Japanese Baseball Cards: November 2024

Wednesday, November 13, 2024

Japanese Players In the Australian Baseball League (And Other Winter Leagues)

The 2024-25 Australian Baseball League season will start later this week and, as has been standard for most of the league's current incarnation, several NPB teams are sending players Down Under for the first half of the season. As usual I'm relying on the WinterLeagueJP website for most of the following information.

Three members of the Yomiuri Giants will become Adelaide Giants for six weeks - Yuto Akihiro, Makoto Kyomoto and Ryusei Yamada.

2023 Epoch One #216

2022 BBM Rookie Edition #028

2022 Epoch NPB #103

In addition to those three players, Adelaide will also have former Hiroshima Toyo Carp pitcher Oscar Nakaoshi on their roster. This will be the second straight season Oscar's been with Adelaide and his third season in the ABL - he was with Auckland for the 2022-23 season:

2016 BBM Carp Autographed Edition #10

The Perth Heat will host Fumiya Kurokawa of the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles:

2020 Eagles Team Set 1st Version #72

The Melbourne Aces will have three players from the Orix Buffaloes on their roster - Taiki Ono, Kyosuke Saitoh and Taito Takashima:

2023 BBM Buffaloes #B27

2023 Epoch NPB Luxury Collection #03

2024 Epoch NPB #194

The Yokohama DeNA Baystars are loaning Atsushi Katsumata to the Canberra Calvary:

2019 BBM 1st Version #268

Canberra will also have another Japanese player - Ryo Kohigashi. As far as I can tell, he never played in NPB. His listing on Baseball-Reference indicates his only pro experience was with Auckland two years ago (with Oscar) and with Quebec in the Frontier League this past summer.

The Chiba Lotte Marines will send five players to the Sydney Blue Sox - Shinya Matsuishi, Hikaru Ohtani, Ryusei Terachi, Daito Yamamoto and Yuto Yoshikawa:

2024 BBM Rookie Edition #074

2024 BBM Marines #M14

2024 BBM 1st Version #216

2023 BBM Marines #M67

2023 Bowman NPB #BP-41

The Brisbane Bandits will be the only one of the six ABL teams to not have any NPB players (although they will have several CPBL and KBO players).

In addtion to Australia, a couple NPB teams have sent players to the Western hemisphere for the winter. Four teams in the Puerto Rican Winter League are getting players from Japan. The Fukuoka Softbank Hawks have sent two players to the Gigantes de Carolina - Haru Matsumoto and Fuga Ohtake:

2023 Epoch Hawks Premier Edition #13

2022 Epoch NPB #360

Those two Hawks players will have an additional Japanese teammate as Shintaro Fujinami, currently a free agent after spening this past season in the Mets farm system, is also on Carolina's roster:

2021 Epoch One #144

The Dragons have sent Koji Fukutani to Leones de Ponce:

2021 Calbee #OP-09

Junpei Azuma of the Baystars is spending his second straight off season abroad. He was with the Canberra Calvary last winter and he'll be with the Senadores de San Juan this year:

2024 BBM Baystars #DB41

The Giants have sent Teppei Mataki and Yuhi Nishidata to Cangrejeros de Santurce:

2024 Epoch NPB #112

2024 BBM 2nd Version #428

The Baystars are also sending players to a third league and country this winter - the Mexican Pacific League. Haruhiro Hamaguchi and Taiga Kamichatani will spend part of the season with Algodoneros de Guasave. Hamaguchi spent last winter with Santurce in Puerto Rico:

2023 Baystars Official Fan Cluib #26

2020 Konami Baseball Collection #20200-N-DB027-00

And finally, Taiki Sekine will be returning to the Yaquis de Obregon for the third straight year (and fourth year since 2019):

2024 Topps NPB #133

Sunday, November 10, 2024

Card Of The Week November 10

The 2024 WBSC Premier 12 tournament started yesterday and I was fortunate enough to be able to catch at least part of all three games. I noticed while watching that each game featured one pitcher with NPB experience. Alberto Baldonado (Yomiuri 2023-present) was the losing pitcher for Panama in their 9-8 walk off loss to the Netherlands. Spencer Patton (DeNA 2017-20) threw a perfect inning in Team USA's 1-0 loss to Puerto Rico, striking out all three batters he faced. Manny Banuelos (2023 Rakuten) was the starting (and losing) pitcher for Mexico against Venezuela. Here's a card of each of them:

2024 BBM 2nd Version #432

2017 BBM 1st Version #225

2023 Epoch NPB #112

Saturday, November 9, 2024

RIP Marty Kuehnert

Long time Japanese baseball personality Marty Kuehnert has passed away at age 78. Kuehnert had entered Japanese baseball in 1972 and 1973 as the business manager of the Lodi minor league team that was owned by Nagayoshi Nakamura, the owner of first the Lotte Orions and then the Taiheiyo Club Lions. He later worked as a sportswriter in Japan, opened the first sports bar in Japan (in Kobe), and would found the International Sports Management and Consulting firm (ISMAC) in the 1980's. It was with ISMAC that he was involved in the birth of BBM's baseball card business. He was the president and part-owner of the Birmingham Barons for a few years in the 1990's, including the season that Michael Jordan spent with the team. He was the first ever Westerner to serve as the GM of an NPB team when he was named to that role with the expansion Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles in 2005 and was a senior advisor to the team for a number of years after that. He was also a senior advisor for the Sendai 89ers basketball team in Japans B. League. I'm sure I'm leaving out many things but my point is that he was involved with Japanese baseball in one way or another for over 50 years.

As the first GM of the Eagles, he had a baseball card in the Eagles inaugural team box set from BBM in 2005 (#E02):

1934 All American Tour 90th Anniversary - Sendai

After playing their first two games on the tour at Meiji Jingu Stadium in Tokyo, the All-American tour headed north. They took an overnight train ride to Aomori at the northern tip of Honshu, then took a ferry across the Tsugaru Strait to the city of Hakodate on the island of Hokkaido. The US team beat the Japanese team 5-2 there on November 8th with Earl Averill hitting his third home run of the tour. After the game, the teams took the ferry back to Honshu and caught a train for Sendai where they would play a game the following day.

The ballpark that the Eagles now play in, Miyagi Baseball Stadium, would not open until 1950. The ballpark in Sendai in 1934 was on the west side of the city (the current stadium is on the east side of the city) and was called Yagiyama Ball Field. The US team once again beat their Japanese hosts soundly by a score of 7-0. They would hit five home runs in the game including two from Babe Ruth, his first two home runs on Japanese soil. After the game, the teams returned to Tokyo where they would play another game at Jingu Stadium the following day.

I'm not exactly sure when Yagiyama Ball Field was torn down. Hyojogawara Stadium, located a few miles to the northeast of Yagiyama Ball Field, opened in 1937 so it's likely the field met it's demise around that time. The Yagiyama Zoo (officially the "Sendai City Yagiyama Zoological Park") opened on this site in 1965. In 2002, the Zoo put up a statue of Babe Ruth to commemorate the MLB All Stars having played in Sendai. The statue is located where Ruth's first home that day landed in the right field stands.

I visited the zoo during my 2019 trip to Japan and took some photos of the statue:

And of the plaque for it:

The statue is fairly easy to find if you visit the zoo as it appears on their map. If you look on the left side of it over by the flamingo, you'll see the where the statue is:

My source for information for this post was drawn largely from Rob Fitts' excellent book Banzai Babe Ruth.

Friday, November 8, 2024

YouTube Video About Japanese Ohtani Rookies

I had mentioned a few weeks back that I had been talking with a YouTuber named @FreddyFind who was asking me some questions about BBM's jersey cards as well as Ohtani rookie cards. He's put together a pretty good video about the subject that's worth checking out:

Apparently SumoMenkoMan also helped him out.

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.