Time to do a quick listing of the baseball cards sets that have been announced in the last month or so. I suspect that these will be the last sets for 2024, unless Topps finally decides to put something else out.
- Epoch is releasing another of their ultra high-end active/OB player "Stars & Legends" team sets. The "Giants Stars & Legends with Memorabilia" set will hit the streets on November 30th. Boxes of this product retail for 22,000 yen (about $144 and I think contain just four cards - although two of them are likely "special insert cards". The base set has 57 cards - 16 active and 41 OB players (although those numbers may change) - and there's a serially numbered parallel version of each base set card. There's Epoch's usual collection of insert cards, five different types of autographed cards and seven different types of memorabilia cards. All the memorabilia cards appear to be fragments of bats. I'm not sure who all has autographs in the set - typically the Giants don't allow their active players to have autographed cards and at least one of the OB players (Tetsuharu Kawakami) isn't around to sign anymore.
- The 2024 edition of "Career Achievement", one of Epoch's annual collaborations with the Japan Baseball Promotion Association (aka the OB Club), is schedule for release on December 28. It's another ultra high-end set with six card boxes retailing for 18,150 yen (~$118) - I think two of the cards are guaranteed to be autographs. The base set has 56 cards and there's a Hologram parallel of each card. There's apparently five possible autograph cards - "Authentic" (53 cards), "Tribute To The Past" (24 cards), "Baseball Greats" (14 cards), "Baseball Autographs (White)" (25 cards) and "Baseball Autographs (Black)" (25 cards). I again can't say for sure who has autographs in the set although it appears that all the players in the set are living. The biggest names in the checklist are Sadaharu Oh, Ichiro and Hideki Matsui.
- BBM's annual ultra high end set - Glory - will be released in late November. Boxes of this will retail for 25,300 yen (~$165) and will contain six cards. The base set will contain 36 cards (three players per team I assume) which all have multiple serially numbered parallels. There are two serially numbered insert sets - "Miyabi" (36 cards serially numbered /50 with a parallel version) and "Glorious 3D" (12 cards that I assume are serially numbered but I don't know the count). There are a plethora of autograph and memorabilia cards. The memorabilia cards include both patch cards and bat knob cards.
- BBM is also releasing a box set for the Lions that is the one set I'm listing here that's not super expensive. Each Lions Collection box will contain 43 cards - the 42 card base set plus one "special insert card". The set apparently commemorates the "New Yorker Tartan" uniforms that the team wore last summer. I'm guessing that the 30 "regular" cards in the base set will feature members of the team wearing these uniforms. I think that the other 12 cardsin the base set - labeled "Lions-Collection Outfit" - will feature players wearing casual clothes. The possible "special insert cards" include foil signature parallels, autographs and exchange cards for an autographed memorabilia card featuring (I assume) a swatch of the uniforms in question. Unopened boxes will retail for 4,940 yen (about $33) although opened boxes will be available on the resell market for a lot less than that. The set will be in stores at the end of November.
I thought I'd (finally) complete my posts about the card shops I visited on my trip to Japan last May with a quick post about the two Mandarake stores I went to. Mandarake is a chain of antique stores in Japan that specialize in manga, toys, and other things including, of course, baseball cards. There are 15 stores across the country, from Sapporo up north all the way west to Fukuoka. I stopped briefly in the one in Nagoya back in 2019 but my main interaction with them the past few years has been ordering cards from them on-line - they ship to the US! On this trip, I visited their stores in Fukuoka and the Nakano ward of Tokyo.
I had walked by the store in Fukuoka in 2019 on a Sunday morning on my way from Tenjin to Maizuru Park but it wasn't open at the time. It wasn't somewhere that I had really intended to visit on this last trip until I realized it was only about four blocks from Mint Fukuoka's new location and I could do both shops with only one subway trip.
It took a few minutes once I entered the store to find the baseball cards. The store is large and has a lot of stuff but if I remember correctly, there were signs or a directory (in English) that told me where the cards were. They were in the back of the first floor on the far right. I think I needed to ask someone about Calbee's but they had several binders full of 70's era cards. I know I bought a few but I don't remember what I bought at this point. I realize that this may be somewhat less than useful but I can at least tell you that the store has Calbees available in it. To be honest, I found the Mandarake store much more useful than Mint Fukuoka but your mileage may vary.
The Nakano store is located in the Nakano Broadway shopping center which can be somewhat intimidating crowd-wise. Ryan had taken me here on my first trip back in 2013 and the crowds put me off enough that I made us leave. I went here again with Ryan on my last day of this trip. Ryan reminded me of my reaction to the crowd the first time we went but I think that after dealing with Japanese crowds for two weeks on this trip, I was able to take them in stride a little better.
Instead of there being one big Mandarake store in the mall, they have a series of separate shops (39 in all across four floors!) that all specialize in a different genre. The card shop is on the second floor:
They had a bunch of old baseball cards in a glass case. You can see there are both Calbee and Takara cards available:
They also had a bunch of singles in boxes by the cash register that you needed to ask to see. This was where Ryan and I spent most of our time here. I again wasn't really intending to buy any cards here but, of course, I found a couple that I had to grab.
Ryan had said there was another shop on the same floor that he'd seen baseball stuff at but we had to walk around a little before we found it. It turned out that it was Mandarake's store for movie memorabilia which also includes baseball stuff. Here's one of the display windows in the hallway:
Ryan had noticed a Sadaharu Oh card in the window that I was pretty sure had been a giveaway at a Giants game in 2008. We went into the store so that he could buy it - I told him if he wasn't going to get it, I was. The store had a lot of movie posters that I briefly looked through - I was thinking about getting one for my oldest daughter if I saw a movie I knew she liked but I wasn't sure how I could get it home in one piece. Ryan pointed me to a bunch of baseball publications towards the back of the store. I thumbed through them for a bit before coming across an interleague program for the Tigers from 2005 that included two baseball cards. It was only 1000 yen so I grabbed it.
I'm not sure I'd prioritize going back to either of these stores on a future trip to Japan - it's a bit unpredictable what you may find there. But it's a little like going to G-Freak - if you've got the time and feel like looking through boxes of random cards, there are worse places to go. And you might get surprised by what you run into.
50 years ago this month, the New York Mets embarked on an 18 game, 12 city tour of Japan that lasted almost four weeks. In fact, 50 years ago this evening they were playing in their second game of the tour, a 10 inning 4-4 tie against the Yomiuri Giants at Korakuen Stadium in Tokyo. They played five games at Korakuen on the tour with the remaining games being in Sapporo, Sendai, Koriyama, Niigata, Toyama, Osaka (2 games), Matsuyama, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, Kokura, Nagoya and Shizuoka. The Mets would go 9-7-2 in Japan, putting up a 3-0 record against an "All Japan" all star team, a 3-1 record against teams that combined the Yomiuri Giants' roster with another teams (the Hawks in Osaka, the Carp in Hiroshima, the Lions in Fukuoka and the Dragons in Nagoya) but only 3-6-2 against Yomiuri.
You can read all the details about the series in Henry Tran's article on it in "Nichibei Yakyu: US Tours Of Japan 1960-2019 (Volume 2)" which was my primary source of information for this post. There's a couple pieces of trivia that I found interesting:
These were the final games that Tetsuharu Kawakami managed as he announced his retirement at the end of the tour
Joe Torre had been traded to the Mets about ten days before the tour started but insisted on coming with the team
There was a home run hitting contest between Henry Aaron and Sadaharu Oh held before the sixth game on November 2nd at Korakuen. Aaron won 10-9. This was commemorated on a Calbee card from the 1977 "Oh Series" (#93):
Speaking of baseball cards, the really interesting thing about the Mets tour is that there's a baseball card set for it! Ed Broder was stationed in Japan with the US Air Force in the 1970's and he published and sold six somewhat primitive sets of NPB baseball cards. These were all obviously unlicensed, home brew cards but, as Gary Engel has pointed out, "most pre-1973 Japanese cards of all types are unlicensed" so these cards don't carry the same sort of stigma as some of the more recent ones.
Broder's first set was a 20 card one for the Mets tour. It featured nine player cards for the Mets (including manager Yogi Berra), eight player cards for the Yomiuri Giants and three cards featuring multiple players. All the photos are in black and white and the card stock is pretty thin, more like a thick piece of paper than a baseball card. The cards are all about 1 7/8 inches wide and three inches high.
Meet the Mets:
Yogi Berra
Wayne Garrett
Ron Hodges
Jerry Koosman
Jon Matlack
Felix Millan
John Milner
Tom Seaver
George Theodore
The other members of the Mets who did not have cards include Torre, Ed Kranepool, Benny Ayala, Bruce Boisclair, Ike Hampton, Ted Martinez, Bob Apodaca, Harry Parker and Jack Aker, although Torre and Kranepool are on the multiple player cards. Some of the Mets more famous players at the time like Rusty Staub, Tug McGraw, Jerry Grote, Bud Harrelson and Cleon Jones had decided not to make the trip.
Here are the cards for the Giants:
Tsuneo Horiuchi
Kazumasa Kono
Shigeo Nagashima
Sadaharu Oh
Shitoshi Sekimoto
Toshimitsu Suetsugu
Kazumi Takahashi
Yoshimasa Takahashi
Some of the Giants players are misidentified on the backs of the cards. For example, Suetsugu is identified as "Tamio Suetsugu" on his card.
Here are the three multi-player cards:
Kazuyoshi Yamamoto & Joe Torre
Kazuyoshi Yamamoto & Tetsuharu Kawakami
Ed Kranepool, John Milner, Sachio Kinugasa & Joe Torre
Here's what the backs of the cards look like. As you can see, they're pretty primitive as well with the team logo having that "photo copier" reproduction quality that I was familiar with as a kid when I copied a photo from a book in the Xerox copier at the library:
Four members of the Mets would eventually play in Japan. Millan played for the Yokohama Taiyo Whales from 1978 to 1980; Garrett played for the Chunichi Dragons in 1979 and 1980 (his brother Adrian played for the Carp from 1977 to 1979); Boisclair played for the Hanshin Tigers in 1980 and Hampton played for the Kintetsu Buffaloes in 1981. I do not know of any Japanese baseball cards for Boisclair or Hampton but both Millan and Garrett have Calbee and Takara cards. The only NPB cards I have for either of them, however, is from another unlicensed set made by Americans - the 1979 TCMA set:
The managerial shuffle for the 2025 season ended late last week with a non-change - Tsuyoshi Shinjyo is returning to manage the Fighters for at least next season. I was kind of surprised as I had felt he had been hired to keep the seat warm for Atsunori Inaba eventually but the team's second place finish this year apparently bought him another season.
So now that the dust's settled, there'll be five teams with a different manager than they started last season with, only one of which - Hajime Miki of the Eagles - has ever managed before. And Miki was only a manager for a single season. The four rookie managers for 2025 will be Kazuki Inoue of the Dragons, Kyuji Fujikawa of the Tigers, Mamoru Kishida of the Buffaloes and Fumiya Nishiguchi of the Lions. All four played played for the teams they'll be managing which isn't a huge surprise for two of the teams. The Tigers haven't had a manager who hasn't played for the team since Senichi Hoshino in 2002-03 and the Lions haven't since Masaaki Mori from 1986-94. Two of the four have experience playing in North America (Fujikawa with the Cubs and Rangers from 2013-15 and Nishiguchi briefly with the Sioux City Explorers in 1995) which means NPB will have five such managers next year, joining Shinjyo, Masato Yoshii of the Marines and Shingo Takatsu of the Swallows. Actually if you include Hawaii in "North America" there's seven in all as both Inoue and Hiroki Kokubo of the Hawks played in the Hawaiian Winter League in the 90's.
My original plans for Friday, May 24th, were pretty open. I was going to meet up with Deanna, Noel and Steve at the Marines game that evening in Chiba but I didn't have any set plans for the day other than that. My expectation was that I would use the day to go to some baseball card shops I hadn't made it to yet like Mint Kichijoji or G-Freak and maybe do a little touristy stuff.
All that changed a few days earlier when I learned from Deanna that there was a corporate league tournament going on in Tokyo. The tournament was the (or "a") Tokyo qualifier for the Intercity Tournament which was held in late July. There were two games being played at Ota Stadium each day - one at 10 AM and the other at 1 PM. Trying to go to both games would make it difficult to get to the Marines game in time but just going to the 10 AM game seemed doable.
My first task that morning, however, was assessing the breakfast situation at my hotel, the Toyoko Inn in Kayabacho. I had discovered the previous day that their only offering for breakfast were rice cakes wrapped in seaweed that I had found inedible. I had hopes that perhaps they changed what they had for breakfast each day, but, alas, it was not to be. I ended up quickly downing a roll and a cup of coffee before heading out with the expectation that I'd be picking up some food somewhere else on the way to the ballgame.
Ota Stadium is located in Southern Tokyo, just north of Haneda Airport. The nearest train station is the Ryutsu Center station on the Tokyo Monorail line. "Nearest" is a bit relative as the ballpark is about a three quarters of a mile walk from the station. It took close to an hour for me to get there from my hotel.
Deanna and Noel had gone to the game between JR East and NTT East the previous afternoon (when I was in Shizuoka) so they were able to give me some idea what to expect when I got to the ballpark. Of course, their experience was very different from mine as they saw two of the more popular teams while I was going to be seeing two of the lesser known teams - Gold's Gym and Revenge99.
One of the things Deanna had mentioned was there was a Family Mart across the street from the ballpark so I stopped there on my way to pick up a late breakfast to eat during the game.
I paid my 1000 yen for a ticket (that would have been good for both games) and headed into the ballpark. Ota Stadium is a single decked ballpark that seats about 2,500 although there weren't anywhere near that many there that morning. There might have been about 100 people in the stands and about half of them were in the Gold's Gym cheering section:
As you can see from the pictures, they had a cheerleader. They also had a very fit man and woman posing during the cheer songs. They had a sound system that played songes like Bon Jovi's "It's My Life" and Timmy Trumpet's "Narco" at times although this was my favorite:
In contrast, the Revenge99 cheering section was a single guy with a drum:
He was into it though. This was his pregame song:
It's normal for the start of non-professional games in Japan to be announced by what sounds like an air raid siren and that was the case with this game. The siren was apparently right by where I was sitting, making me jump a little when it went off.
As I ate my breakfast in the stands, I realized I wasn't the only one doing that. There were several members of the Sega Sammy team sitting near me. They'd be playing Honda in the afternoon's game and they were getting their pre-game meal in:
Some of the Honda players were in the stands as well:
The game itself was pretty good. Gold's Gym took a 1-0 lead in the top of the first but Revenge99 tied it up in the bottom of the second. They scored two more in the bottom of the fourth and another in the fifth to take a 4-1 lead. Gold's Gym cut the lead to 4-3 with two runs in the seventh and then took the lead with two more in the eighth. Revenge99 came back in the bottom of the inning with two more runs with the tying run coming on a throwing error and the winning run coming on a bases loaded walk. Gold's Gym failed to score in the top of the ninth and Revenge99 won the game 6-5.
With the loss, Gold's Gym was knocked out of the qualifying tournament. Revenge99 would play and lose two more games before they were eliminated.
Like the day before in Shizuoka, I moved around a bunch during the game although I didn't take as many photos. Here's a shot of a Revenge99 pitcher doing his best John Pacella impression:
A couple shots of Gold's Gym taking the lead in the top of the eighth:
Here's Revenge99 with the bases loaded in the bottom of the eighth, just before they took the lead on a walk:
I stuck around for a few minutes after the game ended and watched Honda and Sega Sammy start their pregame workouts. I'm sure that the crowd for their game was larger than the game I had seen.
I stopped by the Honda fan table on the way out and asked them if they had a roster for the team. They ended up giving me a full fan packet which made me feel kind of guilty since I wasn't going to the game. It had a plastic folder with the team's roster on it, a pair of fans, a singlet, a cheer towel and a lanyard, all with the Honda logo on it:
I made my way back to the monorail station and headed back towards central Tokyo. I had decided that I would spend the afternoon at G-Freak so I switched to the Yamanote line and got off at Okachimachi. I grabbed a quick lunch at a Sukiya under Yamanote line tracks near the station and then walked the couple blocks to the cards shop.
I spent about an hour going through the boxes at G-Freak, finding random stuff I wanted and having a good time talking with the store owner. I was wearing the Nishitetsu Lions hat I had bought at Seibu Dome a few weeks earlier and he told me how he had grown up in Fukuoka as a Lions fan. He talked about climbing trees in the Fukuoka Castle ruins so that he could peer into Heiwadai Stadium during games. "Although sometimes I paid to get in," he admitted. He and his wife were amused that I only knew how to count to three in Japanese because of the Nobuta Group commercials.
I stopped off at my hotel to drop stuff off and relax a little bit before heading to Chiba. I probably should have left a little earlier as I kind of underestimated how long it was going to take to get to the ballpark.
This was the first time I had taken the Keiyo line train from Tokyo to the ballpark. When I went in 2019, I had stopped by Mint Chiba first so I had come from the opposite direction. I got a pretty good view of where the Arakawa river empties into Tokyo Bay from the train:
I also got a look at Tokyo Disneyland as well although I didn't get a chance to take a picture.
I got to Kaihim Makuhari Station around 5-ish. This is the nearest station to Chiba Marine Stadium but, once again, "nearest" is relative - it's about a 15 minute walk. Luckily for me, Deanna and Steve had alerted me to the bus that runs between the station and the ballpark and it was pretty obvious where the line was for it. Taking the bus easily saved me half the time that walking would have taken me.
The bus let us all off on the left field side of the ballpark and, since we were all going to be sitting in the Marines' cheering section, I needed to get to my gate on the right field side of the ballpark. Instead of doing the smart thing and walking around the back side of the stadium though, I walked around the front side of the ballpark which probably negated most of the time saving that the bus gave me. I eventually found my gate though and then pretty quickly met up with Deanna and Noel in time for us to get dinner (and baseball cards) at the Lotteria stand before making our way to our seats. Steve and his co-worker Shima joined us shortly after that.
The Marines were hosting the Hawks that evening (making it the third time I would see Softbank on this trip) and the exciting thing for me was that Roki Sasaki was starting for Lotte. Steve guaranteed me that there'd be a no-hitter that night. The ballpark was very full - in fact it would end up being a sell out - but the crowd wasn't necessarily there for Sasaki. It was "half price beer" night!
The game started out a little rough for Sasaki and the Marines. Two of the first four batters got hits and a two out single from Kensuke Kondoh brought in the first run of the game. I asked Steve about his guarantee and he replied "I didn't say who was going to throw it!" Things got a little grim when the next batter walked to load the bases but Sasaki stuck out Richard Sunagawa to end the threat.
Sasaki settled down after the first and ended up two more hits and one more walk over the remaining six innings that he pitched. He struck out eight total in seven innings.
Meanwhile the Marines got it done against Livan Moinelo, scoring two runs in the bottom of the second on an infield grounder by Ryusei Ogawa and a single by Hiromi Oka. They added a third run in the fifth when Akito Takabe knocked in Oka although Takabe got himself thrown out at second trying to stretch it into a double.
Koshiro Sakamoto and Naoya Masuda each pitched nearly perfect innings (Masuda gave up a walk) to finish out the 3-1 Marines victory. Here's the highlight video from PLTV:
We stuck around after the game for the hero interviews. I was kind of interesting seeing what the Marines do for this. As they're setting up the stage in the middle of the diamond, the cheerleaders come on the field with lightsticks and lead the crowd in waving their own lightsticks or cell phones:
The three "heroes of the game" were Sasaki, Oka and Takabe and each one of them answered questions (which you can see on the highlight video). I. of course, had no idea what they were saying but it was fun watching it on the scoreboard:
Afterwards the three players walked out to where we were sitting in right field and waved and bowed to the cheering section:
We hung out for a while after all of this while the stadium started to empty. People were coming up to greet Steve (who goes to most Marines home games) and we just had a good time talking with them. Someone from stadium security eventually came by to very politely suggest that we consider leaving but, of course, Steve knew them too so it was all very good-natured. We eventually made our way out of the ballpark before spending a bit of time trying to decide what we were going to do next. We ended up catching a bus back up to Kaihim Makuhari Station. Deanna, Noel and Steve were going to head to a bar (Shima had already left us) but I decided to head back to my hotel as I'm not much of a night owl these days. I also had a pretty full day planned for the next day which would be my last full day in Japan.
UPDATE - I forget to mention that Steve's guarantee actually came true, just not anywhere near us. Shosei Togoh of the Giants threw a no-hitter that evening against the Tigers at Koshien.
