Japanese Baseball Cards: Mail Day From Jason

Saturday, August 3, 2024

Mail Day From Jason

I wanted to do a quick post about the latest cards I got in the mail the other day from my friend Jason, who sells Japanese cards on Ebay as "JK's Card Shoppe".

First up is the complete "1st Bowman" subset from last year's Bowman NPB set. I make fun of Topps' NPB product for what I think are good reasons and I really make fun of the "1st Bowman" cards but I couldn't resist getting all 48 cards for a really reasonable price. If you recall, the "1st Bowman" cards in the Bowman sets have all been cards of ikusei players, usually from that year's rookie class (so the guys in the subset from the 2023 Bowman set were mostly guys taken in the development player portion of the 2022 draft).

There's some odd aspects of this. For one, by the time the 2023 Bowman set was released in early November, there were nine players with "1st Bowman" cards who were no longer ikusei - they had been added to their team's 70 man rosters. Several of these players had cards showing them as non-ikusei players in sets from BBM and Epoch that had been published before the Bowman set was released. It was a weird choice for Topps to still have them as development players.

My favorite thing, of course, is that Swallows player Yukihiro Iwata has "1st Bowman" cards in both the 2021 and 2022 sets.

So with all that said, why did I want the subset? Basically it comes down to wanting cards of as many players as possible for any given season, so while I think it's kind of silly for Bowman to try to make a big deal out of the "1st Bowman" cards, there's no other 2023 cards of these players. Well, there are, as most of them are in the 2023 BBM Rookie Edition set but I'm thinking more of cards showing the players in action. Although even then, some of these cards feature photos of the players from their team's introductory press conference (similar to the photos that Rookie Edition uses) or are just a mugshot of the player. So I wanted the cards but I knew there was some room for improvement with them.

OK, after all that, let's see some cards. Rather than show all 48 cards, I'm just going to show three cards of players who were no longer ikusei by the time the set came out:

2023 Bowman NPB #BP-19

2023 Bowman NPB #BP-8

2023 Bowman NPB #BP-25

If you look closely at the player's uniform numbers, you'll see something kind of interesting. Both Matsuyama and Noguchi have three digit numbers (211 for Matsuyama and 121 for Noguchi) which are standard for ikusei players but Chano's wearing a two digit number (61) indicating that he's on the 70 man roster. So Bowman knew he wasn't a development player anymore (he'd been put on the 70 man roster in March) but put him in the "1st Bowman" subset anyway. (To be fair, there's nothing that actually says that the "1st Bowman" cards are exclusively ikusei players.)

OK, enough whining about the Bowman cards. I complain a lot about cards I keep buying, don't I? Let's move on. I picked up cards of a couple of my favorite players from Epoch's Premier Edition team sets from last year:

2023 Epoch Carp Premier Edition #29

2023 Epoch Carp Premier Edition #07

2023 Epoch Swallows Premier Edition #08

2023 Epoch Swallows Premier Edition #22

Jason had recently picked up a couple boxes of Bushiroad's Dream Order Pacific League Booster Pack Vol. 2 cards and I picked up 15 cards from what he had available. I'm not a big fan of these cards but I wanted some examples from the set. I picked up a handful of player cards:

#PBP02-M11 Yudai Fujioka

#PBP02-H12 Yuki Yanagita

#PBP02-F11 Daiki Asama

#PBP02-L09 Shota Hiranuma

#PBP02-L11 Junichiro Kishii

I picked up ten of the "Tactics" cards which I like more than the player cards. Not only do they have better photos but they all have a horizontal format which is a nice change of pace. My only complaint about the cards is that they don't identify the players:

#PDO-05 Takashi Ogino

#PDO-05 Yuki Yanagita (I think)

#PDO-04 Akira Nakamura

#PDO-06 Akira Nakamura

#PDO-01 ?

#PDO-08 Takahida Ikeda

#PDO-05 Junichiro Kishi

#PDO-06 Takeya Nakamura

#PDO-06 Takero Okajima

#PDO-07 Hiroto Kubokata

That was all the cards that I knew I was getting from Jason but, as usual, he threw in some extras. He gave me a couple more player cards from the Dream Order box - two of them were parallels: