Card Of The Week November 26

The big NPB free agent news this past week was that pitcher Sachiya Yamasaki had left the Orix Buffaloes to join the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters.  Yamasaki's father Akihiro had also been a baseball player.  He was drafted in the second round of the 1979 draft by the Yomiuri Giants and spent ten seasons with them before joining the Fighters (who were sharing Korakuen Stadium and the Tokyo Dome with the Giants in Tokyo during this time) for the 1990 and 1991 seasons.  The elder Yamasaki then coached for the Fighters for much of the next 13 years before moving on to other coaching gigs - mostly with independent teams but also for the Dragons and Giants.  Sachiya was born in 1992 so he's now joining the team that his father coached during much of his childhood.

Here's a card showing both father and son (2015 BBM Rookie Edition #107):

The back of the card is interesting - the column on the right side lists what I think were all the father-son combinations in NPB history, at least until 2015:

The first pair is Kazuhiro and Hiroki Kuroda, followed by Katsuya and Katsunori Nomura and Shigeo and Kazushige Nagashima.  Next is the Donoue clan - father Terashi and brothers Takehiro and Naomichi.  The Yamasaki's are the final entry.