NPB announced their major award winners today and Shoki Murakami of the Tigers and Yoshinobu Yamamoto of the Buffaloes were the MVPs of the Central and Pacific Leagues respectively. Yamamoto has become just the third player in NPB history to win an MVP award three straight years. Oddly enough the two previous players to do it played for the same franchise - Hisashi Yamada for the Hankyu Braves in 1976-78 and Ichiro for the Orix BlueWave in 1994-96.
 |
| 2023 BBM 2nd Version #361 |
 |
| 2023 BBM 1st Version #005 |
Murakami also won the Central League Rookie Of The Year award along with Shunpieta Yamashita of the Buffaloes. Murakami is just the third player to win the MVP and Rookie Of The Year awards in the same season (but the first Central League player to do it) following Isamu Kida of the Fighters in 1980 and Hideo Nomo of the Kintetsu Buffaloes in 1990.
 |
| 2023 BBM 2nd Version #CM61 |
 |
| 2023 BBM 2nd Version #337 |
Just a quick aside - I've written in the past about how it's not unusual for BBM to not have a 1st or 2nd Version of one or both Rookies Of The Year. That didn't happen this year as both players were in 2nd Version but those were the ONLY flagship cards either player had this year. Topps based the player selection in their NPB set completely on last year and Calbee not only dropped Series Three this year but they cut the number of "regular" player cards in Series One and Two from 72 to 60 in each Series. I'm not sure why Epoch didn't include either of them in their NPB set though.
The Best 9 award winners were announced yesterday. Here's the Central League winners:
 |
| 2023 Epoch NPB #254 |
 |
| 2023 Epoch NPB #339 |
 |
| 2023 Epoch NPB #309 |
 |
| 2023 Epoch NPB #271 |
 |
| 2023 Epoch NPB #274 |
 |
| 2023 Epoch NPB #308 |
 |
| 2023 Epoch NPB #316 |
 |
| 2023 Epoch NPB #385 |
 |
| 2023 Epoch NPB #423 |
You may have noticed something interesting - while Shoki Murakami was MVP of the Central League, he was NOT the winner of the Best 9 award for pitcher.
Here's the Pacific League Best 9 winners:
 |
| 2023 Epoch NPB #005 |
 |
| 2023 Epoch NPB #018 |
 |
| 2023 Epoch NPB #020 |
 |
| 2023 Epoch NPB #128 |
 |
| 2023 Epoch NPB #023 |
 |
| 2023 Epoch NPB #025 |
 |
| 2023 Epoch NPB #061 |
 |
| 2023 Epoch NPB #210 |
 |
| 2023 Epoch NPB #063 |
 |
| 2023 Epoch NPB #166 |
Despite his card saying he was a catcher and his photo showing him wearing the tools of ignorance, Yuma Tongu was the Best 9 winner for first base.
Lastly a few weeks back Yoshinobu Yamamoto was announced as the Sawamura Award winner. Like the MVP Award, this was Yamamoto's third straight Sawamura Award. He's only the second player to win three straight with Masaichi Kaneda being the first from 1956-58.
 |
| 2023 BBM 2nd Version #377 |
No comments:
Post a Comment