Japanese Baseball Cards: Motohiro Shima

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

Motohiro Shima

Former Eagles and Swallows catcher Motohiro Shima announced his retirement at the end of last season. Shima was the third round pick of the Eagles out of Kokugakuin University in the university/corporate league portion of the 2006 draft. He was pretty much the Eagles regular catcher in his rookie year, despite only hitting .183. The following year he split catching duties with Akihito Fujii but regained the regular role in 2009 due to Fujii's injuries.

He put together his best season in 2010, hitting .315 and winning the Golden Glove and Best 9 awards. That Golden Glove award was the first one in Eagles history and he was the first Rakuten catcher to have enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting race (he finished some 30 points behind Tsuyoshi Nishioka).

He was the Eagles regular catcher for most of the 2010s, although injuries started to cut into his playing time. He missed time due to a hand injury in 2012, a cracked rib in 2015, back and wrist injuries in 2016 and a calf injury in 2017. Back pain limited him to just 57 games in 2019 and he and the Eagles parted ways at the end of the season.

Shima signed on with the Swallows for 2020. He fractured his right thumb during training camp but since the start of the season was delayed until June due to the pandemic, he was healthy for opening day. Unfortunately though he injured his foot in mid-July and missed most of the rest of the season. He was healthy in 2021 but barely played, getting into only 17 games as a late inning replacement for Yuhei Nakamura. The Swallows made him a player-coach for 2022 but he spent most of the season coaching rather than playing, only getting into two games with the ichi-gun squad (and one of those was his retirement game). He's now a full time coach with the Swallows.

Shima made the All Star team eight times during his career (2007, 2010-2015, & 2017). He again won the Best 9 and Golden Glove awards in 2013. He won a Nippon Series with the Eagles in 2013 and was on the roster for the 2021 champion Swallows but didn't play in the Series as Yuhei Nakamura caught every inning of every game (and won the Series MVP award while doing it). He was Samurai Japan's roster for the 2015 Premier 12 and had been selected for the 2017 World Baseball Classic team but had to drop out due to an injury.

Shima's first BBM cards were in the 2007 Rookie Edition (#43), 1st Version (#214), 2nd Version (#585), Eagles (#E052), All Stars (#A15) and Rookie Edition Premium (#RP17) sets. His first Calbee card was also from 2007 - #160 in Series Two. He also had rookie cards in a couple of Konami's sets that year - #W082 in the Baseball Heroes 3 White set and #C07B067 in the Baseball Heroes 3 Power Up Version set. And as I've been doing for all these players, here's the link to the cards he has at TCDB and here's a a bunch of his cards: