Card Of The Week November 6

Samurai Japan is playing a couple of friendly matches against Team Australia this week and they had a couple warm up matches over the weekend.  They beat the Fighters yesterday 5-4 in a game in which they pulled a 3-6-4 triple play on an attempted bunt.  Today's game was a bit tighter as they trailed the Giants 4-2 going into the eight inning.  But Munetaka Murakami tied the game with a two run home run and his Swallows teammate Tetsuto Yamada followed up with a home run of his own to untie it.  Murakami hit another home run in the ninth which along with his home run yesterday against the Fighters gave him three for the two games.  Murakami may be finding his stroke again which has kind of been missing since he got his 55th home run two months ago - if so, that's probably bad news for the Australian pitching staff.

The team's roster for the two games features a lot of young players that manager Hideki Kuriyama is taking a look at.  The roster for next spring's WBC will likely be very different although it's probably safe to assume that both Murakami and Yamada will be on it.  Both played for Samurai Japan in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (actually held in 2021 of course) with Yamada having also played on the 2017 WBC and the 2015 and 2019 Premier 12 squads.  Here's cards of both of them with the National Team:

2019 Calbee Samurai Japan #SJ-33

2017 Topps Now WBC #W-35

It's looking less and less likely that Calbee will be doing a Samurai Japan set this fall which means there will be no cards for the 2020 Gold Medal winning Olympic team.  Seems a shame that the only two Japanese Olympic baseball teams that featured professionals and won medals (the 2004 team won bronze) will both not be represented in baseball cards.