2022 NPB Draft

NPB held its annual draft today and as usual I took a look to see who already had baseball cards.  There still haven't been any collegiate cards published in Japan that I know about since BBM's final set for the Tokyo big Six back in 2013 but Panini included autographed memorabilia cards of the 2018 and 2019 Japanese Collegiate National Team in their USA Baseball Stars & Stripes sets in 2019 and 2020 respectively (along with a non-memorabilia version of the cards in 2019) and this is now the fifth year that players from those teams have been drafted.  As always I'm using Deanna's draft post as a reference although I also used the Japanese wikipedia page for the draft since at the time I was writing this post, Deanna hadn't added the ikusei rounds of the draft yet.

There were three players from these sets drafted.  One of the players - Ryosuke Kodama - was actually a member of both the 2018 and 2019 teams.  He's the fifth and final player who appeared on both teams to be drafted (following Hiromi Itoh, Masato Morishita, Toshiya Sato and Takashi Umino).  The other two players were both on the 2019 team and were the last two players on that team still in college.  Here's all three players:

Ryosuke Kodama, Kyushu Sangyo University/Osaka Gas, Lions #6

Shota Morishita, Chuo University, Tigers #1

Mikiya Tanaka, Asia University, Dragons #6

If it's not clear, Kodama had attended Kyushu Sangyo University but played for Osaka Gas for a couple years after graduating.

There are now only ten players from the two sets - 7 from the 2019 set and 3 from the 2020 set - who have not been drafted.

I should mention that there's a fourth player who was drafted today who also already has baseball cards - Gosuke Katoh, who is currently in the Mets organization, was taken in the third round by the Fighters.  I haven't heard if he has any intentions of playing in NPB but you figure the Fighters probably know something that the rest of us don't.  Anyway, he's been playing in MLB organizations for about 10 years now so he has a bunch of baseball cards already (although no Japanese cards).