Card Of The Week May 24

Had a minor mystery cleared up this past week.  There's a two card insert set from the 2000 BBM Diamond Heroes set called "Golden Battery".  One card is Daisuke Matsuzaka while the other card is Atsuya Furuta:

00 BBM Diamond Heroes #GB1

00 BBM Diamond Heroes #GB2

I had no idea what the significance of the cards was.  Matsuzaka was in his second year as a professional and was still quite the hot item.  Furuta was in the prime of his career.  My best guess was that the cards were simply recognizing the top pitcher and catcher in NPB at the time - or at least the most popular.

Fast forward to this past week.  I've been working on a post about the 2000 Japanese Olympic Baseball Team that I hope to have done in the next few days.  One of the the things that came up in my research was the Asian baseball qualifier for the Sydney Games - the 1999 Asian Championship played in Seoul, South Korea in September of 1999.  Japan and Korea had both qualified at this tournament with Korea taking the top spot.  I've written a post about the Korean team from this tournament as it is the team featured on the only Korean National Team cards that were actually issued by a Korean card company but I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the Japanese team.

It turns out that this was the first Japanese National Team to feature professional players.  There were only eight on the team - the rest of the team were corporate league and collegiate players.  Matsuzaka and Furuta were part of that team along with Nobuhiko Matsunaka, Kenjiro Nomura, Hidetaka Kawagoe, Hideo Koike, Kiyoshi Hatsushiba and Tatsuya Ide.

The six teams in the tournament - Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China, the Philippines and Thailand - were split into two three-team brackets.  Korea was in Group A with China and Thailand while Japan was in Group B with Taiwan and the Philippines.  For the first round each team played each of the other two teams in its bracket.  Japan beat the Philippines 10-0 (also in a slaughter rule shortened seven inning game) and Taiwan 9-1.

The final round featured the top two teams from each bracket - Korea and China from Group A and Japan and Taiwan from Group B (the Philippines beat Thailand 9-2 in a game to decide fifth place in the tournament).  Each team would play each of the other teams with the tournament winner being determined by whichever team ended up with the best record.  

Japan's first game in the final round was against Taiwan.  Matsuzaka started this game (with Furuta behind the plate) and pitched a gem, throwing a complete game while striking out 13 (I think) and only giving up one run.  Problem was that for the first eight plus innings of the game Japan's offense was held to only one run as well.  But in the bottom of the ninth Jun Heima would hit an RBI single to make Matsuzaka a winner.  Japan's defeat of China the next day would clinch them a spot in the Sydney Olympics despite their loss to Korea 5-3 in the final game of the tournament.  (Taiwan would lose both of their first two games in the final round on walk offs - they lost to Korea 5-4 in 11 innings the day after losing to Japan.)

I didn't realize until now how significant that game against Taiwan was.  Since Japan only played five games total in the tournament it was the only game that Matsuzaka pitched in.  Could this game be the reason he and Furuta were dubbed "The Golden Battery"?

It seemed a stretch to me, but then I ran the text on the back of the cards through Google Translate and discovered that it indeed talked about this game: