More Baseball Women

We now preempt our normally scheduled programming...

My original plan this evening was to publish the second in my series of posts about NPB Collectible Card Games.  The post is all written and I'm about halfway done with editing the 50-ish(!) scans for it.  But two things happened that are causing me to postpone finishing that post.  The first, and biggest, is that I received my latest package from Ryan today.  It's a little bittersweet as it's the last big package that I'm ever going to get from him, what with me not getting much new stuff anymore.  The second is that I learned that this is "Women In Baseball" week, and, amongst the ten pounds or so of Japanese baseball card goodies that Ryan sent me were a number of cards of female baseball players.  I'm busy the next two evenings so if I wanted to do a post about these cards duing "Women In Baseball" week, I need to do it now.  So without further ado...

First up are two cards from the 2011 BBM GPBL set ("GPBL" stands for the "Girl's Professional Baseball League", which was the original name of the "Japan Women's Baseball League" or "JWBL"):

2011 BBM GPBL #18

2011 BBM GPBL #55

I also received a number of JWBL cards produced by AIAIO.  I've expressed some confusion about the checklists for these cards in the past and what I received today doesn't help much.  I got eight cards from the 2013 set but they're only for three different players.  There's three cards for Miki Atsugase of South Dione:

All three cards have the same number on them (0192-4936) but obviously there's two different card designs here.  I believe those are real autographs on the card - they look like they were signed with Sharpies.

I got four cards of Asami Kawabata that, again, have the same card number (0227-1925).  Three of the cards share the designs from the Atsugase cards but the fourth is a little different.

I have four other AIAIO cards from 2013.  Two of them appear to use the same design as the first card from each of these groups (the ones that aren't autographed) but the other two share a different design.  So there's apparently four different designs for these cards.

The last 2013 card is kind of interesting.  That year the league put on something called the "Victoria Series" in which they basically merged North Reia and East Astraia into the All East team and West Flora and South Dione into the All West team for a nine game series (which was won by the All East team).  This card shows Shino Kokubo of North Reia playing for All East:

I also got two 2014 AIAIO JWBL cards:

These are the only 2014 AIAIO JWBL cards that I have and they share a similar design so I'm not confused about them.  At least until I get some more...

The last AIAIO card I got was from 2016:

I only have one other AIAIO card from 2016 and it uses a completely different design so I'm confused again.

I went to a JWBL game in 2019 and was on the lookout for baseball cards but I didn't see any.  I think AIAIO did cards for the league that year but I've never gotten any.  There was a 2019 card in the box from Ryan but it's not from AIAIO.  I think it's some sort of team issued card given away to members of Kyoto Flora's fan club:

The JWBL folded following the 2020 season and women's professional baseball in Japan has been in kind of disorganized state ever since.  At least three NPB teams - the Lions, Tigers and Giants - have established women's teams and a number of the stars from the JWBL have ended up on those teams.  I've looked around for any baseball cards for these teams but there doesn't appear to be much.  I was aware that there were cards for the Tigers Women's Team that were given away with bento boxes at their games but I couldn't find any for the longest time.  The one exception was the guy on Mercari that Ryan picked up the Miura cards from - he had a Tigers card of her but he wanted something like $68 for it which seemed excessive.

I eventually came across one 2024 card and two 2025 cards:

As far as I can tell, none of these three ever played in the JWBL.  Given that Mimura is 20 and Nishimoto is 18, that shouldn't be a big surprise, now that the league's been gone for five years.

I found a lot of cards of Minami Takatsuka (who went just by Minami then) from the 2020 BBM Shining Venus set that I asked Ryan to pick up for me.  There were five cards in all but I already had two of them:

2020 BBM Shining Venus #04

2020 BBM Shining Venus #05

The lot also included a parallel version of card #04.  It's serially numbered to 100 and the card I got was actually #100:

The lot also included an insert card of her:

2020 BBM Shining Venus #IN1

But the big card in the lot was an autographed card of her.  Unlike the AIAIO cards above, this is an "official" authentic autograph which is /93:

I saved the best card for last.  An authentic autographed card from the 2018 Epoch JWBL set of Ayami Sato, the best female pitcher in the world (or at least she was as of a few years back):

As always, thanks to Ryan for picking all this up for me.  There'll be a bunch of posts coming soon about the rest of the stuff he sent me.