2024 Panini USA Baseball Stars & Stripes Japanese Collegiate All Stars

After a delay of about a month from when it was originally scheduled to be released, Panini finally released the 2024 USA Baseball Stars & Stripes set a few weeks ago.  As a collector of Japanese baseball cards, you might be asking why you should care.  You should care because for the third time in the past six years (and fourth time in the last 12), Panini has included autographed memorabilia cards for the Japanese Collegiate Samurai Japan team that took on the collegiate Team USA in the 44th Japan-US Collegiate Baseball Championship last year in Cary, North Carolina and Charleston, South Carolina.  Japan won the championship three games to two.  It was the first time since 2019 that the championship was played so this is the first time since 2020 that Panini has included cards for the Japanese team.

I put together a list of all 26 players from the team (two more than in previous editions) and added their universities, what year they were, who drafted them (if they were drafted) or which corporate league team they're now playing for (if they aren't in college anymore and weren't drafted last fall):

Name	Position	College	School Year	Year Drafted	Team	Round	Corporate
Ippei Amai	Outfielder	Asia	4	N/A			NTT West
Ryo Arima	PitcherCatcher	Kansai	4	N/A			ENEOS
Ryuta Hirose	Infielder	Keio	4	2023	Hawks	3
Haruki Hosono	Pitcher	Toyo	4	2023	Fighters	1
Shunsuke Iwai	Pitcher	Meijo	4	2023	Hawks	2
Jin Kimura	Pitcher	Kyushi Kyoritsu	4	N/A			Nippon Shinyaku
Tatsuki Koja	Pitcher	Toin University Of Yokohama	4	2023	Eagles	1
Toyo Kumada	Infielder	Waseda	4	N/A			Toyoda
Sho Kusaka	Pitcher	Asia	4	2023	Dragons	1
Minoru Makita	Pitcher	Meiji	4	N/A			JFE East
Asahi Miyashita	Infielder	Toyo	2	N/A
Kazuki Miyazaki	Outfielder	Yamanashi Gakuin	4	2023	Fighters	3
Kyosuke Miyazaki	Catcher	Keio	4	N/A			Panasonic
Rui Muneyama	Infielder	Meiji	3	N/A
Kenichi Murata	Pitcher	Meiji	4	2023	Hawks	4
Daisuke Nakashima	Outfielder	Aoyama Gakuin	4	2023	Eagles	6
Misho Nishikawa	Outfielder	Aoyama Gakuin	3	N/A
Tai Sasaki	Infielder	Aoyama Gakuin	3	N/A
Kaito Shimomura	Pitcher	Aoyama Gakuin	4	2023	Tigers	1
Yuya Shinto	Pitcher	Jobu	4	2023	Fighters	2
Natsuki Takeuchi	Pitcher	Kokugakuin	4	2023	Lions	1
Rintaro Tsujimoto	Infielder	Sendai	4	2023	Dragons	3
Hayato Tsunehiro	Pitcher	Aoyama Gakuin	4	2023	Carp	1
Kyuto Ueda	Infielder	Meiji	4	2023	Marines	1
Taiga Ueda	Pitcher	Osaka University Of Commerce	4	2023	Lions	2
Seiya Watanabe	Outfielder	Osaka University Of Commerce	3	N/A

15 of the 26 players on the team were drafted last fall - seven of those were in the first round!  The biggest name in the set is Natsuki Takeuchi, who's the front runner for the Pacific League Rookie Of The Year.  Six of the other players graduated from college this spring and are currently playing for various teams in the corporate leagues.  Those six players may eventually enter the NPB draft at some point in the future (although I don't believe they can until the 2025 draft - there's a requirement that any collegiate player who opts to go into the corporate or independent leagues instead of NPB has to wait two years before they can enter the draft again - it's three years for a high school player).  As a point of comparison, there were two players from the 2019 and 2020 Panini sets who went to the corporate leagues before joining NPB - Rysuke Kodama of the Lions and Daigo Kamikawabata of the Fighters.  That leaves five players on the team who are still in college.  Four of those players will be eligible for this fall's draft (Rui Muneyama, Misho Nishikawa, Tai Sasaki and Seiya Watanabe) while the other (Asahi Miyashita) will be eligible in 2025.

If I'm reading the checklist correctly, there are five different serially numbered versions of each card.  There's the "PE" version which is /58 or /59, a "Prime" version which is /25, a "Button" version which is /6 or /7, a "Laundry Tag" version which is /4 and a "Brand Logo" version which is "1-of-1".  Which means there's between 94 and 96 cards for each player out there which is much more than any of the previous editions.

I'm not sure if I'm going to try to collect these or not yet - the Takeuchi is already prohibitively expensive for my tastes - but I've picked up a couple so far and they're pretty attractive cards:

The backs have a paragraph about the player's performance in the games against Team USA last summer which is a nice change of pace from the fairly generic backs from the 2019 and 2020 cards: