Twenty years ago this month, Japan unveiled its first National Baseball Team made up entirely of professional players. The event the team was playing in was the 2003 Asian Baseball Championship which that year served as the Asian qualifier for the 2004 Athens Olympic Games.
Japan had not medaled in baseball at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the first Olympics to allow professional players. It was the first time in the five Olympics that had featured baseball (two as a "demonstration" sport and three as an "official" sport) that they had not won at least the bronze medal. Despite being allowed to use professionals, Japan's roster that year was a hybrid affair containing only eight professional players (one from each Pacific League team along with the Central League teams) along with five college players (including Shinnosuke Abe and Masanori Ishikawa) and eleven industrial league players (including Norihiro Akahoshi, Toshiya Sugiuchi and Shunsuke Watanabe). Japan went 4-3 in pool play to finish a disappointing fourth and then lost both their semi-final game to Cuba and the bronze medal game to Korea. Head coach Kozo Otagaki from Toshiba took the brunt of the blame for the team's poor performance as it was alleged that he hadn't worked with the professional players very well. As the 2004 game drew near, the All Japan Baseball Conference was determined to not repeat the mistakes of 2000 and decided to field an all-professional team coached by a staff used to dealing with professional players. Putting a team together to play in a tournament being held during the NPB regular season would be a challenge but before they could worry about that, Japan needed to qualify for the games,
The 2003 Asian Baseball Championship was scheduled from October 31st to November 7th in Sapporo, Hokkaido. All the games were to be played in the Sapporo Dome. The tournament consisted of two parts - a qualifying round and a final round. The qualifying round was a round robin tournament between China, Pakistan, Indonesai and the Philippines. The winner of the qualifying round would then play in another round robin tournament for the final round along with Japan, Korea and Taiwan (aka Chinese Taipei). The top two teams of the final round would qualify for the 2004 Olympics.
Because of the structure of the tournament, Japan was not scheduled to play their first game until November 5th which would be more than a week since the ending of the 2003 Nippon Series. Since the tournament would not overlap with the NPB season, teams were a little more willing to allow their players to participate and the organizers were able to put together a team that was stacked.
Japan would only play three games in the tournament and their three starters would be Daisuke Matsuzaka, Koji Uehara and Tsuyoshi Wada. Hitoki Iwase, Masahide Kobayashi and Hiroki Kuroda would be available in the bullpen. The position players included Kazuo Matsui, Kenji Johjima, Michihiro Ogasawara, Kosuke Fukudome, Kazuhiro Wada, Yoshinobu Takahashi, Yoshitomo Tani and Shinya Miyamoto. The roster was actually short one player as Norihiro Akahoshi had gotten injured and was unable to play. He was not replaced. As it turned out, he wasn't missed.
The team would be managed by baseball legend Shigeo Nagashima, who had stepped down as Giants manager two years previously. His coaching staff would consist of Kiyoshi Nakahata who had played for Nagashima with the Giants, Yutaka Ohno who had a Hall Of Fame pitching career with the Carp and former Yokohama Whale and Nippon-Ham Fighter Yutaka Takagi.
When the tournament got under way it was China that dominated the qualifying round. They beat the Philippines 7-1 in their first game and then demolished Indonesia and Pakistan 15-0 and 19-0 respectively with both games ending after seven innings due to the mercy rule. They outscored their opponents 41-1.
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #30 |
Reality set in during the final round as China's first opponent was Japan. Koji Uehara started for Nagashima's team and he went seven innings, striking out 11 while walking two and giving up only one run on a solo home run. Meanwhile Japan's offense got rolling and they scored over a dozen runs to win the game 13-1.
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #31 |
Japan's next opponent was Taiwan. Daisuke Matsuzaka got the start in this game and got into a little bit of trouble early as Taiwan had runners on 1st and 2nd with two down in the second but Tani made a nice play on a hard hit ball to end the inning. Matsuzaka would go on to throw seven shutout innings while striking out 12. Japan's offense again pounded their opponents, scoring nine runs on 16 hits. With the 9-0 victory, Japan assured themselves of being one of the top two teams in the tournament and had clinched a spot in the Athens games.
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #32 |
Tsuyoshi Wada took the mound the next day for Japan's final game against Korea. This was a much tighter affair, with Japan only scoring two runs. Wada held the Koreans scoreless through 5 1/3 innings while striking out nine before giving way to the bullpen. Hiroki Kuroda, Hitoki Iwase and Masahide Kobayashi kept Korea off the board the remaining 3 2/3 innings and Japan won their final game 2-0. Japan went 3-0 in the tournment, outscoring their opponents 24-1. They and Taiwan (who had beaten both China and Korea) ended the tournament as the top two teams.
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #26 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #27 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #28 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #29 |
Japan swept the post-tournament awards as well. Shinya Miyamoto, who had hit .500, scored three runs and knocked in five, was named MVP. Yoshinobu Takahashi was the leading hitter with a .583 average. Kosuke Fukudome matched Miyamoto's .500 average and five RBIs but had to settle for the "Most Runs Batted In" award. Matsuzaka won the "Best Pitcher" award.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Japan's tournament dominance is that they did it without hitting a home run. They also got very little offense out of Kenji Johjima (.143), Kazuo Matsui (.273), Michihiro Ogasawara (.167) and Kazuhiro Wada (.200). It would be Matsui's final game in Japan until 2011 - he would sign that winter with the New York Mets and spend the next seven seasons in MLB. Two players on the Japanese roster - Takuya Kimura and Hiroshi Kisanuki - didn't play in any of the three games. Motonobu Tanishige only had a single at bat in one of the games.
BBM issued a 36 card box set to commemorate the team (the box front can be seen at the top of this post). The base set contained 21 cards for the players, four cards for Nagashima and the coaches, four cards for the award winners and one card for each of the three games the team played. The remaining four cards were either a memorabilia card for Matsuzaka, Nagashima, Uehara or Tsuyoshi Wada or a non-memorabilia version of the card. (I don't know for sure but my guess is that you either got a memorabilia card and three non-memorabilia cards or four non-memorabilia cards which was the more likely outcome.) In addition, BBM had a 22 card "Asian Championship 2003" insert set with the 2004 1st Version set that included Nagashima along with all 21 of the players. Here are the cards of all the coaches and players from both the box set and the 1st version insert set:
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #01 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version "Asian Championship 2003" #AJ1 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #04 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #03 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #02 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #08 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version "Asian Championship 2003" #AJ7 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #21 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version "Asian Championship 2003" #AJ22 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #20 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version "Asian Championship 2003" #AJ15 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #13 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version "Asian Championship 2003" #AJ6 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #06 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version "Asian Championship 2003" #AJ3 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #15 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version "Asian Championship 2003" #AJ12 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #24 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version "Asian Championship 2003" #AJ18 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #05 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version "Asian Championship 2003" #AJ8 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #12 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version "Asian Championship 2003" #AJ2 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #07 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version "Asian Championship 2003" #AJ4 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #18 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version "Asian Championship 2003" #AJ16 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #09 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version "Asian Championship 2003" #AJ9 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #17 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version "Asian Championship 2003" #AJ13 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #19 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version "Asian Championship 2003" #AJ17 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #16 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version "Asian Championship 2003" #AJ14 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #25 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version "Asian Championship 2003" #AJ21 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #23 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version "Asian Championship 2003" #AJ20 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #14 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version "Asian Championship 2003" #AJ11 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #10 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version "Asian Championship 2003" #AJ5 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #22 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version "Asian Championship 2003" #AJ19 |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #11 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version "Asian Championship 2003" #AJ10 |
And just to be complete, here are the four non-memorabilia cards I got with my set:
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #MJ |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #NJ |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #UJ |
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #WJ |
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