2019 Panini USA Baseball Stars & Stripes Japanese Collegiate All Stars

A couple weeks ago Panini issued a set for USA Baseball called "Stars & Stripes".  Normally this isn't something I'd be paying much attention to but Panini included autograph and memorabilia cards for members of the 2018 Japanese Collegiate All Star team (specifically the one that took part in the Haarlem Baseball Week tournament that took place last July in the Netherlands) so the set turned out to be something I was interested in.  This is the second time that Panini has included autograph and/or memorabilia cards for a Japanese Collegiate All Star team (the first being in 2013) and the third time overall that a US manufacturer has done it (Upper Deck did it in 2007).  One big difference between these cards and those two previous sets is that the cards from the previous sets were either autograph cards or memorabilia cards while the new cards are both.

I've been putting off writing about this set until I got one of the cards from it.  It took eight tries on Ebay but I finally won a card the other day and it arrived in the mail today.  That's it at the top of the post.

I put together a list of the players in the set with their colleges, their year in college (my best guess anyway based on their age) and if they had been drafted.  Eight of the 24 players were taken in last fall's NPB draft including four players who were first round picks.  There were four other players who I think were seniors last year but weren't drafted - I don't know if they have gone to the independent or corporate leagues.

Name	Position	College	School Year	Year Drafted	Team	Round	DOB
Ryosuke Aizawa	Outfielder	Meiji	4	N/A			9/26/1996
Hayata Fujino	Catcher	Rikkyo	3	N/A			1/7/1998
Hiromi Ito	Pitcher	Meiji Tomakomai Komazawa	3	N/A			8/31/1997
Yukiya Ito	Infielder	Rissho	4	2018	Baystars	2	8/30/1996
Shunya Iwaki	Infielder	Kyushu Sangyo	4	N/A			1/25/1997
Hiroshi Kaino	Pitcher	Toyo	4	2018	Hawks	1	11/16/1996
Daigo Kamikawabata	Infielder	Nihon	4	N/A			1/12/1997
Shoki Katsumata	Infielder	International Budo	3	N/A			7/20/1997
Ryosuke Kodama	Infielder	Kyushu Sangyo	3	N/A			7/10/1998
Wataru Matsumoto	Pitcher	Nittai	4	2018	Lions	1	11/28/1996
Masato Morishita	Pitcher	Meiji	3	N/A			8/25/1997
Motoki Mukoyama	Outfielder	Hosei	3	N/A			5/7/1997
Kento Ogo	Pitcher	Tokai	2	N/A			9/28/1998
Kazuya Ojima	Pitcher	Waseda	4	2018	Marines	3	7/7/1996
Teruaki Sato	Infielder	Kinki	2	N/A			3/13/1999
Toshiya Sato	Catcher	Toyo	3	N/A			1/27/1998
Noburo Shimizo	Pitcher	Kokugakuin	4	2018	Swallows	1	10/15/1996
Seiya Tanaka	Pitcher	Rikkyo	3	N/A			10/27/1997
Ryosuke Tatsumi	Outfielder	Ritsumeikan	4	2018	Eagles	1	12/27/1996
Yuma Tongu	Catcher	Ajia	4	2018	Buffaloes	2	11/17/1996
Yuki Tsumori	Pitcher	Tohoku Fukushi	3	N/A			1/21/1998
Takashi Umino	Catcher	Tokai	3	N/A			7/15/1997
Yoshiaki Watanabe	Infielder	Meiji	4	2018	Eagles	6	1/8/1997
Nagi Yonemitsu	Infielder	Nara Gakuen	4	N/A			1/9/1997

What's a bit bewildering about the set is that according to the checklist for the set in Beckett there are 10 different versions of each card!  What I have is the most common version - the Silhouettes Signatures Jerseys Prime version, each of which is numbered to 13.  There are five other versions of the Silhouettes Signatures cards - Jerseys (numbered to 5), "Gung Ho" patch (numbered to 4), "Samurai Japan" patch (numbered to 4), "Brand Logo Asics" (1 of 1) and "Samurai Japan Small" (1 of 1).  I found images of all but the "Samurai Japan Small" version on Ebay:

Jersey

Gung Ho

Samurai Japan

Asics

The other four versions are "Signatures" (numbered to 4), "Prime Signatures" (numbered to 2), "Laundry Tag Signatures" (1 of 1) and "Buttons Signatures" (numbered to 7).  Again I was able to find images on Ebay for all but one of these ("Prime Signatures"):

Signatures

Laundry Tag

Buttons

You can see that despite having names like "Jersey" and "Signature", each card has both an autograph and a piece of memorabilia.  I like that the signatures are in kanji - they look better than the ones in English on the 2013 cards.

Here's what the back of the card I got looks like.  I'm kind of disappointed that unlike the 2013 Panini cards there's no biographical information about the player on these cards.

 

The set also contains similar cards for the Chinese Taipei Collegiate All Star team.  There was a Taiwanese team at the Haarlem Baseball Week tournament also but I don't know if this is that team.  Since I don't know anything about the CPBL I don't know if any of the players in the set have turned professional.

I probably won't seriously try to complete this set but I'll do what I've been doing with the 2013 set - pick up the cards when they are available for a reasonable price.  There were only 25 of each card from the 2013 set but if you take all 10 versions of each card into account there are 42 cards for each player in this set!