Card Of The Week June 1

Two of hot rookies this year in the Pacific League are Rui Muneyama of the Eagles and Seiya Watanabe of the Lions.  Muneyama has gotten more hype than Watanabe - five teams took him in the first round of last fall's draft with Rakuten winning the lottery for his rights over Hiroshima, Nippon-Ham, Seibu and Softbank while Watanabe was taken in the second round by the Lions.  So far, however, Watanabe's been putting up better numbers - he's hitting .331 with four home runs in 34 games while Muneyama's hitting .251 with two home runs in 46 games.

Since I'm not getting any new cards, of course, I'm not able to get any cards of either of them on their NPB teams.  But I actually do have cards of them - they both played on the Collegiate Samurai Japan team in 2023 and so had autographed and memorabilia cards in last year's USA Baseball Stars & Stripes set from Panini.  The autographed cards have been going for more than I'm willing to pay but I've picked up the non-autographed memorabilia cards for both players off of Ebay (which haven't been cheap either):

#JPN-RM

#JPN-SW

There's a pretty good chance one of these two players will be this year's Pacific League Rookie Of The Year which means there will have been two players from 2023 squad (and the 2024 Panini set) to have won that award:

#JPN-NT

I'll mention that Muneyama also appears in the 2024 Topps Now Samurai Japan team set for the "Global Games" - two games against a European All Star team in March of last year.  I don't have that card in my hands yet but it will be in the next shipment of cards that I get from Ryan.

I had been wondering if Panini was going to include the Japanese college players in this year's edition of USA Baseball Stars & Stripes but apparently they will not.  Instead they'll include members of the Australian (U-16), Canadian (U-18) and Taiwanese (collegiate) National Teams.