More Baseball Women

I got a big package of cards from Ryan in the mail today.  It's a bit of an overwhelming bunch of cards and I'll probably do six or seven posts on the cards I got.  I thought I'd start with something simple - a couple of cards of players from the Japan Women's Baseball League.

BBM issued their "Shining Venus" set back in January.  This is their annual set devoted to female athletes (It was called "Real Venus" from 2009 to 2015 and has been "Shining Venus" from 2017 to the present).  This year's edition featured two players from Saitama Astraia - Meguna Furuya and Minami (Takatsuka).  There are three cards for each player in the set - a posed shot in their uniform (the "Regular" card), an action shot (labeled "Playing Venus" in a couple of the sets) and a posed shot in street clothes (labeled "Venus Shot").  I asked Ryan to skip the "Venus Shot" cards.  There was also a "Twin Venus" card featuring both players.  Here's the cards:

2020 BBM Shining Venus #01

2020 BBM Shining Venus #02

2020 BBM Shining Venus #04

2020 BBM Shining Venus #05

2020 BBM Shining Venus #95

Both players have been featured in previous "Venus" sets although with other teams.  This is actually Minami's third appearance and third team - she was in the 2015 "Real Venus" set when she was with Tohoku Reia and in last year's "Shining Venus" set when she was with Kyoto Flora.  Furuya was in the 2018 "Shining Venus" set when she was also with Kyoto Flora.

Last May Mari Yamazaki of Saitama became the first JWBL player to hit a sayanora home run.  I came across an autographed card of hers from the 2018 Epoch JWBL set on Yahoo! Japan Auctions for just 500 yen a few months back and I asked Ryan to pick it up for me.  This is my first certified autograph card from Epoch and it confirmed something that Kenny told me - they have "on-card" autographs (as opposed to the sticker autographs that BBM does):

2018 Epoch JWBL #AG-25

The card is #35/65.