RIP Yoshihiro Itoh

Catching up on some tragic news from last week when I was on vacation...

Former Chiba Lotte Marines pitcher Yoshihiro Itoh was killed in a motorcycle accident last Monday in Fukuoka.  He was 43 years old.

Born in Fukuoka, Itoh attended Higashi Fukuoka High School (where he pitched in the 2000 Koshien Tournament) and Kokugakuin University before joining the JR Tokai corporate league team.  He was taken by the Marines in the fourth round of the college/corporate league phase of the 2007 NPB draft.

He was a fixture in the Marines' bullpen for his first couple seasons, mostly in middle relief.  He appeared in over 50 games in both 2008 and 2009 and over 60 games in 2010.  

What was probably the highlight of his career happened in that post-season.  The Marines made an improbable run in the Climax Series, becoming the first third place finisher to make it to the Nippon Series where they took on the Chunichi Dragons.  The two teams split the first two games in Nagoya, with Itoh pitching a perfect eighth inning with two strikeouts in Game One (won by the Marines 5-2).  Lotte won Game Three back in Chiba but Chunichi evened things up in Game Four where Itoh gave up the game winning run in the top of the eleventh inning.  After Lotte won again in Game Five, the Series moved back to Nagoya.  Game Six was a grind - tied 2-2 after nine innings, it would ultimately end in a tie after 15 innings when neither team scored again.  Itoh pitched a scoreless ninth in the game, striking out two Dragons.

With the tie, the Dragons would need to win Game 7 to force a winner-take-all Game 8.  Early on, it looked like that might happen as Chunichi led 6-2 after three innings.  But the Marines battled back, scoring a solo run in the top of the fourth and three runs in the fifth to tie the game up.  They took the lead in the top of the seventh and looked to close out the game and the Series with their closer, Hiroyuki Kobayashi on the mound.  However, Kazuhiro Wada led off the bottom of the ninth with a triple and Tony Blanco brought him home with a game tying sacrifice fly.  For the third time in the Series, the game would go into extra innings.  Itoh would relieve Kobayashi in the eleventh inning and retire the Dragons in order.  Toshiaki Imae walked to lead off the top of the twelfth, bringing Itoh to the plate.  With the bullpen stressed due to the previous day's marathon, the Marines had no real option to pinch hit for him.  He laid down a sacrifice bunt, successfully moving Imae to second where he would score on Yoshifumi Okada's triple two batters later.  Itoh pitched another perfect inning in the bottom of the twelfth to win the game and the Series.

It looked like 2011 was going to be a continuation of the previous few seasons, with Itoh again working in middle relief and appearing in 50 games.  His season ended on September 1st, however, when he suffered a horrific injury in a game against the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters in Chiba.  With one out in the seventh inning, Daikan Yoh hit a soft line drive to shortstop.  Itoh had turned to watch the ball and didn't see that Yoh's bat had shattered and the barrel of it was heading straight towards him.  The sharp end of the bat slammed into the back of his left leg and Itoh staggered off the mound before collapsing on the ground, clutching his leg.  He needed to be carried off the field.  (There's video of the incident here - H/T one of the commenters on this NPB Reddit thread.)  I'm not entirely sure but I think the bat damaged his calf muscle.

He wasn't the same pitcher after the injury.  He was compensating for his injured left leg and ended up developing issues with his right shoulder and elbow as well as his side and back.  Injuries and ineffectiveness limited him to only six games with the top team in 2012, 17 in 2013 (with an ERA of 10.61), five in 2014 and seven in 2015.  

After making no appearances at the ichi-gun level in 2016, Itoh was released by the Marines at the end of the season.  He hoped to continue playing and attended the 12 team tryout in November but he didn't draw any interest from any teams.  He announced his retirement in December and went back to school to get his Master's degree in Physical Education and his teaching license.  He became a teacher at his alma mater and also coached the baseball team.  He left the school last summer and opened his own sports academy - "Pitch+" - last month.

His first card was #50 from the 2008 BBM Rookie Edition set.  He also had rookie cards in BBM's 1st Version (#287), Marines (#M19) and Rookie Edition Premium (#RP24) sets in 2008 as well as Konami's Baseball Heroes Power Up Version (#C08B025).  He'd kind of have his first Calbee card in 2009 as he appeared in the Iron Arms box set associated with Series Three that was sold on Calbee's e-commerce site.  His first Calbee card that came with potato chips was in the 2010 Series Three set (#277).  He appeared in a number of Konami and Bandai Owners League card game sets but all the cards I have of him are from BBM:

2008 BBM Rookie Edition #50

2008 BBM 1st Version #287

2010 BBM Nippon Series #S08

2011 BBM 2nd Version #494

2015 BBM Marines #M15

Card Of The Week October 12

Sorry for the lack of posts lately - I was out of town on vacation all last week and spent most of today getting caught up on things around the house.  So here's a quick post about a card I picked up a few months back - a 1958 Marukami JCM 31a menko card depicting Shigeo Nagashima (left) and Tetsuharu Kawakami (right, in the kimono).  This is one of a myriad of menko rookie cards for Nagashima.

Card Of The Week October 5

Shingo Takatsu and Daisuke Miura have both announced in the past couple weeks that they'd be stepping down as manager of the Swallows and Baystars respectively.  Takatsu was the longest tenured NPB manager, having taken over the team in 2020 while Miura was the second longest, taking the DeNA helm the following year.  That means that the longest tenured NPB manager, the dean of all Japanese field managers as it were, is now this man:

2022 Topps NPB #67

KBO Catchup and End Of The Year Releases

It's only been a little over two weeks since I last did a round up of newly announced releases but Dan Skrezyna - aka Korean Cardboard - contacted me last week to let me know there were a couple new KBO releases.  So I thought I'd get caught up on those as well as cover a couple newly announced NPB sets.

- SCC released "KBO Sensation" at the end of August.  I think this is a higher end set.  I'm a little confused about the details as Dan's post on BlueSky has different information then what he's put up on TCDB.  Of course, it would help if SCC had some useful information on their website but, hey, you can't have everything.  I'm going to assume what's on TCDB is the accurate information.  The base set has 182 cards and there's some sort of parallel but I'm not sure if all the base set cards have parallel versions.  There's six different varieties of insert cards - "Chrome" (50 cards), "Wave" (40 cards), "Impact" (40 cards), "Tropical" (10 cards), "Rookie" (33 cards with a 1-of-1 parallel) and "Rookie Of The Year" (1 card).  There are also jersey cards, patch cards, sticker autograph cards and on-card autograph cards available.  It looks like each box retails for 120,000 won (around $86) and is guaranteed to contain one autograph cards, one memorabilia card (either a jersey or a patch) and one "Chrome" insert card.

- About three weeks after releasing "KBO Sensation", SCC released another KBO set called "KBO Collection Plus".  They put a little more detail on their website and Dan's put the information for the set up at TCDB.  The set has a 115 card base set and there's two associated sets that could be considered either inserts or parallels - 52 "All Star" cards and 50 "Hologram" cards.  The reason I'm a bit confused about what they should be considered is that they use the same card numbers as the base set but they use a completely unrelated design.  Further confusing matters is that the "Hologram" cards have a parallel version too.  50 players also have autographed cards - both facsimile and real ones - that also use the same numbering system as the base set which is really confusing but kind of par for the course for SCC's KBO sets.

- This year's edition of "Rookie Edition Premium", BBM's annual box set for the top rookies of the season, will be released on November 1st.  Each box contains 38 cards - the 36 card base set plus two "premium" insert cards.  The base set contains three cards for each team which aren't necessarily the top three picks from last year's draft.  (I should point out that "rookie" in this case is the baseball card definition - players taken in the 2024 draft - rather than the "eligibility for the Rookie Of The Year award" definition.)  The "premium" insert cards could be autographed cards (either sticker or on-card), memorabilia cards (including patch and bat knob) and "booklets" - although I'm not sure if those have multiple autographs or multiple pieces of memorabilia (or both).  As you might expect because each box has two hits, they're retailing for 16,000 yen or around $108.

- I guess that last year's "Lions Collection" box set featuring the team's alternate uniform that they collaborated with the Japanese fashion line "New Yorker on and also featuring cards of team members wearing street clothes was popular enough that BBM decided to do a similar set this year.  "Lions Bouquet" is a 46 card box set that will be released towards the end of November.  Each box contains the 45 card base set, a "special" insert card and one of 11 tin badges.  The base set is split up into three parts - 16 "Bouquet-style" cards showing players in street clothes, 18 cards showing players in the "Lions Summer Blue" alternate uniforms and 11 "Peko-chan & player illustration" cards.  Peko-chan is the mascot for the Fujiya candy company - it's a girl with pigtails.  I'm not sure but I think these eleven cards are drawings and the tin badge in the box matches one of these cards.  The possible "special" insert cards include foil "facsimile" autographed cards, real autographed cards, and exchange cards for memorabilia cards.

- 2025 is BBM's 35th year doing baseball cards.  It will also feature the 4000th issue of Shukan (Weekly) Baseball, published by Baseball Magazine Sha, BBM's parent company, at some point this fall.  To celebrate both of these events, BBM is releasing a set called something like "35th Anniversary & Weekly Baseball Issue 4000 Commemorative Special Edition" in late December.  The base set will contain 240 cards, split evenly between OB players and active players - although 12 of the active player cards are for rookies and will use the 1991 BBM design.  I'm assuming this set will follow the usual "same number of cards per team" format (although BBM's "25th Anniversary" set from 2015 did not) so there'll be 20 cards per team (with Kintetsu and Rakuten combined probably).  The OB player list is interesting.  Previous BBM anniversary sets were limited to post-1991 players but with Shukan Baseball's archives going back to 1958, it really opens up the number of players available.  Some of the pre-1991 OB players include Sadaharu Oh, Koichi Tabuchi, Keishi Suzuki, Masayuki Kakefu and Suguru Egawa.  The set will have three insert sets - "Cross Ocean" (24 OB players), "Dream Team" (24 active players, I assume it's using the 1998 "Dream Team" insert design like the 30th Anniversary set did) and "Combined" (12 cards with an OB player paired with an active player from the same team).  There are also memorabilia cards, all of which appear to feature multiple players as there are "combo", "triple" and "quartet" ones listed.  And, of course, there are autograph cards for both the OB and active players as well as ones that are listed as "Shukan Baseball Cover Autograph" which I guess is an autographed reproduction of a Shukan Baseball cover shrunk to baseball card size.  I was kind of hoping that the base set cards would be reproductions of Shukan Baseball covers but I'm guessing that it'll only be for these autographed cards.

- Epoch is releasing their second of their "ultra high-end" combination active/OB player team sets on November 8th (a week after their first one comes out).  Three card boxes of the "Marines Stars & Legends with Memorabilia" set will retail for 16500 (about $112).  The base set has 36 cards - 32 for active players (and manager Masato Yoshii) and just four for OB players (Seiya Inoue, Toshiaki Imae, Masahide Kobayashi and Tomoya Satozaki).  There are three flavors of the six "Decomori Signature" insert cards - gold (/25), green (/5) and "hologram" (1-of-1) - along with nine "Gem" premium insert cards which have a "Black Gem" parallel that are /5.  All the memorabilia cards are bat and/or batting glove cards for three 2025 rookies - Misho Nishikawa, Ryusei Miyazaki, and Yu Tatematsu.  There are four varieties of individual bat cards - "core", "grip", "barrel" and "knob" - along with a card featuring a bat fragment for all three players.  There are two varieties of individual batting glove cards - "piece" and "strap" - along with a card featuring a batting glove piece from all three players.  There are also individual cards that feature both a bat and glove relic for each player.  There are also five varieties of autographed cards available.  All 36 players have an "authentic" autograph card while the four OB players also have a "Legendary" autograph card.  I think the remaining autograph cards are all for the active players - "Star" (five cards), "Rookie" (six cards) and "Baseball" (20 cards).  If we assume that there's no overlap between the players in each group, there's an additional autograph for 31 of the 32 active players.  I'd guess that the one guy who doesn't have a second autograph card is Yoshii but I don't know that for sure.

Another Zippy Zappy-ing

Earlier this week, I finally got around to writing about some cards that Kenny (Zippy Zappy) had sent me a month or so ago.  He left a comment on that post, saying there was another envelope en route to me.  It showed up yesterday and contained this "Super Rare" card from the 2021 Konami Baseball Collection set:

#2021C7-SRD001-00

Thanks as always, Kenny!

Masahiro Tanaka

After what seemed like forever, Masahiro Tanaka finally got his 200th career win between NPB and MLB yesterday.  He'd gotten to 197 wins after the 2023 season but went winless in his final season with the Eagles last year and it took nine starts this season with the Yomiuri Giants to get those last three wins.

I'm not going to do the usual deep dive into Tanaka's career here because it's pretty well known and I've covered it a lot in the past.  He had a stellar career at Komazawa University Tomakomai High School which culminated in his famous duel with Yuki Saitoh in the finals of the 2006 Summer Koshien Tournament and was taken in the first round of the 2006 draft by the Eagles.  He spent the next seven seasons in Sendai, winning a Rookie Of The Year Award, two Sawamura Awards and an MVP award while capping his tenure off with a phenomenal 24-0 season in which he led the Eagles to their first (and to date only) championship in 2013.

He left for MLB and the Yankees after that and spent seven seasons in pinstripes before returning to Japan and the Eagles for the 2021 season.  His first three years back were somewhat mediocre and then he missed a lot of last season due to an elbow injury.  He ultimately only made one start at the ichi-gun level, giving up four runs in five innings against the Buffaloes on September 28th and took the loss.  That was his last appearance with the Eagles as the team released him at the beginning of December and he signed with the Giants later that month.

I'm again not going to do my usual thing of saying what his rookie cards are and et cetera - I did all that in a post back in late 2013 and I did another post showing a bunch of his cards when he signed with the Yankees a month or so later.  I'll just share a bunch of other cards of his here:

2007 BBM SCM #82

2007 Calbee Series Three #C-11

2009 Eagles Seat Owners Club #18

2013 Topps Tribute WBC Edition #45

2013 BBM Shukan Baseball Season Memorial #1

2013 BBM Masahiro Tanaka Invincibility Legend #25

2014 Calbee Series One #NS-1

2021 BBM 1st Version #087

2022 Epoch One #604

2023 Calbee Series Two #FW-04

2023 Topps NPB #197

2024 Epoch/Eagles Team Set 1st Version #03

2024 Bandai Pro Baseball Deforme #BDC1-E02

A couple comments:

• That's Takeshi Yamazaki with him on the 2007 Calbee checklist card
• That 2014 Calbee card is not officially a Tanaka card as Calbee didn't have the rights to make a card of him that year since he was in MLB.  But that's obviously him in the middle of the crowd.

A Brief History Of NPB Collectible Card Games - Part 3 - Future Bee, Bandai and Bushiroad

I'm finally getting around to finishing off this series of posts.  I devoted earlier posts to Takara and Konami.  This one deals with the other three "modern" game - Power League from Future Bee (or CollecCarA), Owners League from Bandai and DreamOrder from Bushiroad.

Future Bee 2000-2001

A company called "Collection Card Assortment" or "CollecCarA" issued cards under the "Future Bee" label from 1998 to 2001.  Their cards were team sets for the Baystars, Swallows and Marines but they also did a collectible card game set called "Power League" in 2000 and 2001 that included all twelve teams.  There were two sets in 2000 - "Dream Stadium" which had a 252 card base set and "UL 2000" which only had 195 cards (including three checklists which is why it's not evenly divisible by 12).  Both sets had "Super Rare" inserts and the "UL 2000" set also had an insert set for the statistical leaders and award winners for the 2000 season.  I only have base set and "Super Rare" cards from the Dream Stadium set:

2000 Power League Dream Stadium #220

2000 Power League Dream Stadium Super Rare #S006

Their single set in 2001 was again called "Dream Stadium" and again had 252 player cards but they added two unnumbered checklists so that the total number of cards in the base set was 254.  Unlike the 2000 version, it was issued in two series. It had three insert sets - half of each insert set was released in each series - "Nostalgic" (featuring OB players including Sadaharu Oh and Shigeo Nagashima), "Current Player" and "Best Performers".  These are the only two cards I have from this set:

2001 Power League Dream Stadium #072

2001 Power League Dream Stadium Current Player #S-59

I don't know how the game was played but there was player information on both sides of the card so I don't think it involved hiding which players you were using from your opponent.

Bandai 2010-2015

Bandai's CCG cards were issued under the name "Owners League".  Compared to Konami, Bandai's releases were fairly straight-forward.  For the most part, there were four releases each year - Owners League 01, Owners League 02, Owners League 03 and Owners League 04.  Each year's sets shared the same design but were numbered separately so they shouldn't be considered separate "series" the way that Topps' or Calbee's releases are.

While the number of Owners League sets were less confusing than Konami's, the content of those sets was kind of bewildering.  The base set for each set contained five or six different types of cards, from the common "Normal (B)" and "Normal (W)" cards (with the "B" and "W" standing for "Black" and "White" respectively) to the short-printed cards labelled variously "Star", "New Star", "Superstar", "Infinity", "Clutch", "Boost" and "Great".  Some of the sets also had related insert sets of "Idol" (mascots) and "Legend" (OB players).  

I've never tried to complete one of the sets but I imagine the large number of short prints would make it difficult.  For example, the 2011 Owners League 04 set (which I bought a box of a while back) had a base set of 132 cards but 48 of those were short-prints - 12 "Great" cards, 12 "Super Star" cards and 24 "Star" cards.  

Here's an example base card from each year the sets were issued:

2010 Bandai Owners League 04 #088

2011 Bandai Owners League 02 #022

2012 Bandai Owners League 03 #102

2013 Bandai Owners League 04 #070

2014 Bandai Owners League 04 #053

2015 Bandai Owners League 01 #009 (Shohei Ohtani)

The cards were used in some sort of online baseball game.  The card backs have a unique code that could be entered at the game's website and used somehow. 

It was kind of interesting (and infuriating) how they identified the set that a card was from on its back.  Before the card number, they'd list "OL##" where "##" was the number of the set.  But they didn't restart this count each year - the number was from 2010.  What I mean by this is that all the cards in the 2011 Owners League 01 set had "OL05" on the back, while all of that year's Owners League 02 set had "OL06".  They continued this all the way through to Owners League 04 in 2015 which was "OL24".  This forced you to do some modulo arithmetic to determine which set the card was actually from.

2015 Bandai Owners League 04 #084 (Seiya Suzuki)

Bandai added a fifth set in 2014 called "Owners League Masters".  Actually to be completely honest, I suspect that this set was first added in 2012 as the card numbers of the 2014 cards (which are the only ones I've seen) have a prefix of "OLM03" which implies that they were the third "Masters" set.

This set was entirely made up of OB players but there was a twist - all the players featured in the set were on the coaching staff for one of the twelve NPB teams that year - although the cards showed them as active players and they may not have played for the teams they were coaching for.

2014 Bandai Owners League Masters #056 (Yutaka Nakamura)

I think these are my favorites of all the post-Takara CCG sets.  I especially like the "04" sets from each year as they have cards of players who either signed late in the season or were traded and did not appear in any other card sets that year.  My favorite example of this is from the afore-mentioned 2011 Owners League 04 set.  Long time Chiba Lotte Marines player Saburo Ohmura (whose registered name with Lotte was just "Saburo") was traded to the Yomiuri Giants at the end of June that year.  The trade was after the cut off for BBM's 2nd Version set and BBM had not started doing the Fusion set, so there would not be any BBM cards of him with the Giants that year.  Similarly, he didn't appear in Calbee's Series Three set.  He returned to Lotte as a free agent in the off season so his 2012 cards all show him with the Marines.  The only contemporary card of him as a Giant that I am aware of is from the 2011 Owners League 04 set (Fun fact - his registered name with the Giants was his full name which is reflected on this card):

2011 Bandai Owners League 04 #093

Bushiroad 2024-

Ryan had pointed out to me at some point that the card market in Japan has historically treated the game cards separately from the "regular" baseball cards (i.e. Calbee, BBM, Epoch, etc).  As a result, most of the baseball card shops in Japan don't tend to stock the game cards very much, at least in the post-Takara era.  I think I've seen more Takara cards in card shops than I've seen Konami, Power League or Bandai cards - off hand the only place I remember getting any Konami cards was Mint Odawara where I got a handful of 2018 Baseball Collection cards.  This dichotomy has contributed to my ignorance about these sets - since Jambalaya doesn't stock them, I haven't been seeing them.

Bushiroad, however, appears to be pushing a different strategy.  They debuted their collectible card game cards, DreamOrder, last year with a big marketing campaign that included getting Mint on board with them.  I saw their cards (and their advertising) in several Mint stores and, most importantly for my ability to track them, Jambalaya has been listing their sets as well.

There's been about 34 distinct DreamOrder sets so far.  They started out last year with a "Starter Deck" set for each of the 12 teams.  These sets included three copies each of 12 unique player cards along with some game play cards.  They then issued four separate "Booster Pack" sets for each league - Vol. 1 came out in April with the "Starter Deck" sets and the remaining sets came out in two month increments - Vol. 2 in June, Vol. 3 in August and Vol. 4 in October.  They've issued a "Booster Pack" for each of the 12 teams this year which have included OB players as well as active ones.  They've also issued a Samurai Japan set and a "Heroes Of 2025" set.

DreamOrder is a table top card game rather than an on-line game, the first such game for NPB since the Konami Field Of 9 cards in 2005.  The card backs are all identical so I assume the players hide what they have available until the cards are played.

I don't have a lot of these cards and the ones that I have are either "regular" player cards or "Tactic" cards.  The "Tactic" cards don't identify the players on them but I've felt that they've featured more interesting photos than the "regular" cards.  Some of the "regular" player cards have "holo" or "kira" finishes or gold text indicating that they're more rare and powerful cards but I don't think these are parallels.  There ARE parallels available in the team "Booster Packs" from this year but I think the cards use a different design rather than the foil/holo stuff.

Here's some examples:

2024 Bushiroad DreamOrder Dragons Starter Deck #CSD06-D03 (Raidel Martinez)

2024 Bushiroad DreamOrder Lions Starter Deck #PSD05-L01 (Sosuke Genda)

2024 Bushiroad DreamOrder Central League Booster Pack Vol. 1 #CBP01-DB10 (Keita Sano)

2024 Bushiroad DreamOrder Pacific League Booster Pack Vol. 1 #PBP01-E12 (Hiroaki Shimauchi) 

2024 Bushiroad DreamOrder Pacific League Booster Pack Vol. 2 #PDO-01 

2024 Bushiroad DreamOrder Pacific League Booster Pack Vol. 2 #PDO-06 (Takeya Nakamura)

The last two cards are "Tactics" cards.  There's nothing on the cards that identify the players on the cards and I don't know who the Fighters pitcher is.

More Cards From Kenny

The other person that I got cards from recently was Kenny, aka Zippy Zappy.  Kenny, of course, has been very generous to me and other bloggers over the past few years and he had sent me four(!) separate envelopes full of cards over a couple week period back in late August and early September.  At this point, I don't remember what was in which envelope but it doesn't matter all that much.  Let's go through what he sent...

First up was two cards from the 2025 Calbee Series Two set:

2025 Calbee Series Two #064 (Taisei Ota)

2025 Calbee Series Two #S-36

Next up is a 2018 Epoch One card of Raidel Martinez.  This commemorates his first win in NPB in what I think was his second appearance.  I'm pretty sure this was his first card (unless he had a team issued card in 2017 when he was a development player):

2018 Epoch One #190

There were some random Calbee and BBM cards:

2022 Calbee Series Two #080 (Teruaki Sato)

2007 BBM 2nd Version #723

2010 BBM 1st Version #049

I know the Nakamura card says "1st Version" on it but it was from the "1st Version Update" subset from that year's 2nd Version set.

There was a OB card of Tetsuharu Kawakami from one of Bandai's Owners League sets from 2014:

2014 Bandai Owners League 04 #133

The last ten cards were from various Konami sets between 2006 and 2012.  Most of them - eight in all - were cards of Kyuji Fujikawa for some reason.  As was the case with my post about Konami a few months ago, I have very little faith that I have gotten the set names right here:

2006 Konami Baseball Heroes 2 Black Edition #B06B123

2007 Konami Baseball Heroes 3 Black Edition #B07B144

2007 Konami Baseball Heroes 3 Black Edition #B07S029

2007 Konami Baseball Heroes 3 Power Up Edition #C07S009

2008 Konami Baseball Heroes Black Edition #B08B046

2008 Konami Baseball Heroes Power Up Edition #C08S029

2009 Konami Baseball Heroes Black Edition #B09B144

2009 Konami Baseball Heroes Black Edition #B09S028

2012 Konami Baseball Heroes Black Edition #B12RB223

2012 Konami Baseball Heroes Black Edition #B12SP004

Thanks for the cards, Kenny!