Carter Stewart's First Japanese Cards

I got a package in the mail from Ryan yesterday that contained a number of things he's found for me in the past three months.  Among those things are a bunch of Epoch One cards and this year's edition of BBM's Hawks team set and among THOSE items are the first Japanese cards of Carter Stewart, Jr.

Stewart you will recall is the first round pick of the Atlanta Braves in 2018 who spurned MLB to sign with the Hawks back in June.  His introductory press conference on June 3rd was commemorated with an Epoch One card:

When I did a post a while back talking about what cards for him had been announced I had expressed surprise that the print run for his Epoch One was only 326.  Now that I've seen some more print runs for Epoch One cards I realize that 326 is actually a quite large run - the other Epoch One cards I got from Ryan have print runs between 25 and 83.

I had said in that earlier post that BBM had announced that Stewart would be in their Hawks team set this year.  He actually has two cards - a "regular" player card and a card in a two card subset called "Fresh Prince" which also features the Hawks' 2018 first round draft pick Hiroshi Kaino.  Here are the front and back of each card:

Will there be any other cards of Stewart this year?  I don't know for sure but my gut feeling is no.  Not only has Stewart not appeared with the Hawks ichi-gun team this year but he hasn't even made an appearance with the ni-gun team!  I know he's pitched with the Hawks' san-gun team but I haven't seen anything that tells me how well he's been doing (in English anyway).  (If you're not familiar with san-gun which literally means "third troop" it's essentially the ikusei players.  Most teams don't have enough ikusei players to make up a team but the Hawks are one of the few that do.  I think they play games against independent league teams and club teams but I could be wrong.)

Stewart did not have a card in this year's 2nd Version set and is not listed as being in either the Calbee Series Three set coming out next week or the "Hawks Brilliant" set BBM is releasing in October.  The three remaining perennial BBM sets that have either been announced or are expected for this year are Genesis, Rookie Edition Premium and Fusion.  I really don't think he'll be in Genesis - there's only nine cards per team and the Hawks are pretty stacked with fan favorites.  Rookie Edition Premium is a more likely location but there's a bit of a numbers game there as well.  There will be only three Hawks players in the set and one of those is going to be Kaino.  Only two of the Hawks' other 2018 draft picks played in ichi-gun this year (Keisuke Izumi and Masato Okumura) so BBM might decide to go with Stewart here.  I had thought before that Fusion would be a distinct possibility for him earlier as he could go into the "1st Version Update" subset but given how many trades and late signing foreign players there have been I'm less inclined to think he's going to end up there.  I suspect we'll know more in the next month or so.

I will repeat my earlier assertion that on the increasingly unlikely event that he makes an appearance with the ichi-gun Hawks he'll have an Epoch One card.