Zippy Zapped Once More

On Tuesday of this week, I was pleasantly surprised to discover an envelope in the mail from Kenny - aka Zippy Zappy - in Japan.  It'd been a month or so since the last time I'd gotten anything from him - not that I'm complaining at all.  I'm happy to take any cards that Kenny wants to send my way.  He has an uncanny knack for finding things that I don't already have.

This week's envelope only contained two cards - both of Ryosuke Nomura:

2015 BBM 1st Version #262

2016 BBM Dragons Dash

Nomura had joined the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Yokohama team in the corporate leagues after graduating from high school,  He pitched poor in 2013, putting up an ERA of 7.71 but pitched much better the following year, either posting an ERA of 2.11 or lowering his career ERA to 2.11 (not sure from his Japanese Wikipedia page).  Dragons GM Hiromitsu Ochiai liked the looks of him and convinced manager Motonobu Tanishige and Muneo Nakata, head of the Dragons' scouting department, that they should draft him in the 2014 NPB draft.  Which they did, as their number one pick, while the other teams were drafting the likes of Yasuaki Yamazaki, Kazuma Okamoto, Kohei Arihara, Shogo Nakamura and Sachiya Yamasaki.

Following the draft, Nomura pitched for the Samurai Japan team in the U21 Baseball World Cup.  He was the team's closer and made three scoreless appearances in round robin play.  In the final against Taiwan, however, he gave up five hits and two runs in one inning.  In fairness, it didn't matter much as Japan's offense couldn't muster more than four hits in the game and fell 9-0.

Nomura re-injured his shin - an injury he'd suffered in high school - while doing "voluntary" training with the Dragons that fall.  His attempts to pitch while protecting his shin caused him to hurt his shoulder which pretty much caused his career to be short.  He got into 14 games on the farm team in 2015 and pitched ok, going 1-2 with a 3.89 ERA but his time on the ichi-gun squad did not go well.  He debuted in the ninth inning against the Swallows on June 25th and gave up three runs on four hits and a walk.  He had an ERA of 10.13 in only three appearances with the top team that year which would end up being the only three appearances he'd ever make with them.  He had a winning record (3-2) in 12 games on the ni-gun team in 2016 but his ERA was 6.16 and he got released after going 0-1 with a 9.75 ERA in 2017.  He attended the twelve team tryout that fall but drew no interest.  He retired and became a batting practice pitcher for Chunichi.  

The Dragons finished last in 2016 - for the first time since 1997 - with Tanishige stepping down during the season and Ochiai being let go as GM after the season.  I don't know this for sure but I wonder if that sealed Nomura's fate - maybe he'd have been given a longer leash if Ochiai and Tanishige were still running things.  On the other hand, he didn't pitch well so maybe nothing would have saved him.

One last note - the Dragons thought highly enough of him to assign him uniform number 20.  As the back of his 1st Version card points out, this was the Dragons' "ace number" and had previously been worn by Shigeru Sugishita, Hiroshi Gondoh, Seinichi Hoshino, Tatsuo Komatsu, Sun Dong-yol, Kenjiro Kawasaki and Kenichi Nakata.  After Nomura's release, the number went unused for five seasons until the arrival of Hideaki Wakui in 2023.  I guess Chunichi wanted to have some confidence that the next pitcher to wear the number was more likely to deserve it.

As always, thanks for the cards, Kenny!

Ohtanis In The Outfield

 

2013 Calbee Series Three #AS-22

I saw a question asked both in comment in an old post here on the blog and over at NPB Reddit about whether the above card of Shohei Ohtani is the only Japanese card of him listing him as an outfielder.  I actually knew from a discussion I'd had on BlueSky recently that it wasn't, but I got curious about how many cards did list his position as an outfielder.  So I took a look.

Before I get to what I found, I want to take a minute and get kind of nit-picky about the Calbee card though.  Technically, it doesn't list Ohtani's position.  Rather it's listing the slot he had on the All Star team - "Pacific League Outfielder".  Now you're probably thinking to yourself "what's the difference?" so let me explain a little bit more.  Players are listed on NPB rosters in four separate categories - "Pitcher", "Catcher", "Infielder" and "Outfielder" - and those four categories are typically what you'll see on their baseball cards.  For example, Munetaka Murakami's cards list him as "Infielder" and not "Third Baseman".  The other cards in the All Star subset from that Calbee set list the actual position for the infielders rather than the generic "Infielder".  For example, Nobuhiro Matsuda is listed as the "Pacific League Third Baseman" and Kazuo Matsui is listed as the "Pacific League Shortstop".  That's because what the card is actually listing is their position for the All Star game and not their general position.  It's splitting hairs to be sure but I wanted to point out that the circumstances for this card are different than those of the other cards in this post.

I research this, I did searches for Ohtani's cards over at Jambalaya and examined the results.  I got my initial list from this and then checked some additional cards that I had that Jambalaya didn't.

What I discovered is that the vast majority of Ohtani's NPB cards list him as "Pitcher" which is what I expected.  As I said above, typically cards of NPB players reflect their category on the team's roster and Ohtani was always listed as a pitcher on the Fighters' rosters.  But I found ten cards that listed him as "Outfielder" - even though he didn't actually play in the field after 2014.  Every card that lists him as an outfielder shows him batting but not every card that shows him batting lists him as an outfielder.  With one exception, it's only BBM cards that listed him as an outfielder.  What's kind of odd is that BBM only did it for their flagship sets and a couple of their Genesis sets.  For the Fighters' team sets, he's always listed as a pitcher - even on the card in the 2013 set that shows him batting.

Without further ado, here are the cards listing him as an outfielder:

2013 Bandai Owners League 02 #074

2014 BBM 1st Version #137 (Batting Version)

2014 BBM Genesis #054

2015 BBM 2nd Version #343

2016 BBM 2nd Version #340

2016 BBM 2nd Version "One and Only" #OO02

2017 BBM 1st Version #002 (Secret Version)

2017 BBM 2nd Version #388

2017 BBM 2nd Version #CS39

2017 BBM Genesis #008

A couple comments:

• It may not be obvious that the Bandai card lists his position as "Outfielder" but if you look at the text in the lower right corner, you'll see "外野手" which is Japanese for "Outfielder"
• This is not a definitive list.  I only have a couple of his Bandai cards and none of his Konami cards as well as only a couple team issued cards.  But I'm pretty confident that I've checked all his BBM, Calbee and Epoch cards
• The 2014 Genesis set has two Ohtani cards - one pitching (#46) and one hitting (#54).  The 2017 set only has the one card
• The 2017 "Cross Squall" subset is the only one of the "Cross" subsets to have two Ohtani cards - one pitching and one hitting.  All the other ones between 2013 and 2016 have only one card that lists him as a pitcher, even if the photo shows him batting

Card Of The Week November 16

Samurai Japan played two friendly matches with Team Korea over the weekend in Tokyo and things went pretty well for them.  They won the game yesterday 11-4, making it ten straight wins against Korea before playing to a 7-7 tie today.

The MVP of each game - Mishio Nishkawa of the Marines and Tai Sasaki of the Carp - were both 2024 draft picks so I don't have any NPB cards of either of them.  But both of them were on the 2023 Collegiate Samurai Japan team that was commemorated in the 2024 Panini USA Baseball Stars & Stripes set so I have jersey cards of both of them:

2024 Panini USA Baseball Stars & Stripes #JPN-MN

2024 Panini USA Baseball Stars & Stripes #JPN-TS

The only Samurai Japan player to homer in the series was Yukinori Kishida of the Giants.  His three run shot in the fifth inning of yesterday's game broke a 3-3 tie and put Japan up for good.

2024 BBM 2nd Version #436

Japanese Players In Baseball United

Baseball United, a winter league with four teams representing Middle Eastern and Asian countries - India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE - kicked off their inaugural season today in Dubai with the Karachi Monarchs beating the Mumbai Cobras 6-4 on the strength of a five run, ninth inning rally.  The league will play an 18 game season with each team playing nine games through early December.

I was a bit surprised when I looked over the 2025 team rosters that there didn't appear to be any Western players who had played in Japan.  The initial rosters back in 2023 had included former gaijin like Willin Rosario, Brandon Laird, Courtney Hawkins and Dovydas Neverauskas but there aren't any on the current rosters.  There are, however, a number of Japanese players on the roster for the Mid East Falcons.  Actually, eleven of the twenty players on the roster are from Japan and I believe that two more will be named on November 19 - there was a TBS* reality show called "Tryout: Plan D" where players competed for the last two roster spots on the team.

* That's Tokyo Broadcast System, not Turner Broadcasting System

The eleven players on the roster can be split up into three groups.  The first, and largest, are the eight former NPB players.  Let's run through them quickly:

2007 BBM 1st Version #101

Shuhei Fukuda was the Hawks first round pick in the 2006 high school draft and played for the team until he left as a free agent after the 2019 season.  He spent the next four years with the Chiba Lotte Marines and played for the independent Kufu Hayate Ventures Shizuoka in 2024.

I didn't see him play for Hayate at the game I went to last year but his name and image was on a banner outside the ballpark:

2017 BBM Eagles #E21

Kodai Hamaya was the Eagles 2013 third round draft pick.  He spent five years in Sendai before being traded to the Baystars before the 2019 season.  He's played all over the place since DeNA released him after the 2020 season including indy ball in Japan (Ibaraki Astro Planets) along with teams in Mexico (Veracruz) and Italy (Nettuno).

2023 BBM Baystars DB18

Shingo Hirata spent his entire ten year NPB career with the Baystars after they drafted him in the second round of the 2013 draft.

2019 Calbee Samurai Japan #SJ-05

The Dragons took Shotaro Kasahara in the fourth round of the 2016 draft.  He was a member of the Samurai Japan team that played against the MLB All Stars in the 2018 off season.  The Baystars plucked him off Chunichi's roster in the first "Active Player Draft" in December of 2022 but they released him after the 2023 season.  He split 2024 between the TSG Hawks of the CPBL and the independent Oisix Niigata Albirex Baseball Club.

2017 Epoch Hawks #21

I probably don't need to say much about 44 year old Munenori Kawasaki.  He was the fourth pick of the 1999 draft by the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks which I believe makes him both the last active player drafted in the 20th century and the last active Daiei Hawk.  After 12 seasons with the Hawks (which included eight All Star appearances, two Best 9 awards, two Golden Glove awards, a stolen base title and two Nippon Series championships), he departed Japan for the Seattle Mariners.  He spend four seasons in MLB between the Mariners, Blue Jays and Cubs before returning to the Hawks in 2017.  After one season with Softbank, he played for the Wei Chuan Dragons of the CPBL and has spent the past six seasons with the Tochigi Golden Braves of the indy Baseball Challenge League.  He played on both the 2006 and 2009 WBC teams for Japan as well as the 2008 Beijing Olympic team (which didn't go as well as the WBC).  He was also a member of the Japan Breeze team that participated in last winter's Caribbean Series.

2006 BBM All Stars #A28

Hiroyuki Nakajima was the fifth round pick of the Seibu Lions in the 2000 draft.  Like Kawasaki, he spent 12 years with the team that drafted him, racking up similar accolades - eight All Star appearances, four Best 9 awards, three Golden Gloves and two Nippon Series championships - before heading for North America.  He spent two seasons in the Oakland Athletics' farm system and never reached the majors before returning to Japan.  He'd spend the remainder of his career with the Orix Buffaloes (2015-18), Yomiuri Giants (2019-23) and Chunichi Dragons (2024).  He was a teammate of Kawasaki's on the 2008 Olympic and 2009 WBC teams.

2019 Baystars Spring Camp #41

Shuto Sakurai was taken by the Baystars in the fifth round of the 2017 draft.  After six years with DeNA, he was selected by the Eagles in the 2023 Active Player draft but Rakuten released him after the 2024 season.  He also played for the Japan Breeze last winter before joining the TSG Hawks of the CPBL for the 2025 season.

2017 BBM 1st Version #357

The second round pick of the Carp in the 2014 draft, Kazuki Yabuta would spend nine seasons in Hiroshima and made one All Star team.  He has spent the last two seasons with the independent Oisix Niigata Albirex Baseball Club.

The second group of players are the current NPB players.  The Yokohama DeNA Baystars have dispatched two "prospects" to play with the Falcons - Manato Tanai and Haru Yoshioka:

2025 BBM Baystars #DB56

2025 Epoch Baystars Premier Edition #35

The final group consists of a single player - Shotaro Usui.  As far as I can tell, he has never played professional baseball in Japan at any level but I've not been able to find out a lot of details about him.  I've seen him referenced with teams in both Austria and Germany as well as a club team in Australia but that's about it.

Japanese Players Playing In Winter Leagues Abroad

The 2025-26 Caribbean Winter Leagues are already underway and the Australian Baseball League will be starting their season later this week.  This means that it's time for my annual post about which Japanese players have been dispatched by their NPB teams to get some overseas experience over the winter.  Well, I say "over the winter" but typically the players only play in these leagues for a month or so, usually returning to Japan in time for Christmas or New Years.  As usual, I'm relying on the WinterLeagueJP website for much of this information.

The Australian Baseball League is going to look a little different this year.  They lost two teams over the off-season, with the Melbourne Aces departing the league for the KBO Fall League and the Canberra Cavalry just flat out disbanding.  That leaves the league with just four teams - the Brisbane Bandits, Sydney Blue Sox, Adelaide Giants and Perth Heat - which is half of what the league had six years ago.

Adelaide will welcome four Giants of the Yomiuri variety - Yu Aramaki, Yusei Ishuzaka, Yamato Shiroki and Tomoki Tamura:

2025 BBM 1st Version #025

2025 Epoch NPB #016

2023 BBM 2nd Version #541

2023 Bowman NPB #BP-10

Brisbane is getting Kyosuke Mashiko and Hayate Nakagawa from the Yokohama DeNA Baystars:

2021 BBM Baystars #DB37

2024 BBM Baystars #DB74

Moving over to the Western hemisphere, four NPB teams are sending players to three teams in the Puerto Rican Winter League.  Most of these players are on the young side with only a few years of professional experience with one exception - the Swallows are sending 30 year old and 12 year veteran Kazuto Taguchi to the Leones de Ponce:

2023 BBM 1st Version #170

The Gigantes de Carolina are getting four players from two teams - Ryuta Hirose and Kazuo Ohno of the Hawks and Ren Mukunoki and Kaisei Tohmatsu of the Buffaloes:

2024 BBM Hawks #H49

2023 Epoch Hawks Premier Edition #15

2022 Epoch NPB #246

2024 Topps Stadium Club NPB #45

Lastly, the Lions are sending three players to the Senadores de San Juan - Minato Aoyama, Shinya Hasegawa and Taishi Mameda:

2024 Epoch NPB #288

2022 BBM Fusion #620

2024 BBM Lions Collection #LC11

There is another winter league that is starting up this winter that has some Japanese players - Baseball United.  Most of those players are not under contract to an NPB team anymore, however.  I will discuss them in a post that I hope to get to later this week.

NOTE - any 2025 cards in this post are images swiped from Jambalaya.

Ending 2025 On A (Mostly) High (End) Note

It's been a bit since my last round up of the upcoming card releases so I thought I should get caught up.  I suspect that these are the last of the 2025 releases but it wouldn't be the first time I thought the card manufacturers were finished for a year and then found out I was wrong.  All but one of these releases are on the high end of the price scale.

- We'll start with the release that's not super expensive.  BBM is releasing a box set for the Fighters called "Great Voyage" in mid-December.  Each box contains the entire 36 card base set plus one "special insert card".  The base set contains 24 cards of "young" Fighters players including Hiromi Itoh, Kotaro Kiyomiya, Koki Kitayama and Yuya Gunji plus all six of the 2024 draftees/2025 rookie class.  The base set also contains 12 "combination" cards and I'm guessing that all 24 of the players appear on one of those cards but I don't know that for sure.  The "special insert card" could possibly be a foil signed card or (I think) a memorabilia card.  Again, I'm not sure but I think the memorabilia cards are only for the 2024 draftees - one of them is combination card featuring all six players.  I don't think there are any actual autograph cards available.  Unopened boxes will retail for 5500 yen or roughly $36.

- Moving on to the more expensive stuff, BBM will release their "ultra high-end" "Glory" set on November 28th.  Boxes will contain just six cards and retail for 26,400 yen or about $172.  There are 36 cards (three active players from each NPB team) in the base set, each of which has a parallel.  I think the base cards are /2000 but I don't know what the parallels are.  There are two possible inserts - "MIYABI" (six cards, each /50 with an even more limited parallel) and "Glorius 3D" (12 cards, each /25).  The big attraction is, of course, the memorabilia and autographed cards.  The memorabilia cards include "super patch" cards as well as combo and triple ones.

- BBM's "ultra high-end" multi-sport set "Crown" will be released at the end of December.  Like "Glory", this set will be sold in six card boxes that will retail for 26,400 yen.  All the cards in the set are serially numbered but I don't know what any of them are numbered to.  The base set has 48 cards, 18 of which will feature baseball players - 9 OB and 9 active.  There are four insert sets although two of them - "Velvet" and "Jet" - could be considered parallels of the base cards as there are 48 cards in each of those sets.  The "Velvet" cards are "made of brushed material" while the "Jet" cards are "made from jet black special paper".  The other two insert sets are "Foil Autumn" (24 cards on "hologram paper") and "Sparkling" (12 3D cards).  And, of course, there are tons of autographed cards although no memorabilia cards.  Each box is guaranteed to include at least one autographed card.

- Epoch has announced two more of their "ultra high-end" combination active/OB player team sets.  The "Hawks Stars & Legends" set will be released on November 29th and the "Tigers Stars & Legends" set will be out on December 6th.  Both sets will be sold in boxes of four cards (well, two "mini-boxes" of two cards) for 18,700 yen or about $122.  The Hawks base set will contain 64 cards (41 active players and 23 OB players) while the Tigers set base set will contain 45 cards (25 active player and 20 OB players).  I think all the base cards are serially numbered but, again, I don't know what the counts are.  Both sets have what seems to be the standard "Stars & Legend" set inserts - three flavors of the six "Decomori Signature" insert cards - gold (/25), green (/5) and "hologram" (1-of-1) - along with six "Gem" premium insert cards which have a "Black Gem" parallel that are /5.  The Hawks set will have four different types of autographed cards - "Authentic" (64 cards), "Star" (two cards), "Rookie" (six cards) and "Legendary" (20 cards).  The Tigers set also has four different types of autographed cards but they're slightly different - "Authentic" (45 cards), "Star" (21 cards), "Legendary" (18 cards) and "Baseball" (six cards).  The "Baseball" ones are on pieces of actual baseballs.

 - Topps has announced that their fourth NPB set for 2025 will be "Finest".  Boxes containing 15 packs of four cards will retail for 9900 yen (~$65) and will be released on November 14th.  The base set contains 216 cards (as usual) which breaks down to 18 cards per team (as usual).  Those 18 cards will contain cards for the team's manager and top three 2024 draft picks (also as usual).  There are four 24 card insert sets - "The Man", "Finest Fortune", "Creators" and "1993 Baseball's Finest".  According to the checklist for the set, there are a ton of autographed cards available.  Looks like ten players for each team along with a bunch of NPB Legends.  The Legends include a number of current MLB players like Shohei Ohtani, Masataka Yoshida, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Yu Darvish and Shota Imanga along with Ichiro, Norichika Aoki, Sadaharu Oh, Hideo Nomo and Cecil Fielder.  The only memorabilia cards available are all for Ichiro - a "relic", a "Topps Sterling Jumbo Letter Patch Card" and a "Topps Dynasty Autograph Patch Card".

Card Of The Week November 9

I noticed the other day that Robert Suarez of the San Diego Padres had led the National League in saves this past season.  Suarez had spent six years in Japan playing for the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks (2016-19) and Hanshin Tigers (2020-21) and is, I think, the fourth guy to lead either the American or National League in saves and play in NPB.  The others are Rick Gossage (led the AL in 1975, 1978 and 1980; played for the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks in 1990), Bobby Thigpen (led the AL in 1990; played for the Hawks in 1994-95) and Roberto Osuna (led the NL in 2019; played for the Chiba Lotte Marines in 2022 and the Hawks in 2023-present).  And, yeah, it's kind of weird that all four of these guys played for the Hawks.

Suarez differs from the other three in two ways.  The first is that he's the first guy to lead an MLB league in saves AFTER he played in Japan.  The other is he's the only one of the four who also led one of the NPB leagues in saves - he led the Central League in both 2020 and 2021.  Here's his "Title Holder" cards from BBM's Fusion sets from both years:

2020 BBM Fusion #TH20

2021 BBM Fusion #TH20

Series MVP And Winning Manager

A year ago, I went down a rabbit hole based on something that NPB on Reddit had posted about how Daisuke Miura was the 25th player to win a Nippon Series as both a player and a manager.  This year, NPB on Reddit has provided a new rabbit hole to go down by reporting that Hiroki Kokubo of the Hawks was the the sixth person to win the Nippon Series MVP award as a player and the Nippon Series as a manager.  I, of course, had to go research this and figure out who the other five were.  Here they are, in order of when they achieved the feat (i.e. when they won their first Nippon Series as manager) along with a card of them as a player and as a manager.  Like last year's post, I tried to get cards from the years they won the MVP or managed the champions but it wasn't possible in a couple cases:

Tetsuharu Kawakami: Series MVP - 1953; Series Winning Manager - 1961, 1963, 1965-73

1958 "Who Am I?" JCM 54

1997 BBM Giants #89

Masahiko/Masaaki Mori: Series MVP - 1967; Series Winning Manager - 1986-88, 1990-92

1999 BBM Mr Giants #G21

1991 BBM Nippon Series #S1

Shigeo Nagashima: Series MVP - 1963, 1965, 1969, 1970;  Series Winning Manager 1994, 2000

1964 Marukami JCM 14g

1994 BBM Nippon Series #S1

Koji Akiyama: Series MVP - 1991, 1999; Series Winning Manager - 2011, 2014

1999 BBM Nippon Series #S64

2014 BBM 1st Version #082

Kimiyasu Kudoh: Series MVP - 1986, 1987; Series Winning Manager - 2015, 2017-20

1987 Calbee #130

2020 Epoch NPB #037

Hiroki Kokubo: Series MVP - 2011; Series Winning Manager - 2025

2011 BBM Nippon Series #S58

2024 BBM Hawks #H01

Kokubo, of course, has become the 26th player to win a Nippon Series as both a player and a manager.

I was a little surprised to discover that Sadaharu Oh never won a Nippon Series MVP award.

I got curious to see if anyone had ever done the equivalent in MLB - win a World Series MVP award as a player and the World Series as a manager.  Nope, it's never been done.  In fact, I could only find six World Series MVP winners who went onto manage in MLB at all - Frank Robinson, Pete Rose, Bucky Dent, Alan Trammell, Ray Knight and Paul Molitor.  And I could only come up with two league MVP award winners who had ever managed a World Series champion - Mickey Cochrane and Joe Torre - while the list of NPB MVPs who managed Nippon Series champions is quite long (not that I've made a list.  Yet).  The reason for this, of course, is that a star player in MUCH more likely to become a manager in NPB than MLB.

I was a little surprised to discover that the Nippon Series MVP Award predates the World Series MVP award.  The Nippon Series MVP has been award for every Nippon Series which started in 1950.  The World Series MVP award was first awarded in 1955, which means there's 50-ish World Series that do not have an MVP.