Japanese Baseball Cards: NPB Champion Players And Managers

Wednesday, November 6, 2024

NPB Champion Players And Managers

NPB Reddit on Twitter tweeted out an article the other day that mentioned that Daisuke Miura, manager of the 2024 Nippon Series Baystars, was the twentieth series winning manager who had also won the series as a player. This seemed an insanely low number to me so, of course, I had to go research it.

And it turns out that, yes, Miura is the twentieth person to win a Nippon Series as both player and manager. However, it's a fairly common occurrence lately, as the last Series winning manager who did NOT win a Series as a player was Hideki Kuriyama in 2016. Here's a table showing all twenty:

Champion	As Player	As Manager
Tetusharu Kawakami	Giants 1951-53, 1955	Giants 1961, 1963, 1965-73
Masaichi Kaneda	Giants 1965-69	Orions 1974
Tatsuru Hirooka	Giants 1955, 1961, 1963, 1965-66	Swallows 1978, Lions 1982-83
Motoshi Fujita	Giants 1961, 1963	Giants 1981, 1989
Masaaki Mori	Giants 1955, 1961, 1963, 1965-73	Lions 1986-88, 1990-92
Katsuya Nomura	Hawks 1959, 1964	Swallows 1993, 1995, 1997
Shigeo Nagashima	Giants 1961, 1963, 1965-73	Giants 1994, 2000
Akira Ohgi	Lions 1956-58	BlueWave 1996
Sadaharu Oh	Giants 1961, 1963, 1965-73	Hawks 1999, 2003
Tsutomu Wakamatsu	Swallows 1978	Swallows 2001
Tatsunori Hara	Giants 1981, 1989, 1994	Giants 2002, 2009, 2012
Tsutomu Itoh	Lions 1982-83, 1986-88, 1990-92	Lions 2004
Hiromitsu Ochiai	Giants 1994	Dragons 2007
Hisanobu Watanabe	Lions 1986-88, 1990-92	Lions 2008
Koji Akiyama	Lions 1982-83, 1986-88, 1990-92, Hawks 1999/td>	Hawks 2011, 2014
Kimiyasu Kudoh	Lions 1982-83, 1986-88, 1990-92, Hawks 1999, Giants 2000, 2002	Hawks 2015, 2017-20
Shingo Takatsu	Swallows 1993, 1995, 1997, 2001	Swallows 2021
Satoshi Nakajima	BlueWave 1996, Fighters 2006	Buffaloes 2022
Akinobu Okada	Tigers 1985	Tigers 2023
Daisuke Miura	Baystars 1998	Baystars 2024

A couple things I thought were interesting:

While there's only twenty series managers who also won as a player, they managed 50 of the 75 Nippon Series winners
Tatsuru Hirooka is the only one who managed multiple teams to Series wins
The first Series winning manager who won a Series as a player with a team other than the Giants didn't happen until 1993
I was a little generous in listing Series winning years for a couple players. I'm pretty sure Mori didn't play in the 1955 Series and Kaneda didn't play in the 1969 Series. Nagashima broke his finger towards the end of the 1973 season and didn't play in Series.

I thought I'd share a pair of cards for each of the members of this club, one as a manager and one as a player. I tried to find cards from the relevant seasons when I could but I had to use cards from OB sets for some of the older players. I leaned heavily on BBM Nippon Series sets from 1991 to 2012 - I really wish they'd bring those back.