Japanese Baseball Cards: 2024 Premier 12 Samurai Japan Roster

Thursday, November 7, 2024

2024 Premier 12 Samurai Japan Roster

After a one year COVID-related delay, the 2024 Premier 12 is going to kick off this weekend. The twelve teams are split into two six team Groups with Group A (Mexico, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Panama, the Netherlands and the US) playing in Mexico starting on Saturday and Group B (Japan, Korea, Cuba, "Chinese Taipei" aka Taiwan, Australia and the Dominican Republic) playing mostly in Taiwan (Japan's first game will be in Nagoya) starting next Wednesday. The top two teams in each group will play in the Super Round at Tokyo Dome starting on November 21st - this round will determine the seeding for the Gold Medal and Bronze Medal games on November 24th.

At first glance, the Samurai Japan roster isn't as impressive as it's been for previous tournaments. MLB does not allow any player on a 40 man roster to play so a bunch of the stars from the WBC team of last year aren't available. Additionally stars like Roki Sasaki and Munetaka Murakami aren't playing. A couple other big names - Kazuma Okamoto, Hiromi Itoh and Chusei Mannami - had to back out due to injury. Still, there's a number of good players and Japan is still the favorite to win the tournament again.

There are a handful of players from the WBC team - Taisei, Shosei Togoh, Hiroto Takahashi, Shugo Maki and Sosuke Genda. There are also a bunch of players from the team that won the Asian Professional Baseball Championship a year ago. I tried to pick cards showing players in Samurai Japan uniforms as much as I could, including a few of the Panini cards for the collegiate team.