player for 2013.  He joined the EDA Rhinos of the CPBL in 2014 and appeared in 64 games with them over the next three seasons, going 6-9 with an ERA of 4.95.  He was still with the team (which was now the Fubon Guardians) in 2017-18 but he didn't make any appearances with the top-level team.  They released him at the end of last season.  He was hired last month to be Wang's interpreter.

He didn't have a whole lot of baseball cards, at least in Japan.  He was in the 2009 Rookie Edition and 1st Version sets from BBM and a 2009 Konami set but other than that all his cards were in BBM team sets - for the Tigers from 2009 to 2012 and for the Hawks in 2013.  He may have CPBL cards under his original name - on TradingCardDB.com I see some cards from the 2014 CPBL Player of the Year set listed for Yi-Chieh Hsiao which might be the same guy.

Here's his card from the 2009 BBM Tigers set (#T008):


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