2024 JABA Player Cards

The 2024 Intercity Baseball Tournament, which is one of two major tournaments for corporate league baseball in Japan, was held a couple of weeks ago.  Mitsubishi Heavy Industries East was the winner.  My friend Deanna was still in Japan while it was going on and she attended some games.  She discovered that they were selling packs of the 2024 JABA Player cards at the games and she picked up a few packs for me.  She and her boyfriend Noel subsequently returned to the States and made an East Coast swing recently that brought them into the mid-Atlantic area.  The two of them stopped by my hometown in Maryland this past week to meet up with me for lunch and she passed the cards along to me.

She had four packs total for me although one of them is going to Ryan.  Each pack contains five cards and retailed for 660 yen.  The packs for the 2021 and 2022 sets were available on the online store at JABA's (Japan Amateur Baseball Association) website but the store doesn't appear to be there anymore.  I would say that the cards are only available at JABA events but I went to a corporate league game while I was in Japan back in May and they didn't have any cards for sale.

It's been a little frustrating trying to find information about these sets.  I've never seen a checklist for any of the sets and the cards are pretty rare on the on-line stores that it's difficult to generate one.  There's a QR code on the back of the wrapper that I hoped would lead to something useful but the link takes you to a webpage with a "Prospect Player List" which is not a checklist.  However, I believe that it IS the list of players in the set AND I think the order they appear in the list corresponds to the order the players appear in the checklist.

The thing that's a little odd about this iteration of the set is that while I believe the set has 90 cards total, it only has cards for 45 players.  Each player has two cards in the set with the higher numbered cards (46-90) having a "foil" finish.  The foil cards aren't parallels of the non-foil cards and aren't necessarily more rare - of the three packs I opened, I got eight "foil" cards and seven non-foil cards (one of which was a double).  This was not how the 2021 and 2022 sets looked - as far as I've seen, there's only one card per player in those sets.  I don't know about the 2023 set since I don't have any of those cards.

Here's the 14 cards I got from the three packs I opened (I got doubles on the Fujimura card):

You'll notice that I have two cards of Kazuki Kondoh and their numbers are 45 cards apart (the non-foil card number is 24JP016 while the foil card's is 24JP061).  This is what made me assume that there were 90 cards total but only 45 players in the set.  If you compare the card numbers to the order that the player's appear in the "Prospect Player List", you'll see that they match up.  For example, the card I have of Kishi Iwamoto is numbered 24JP048.  If we "normalize" it (which basically means subtract 45 from it so we have a number between 1 and 45) we get 3.  In the "Prospect Player List", Iwamoto is the third player listed.  Similarly, Fujimura is the eighth player listed and Akiyama is the eleventh which correspond to their card numbers.  

I don't know anything about these particular players although I find it interesting that Keisho Amiya of Yamaha was an ikusei player for the Baystars for three years (2016-18) and I have a handful of cards of him with DeNA:

There's no real difference in the backs of the non-foil or foil cards other than the color - the non-foil cards are blue while the foil ones are grey.  Here's the backs of both Kondoh cards so that you can see that they're identical except for the color:

Like I've said about the previous sets, I'd love to get more of these cards but the few ones I see on Mercari are pricier than I'd like.  But thanks for picking these up for me, Deanna!