Chinese Players On The Baystars

Last year when I did a post reviewing 20 years of BBM's Rookie Edition sets I discovered that the Baystars had signed two Chinese players to development (ikusei) contracts in 2009.  And by "Chinese" I mean mainland, People's Republic of China (PRC) as opposed to Taiwan.  I did a little research on the players and discovered that they both been signed from the Tianjin Lions of the China Baseball League and ended up spending two years each with the Baystars before getting released.  Neither player ever moved onto the 70 man roster.  I thought this was interesting enough that I decided to look for any cards the players had - luckily BBM was still including the ikusei players on their team sets in 2009 and 2010 so they both appeared in their Baystars team sets those years.  I found one of the four cards myself but Ryan tracked the other three down for me.

I had originally thought that these were the first two Chinese players in NPB but that's not the case - the Giants had signed Xu An (who would go on to play on China's 2013 WBC team) to an ikusei contract in 2006.  But I still thought this was interesting enough to do a post on the players.

20 year old outfielder Wang Jing-chao had played three seasons with Tianjin before signing with the Baystars.  He got into only four games in two years with the Baystars farm team (known at the time as the Shonan SeaRex), going 2 for 9 with three strikeouts.  He returned to Tianjin and played another three years for them.  Here's his baseball cards:

2009 BBM Rookie Edition #095

2009 BBM Baystars #YB69

2010 BBM Baystars #YB73

I should say that those are his only Japanese cards but because he was on China's roster for both the 2006 and 2009 World Baseball Classics, he has a couple other cards.  He only had two at bats for the 2006 team but he got a hit in one of them.  Upper Deck included him in the Future Watch insert set from the 2006 SP Authentic set:

2006 Upper Deck Future Watch #WBC-16

He didn't get into any of the games in the 2009 tournament but Topps included him in a couple of their WBC-related sets that year.  Or did they?  Officially he's in the WBC insert sets in the Topps Chrome and Bowman Draft Picks & Prospects sets but I'm not entirely sure the photos are him.  Here are the cards in question:

Topps Chrome WBC #W69

Bowman Draft Picks & Prospects WBC #BDPW15

The Topps Chrome card might be him (although I'm not convinced it is) but I'm pretty sure the other card is actually the similarly named Wang Chao as the photo on this card looks very similar to the one on Wang Chao's Bowman Chrome WBC Prospects card (which TCDB has listed under Wang Jing-chao's cards).  This isn't the most egregious mistake that Topps made with their WBC cards in 2009 (that of course being using a picture of Korea manager Kim In-Sik on Kim Hyun-soo's card) but it's still pretty sloppy.

The other player was 26 year old pitcher Chen Wei who had played for Tianjin since 2000.  He also only got into four games with the SeaRex in his two season, posting a 3.86 ERA in 4.2 innings worth of work, giving up two runs on nine hits and two walks while striking out one.  He also returned to Tainjin after the Baystars released him but only spent one season with them before apparently retiring as a player.  His 2009 BBM Rookie Edition card erroneously lists him as an outfielder.  Like Wang, he was on the 2009 China WBC roster but didn't play in the tournament,  Unlike Wang he didn't have any WBC baseball cards.  Here's the three he had with the Baystars:

2009 BBM Rookie Edition #094

2009 BBM Baystars #YB67

2010 BBM Baystars #YB70