2024 Topps Now Samurai Japan Global Games Team Set

#1

There was a pair of international friendly games played in Osaka back in March of 2024 between Samurai Japan and "Team Euro" - an All Star team consisting of players from various European countries.  Japan won both games rather handily with scores of 5-0 and 2-0.  That 2-0 score wasn't a close as it looked as six Japanese pitchers combined to no-hit the Europeans.  

Topps issued eight of their Topps Now Samurai Japan cards for members of the team (including a card showing all six of the pitchers involved in the no-hitter) immediately after the games and followed that up a little later with issuing a 30 card team set, also under the "Topps Now" label (which makes sense since it was only available to order on-line and they only printed up the number that were ordered).  This is the third Topps Now Samurai Japan team set issued by Topps Japan in the past few years after the ones for the 2022 Australian Friendlies team and the 2023 Asian Professional Baseball Championship team.  (I'm not counting the 2023 WBC team set as it was not "Topps Now".)

This team lacked a little of the star power of some of the previous incarnations of Samurai Japan but there's still some big names in the set.  Several members of the 2023 WBC champs are in the set - Munetaka Murakami, Kensuke Kondoh, Sosuke Genda, Ryoji Kuribayashi, Hiroya Miyagi, and Takumu Nakano - along with Shota Morishita, Shunpeita Yamashita, Chusei Mannami and Kotaro Kurebayashi.  Here's some examples:

#7 Masato Morishita

#18 Sosuke Genda

#9 Ryoji Kuribayashi

#24 Munetaka Murakami

One of the unique things about this particular Samurai Japan team is that it included four collegiate players on its roster - Yumeto Kanemaru of Kansai University, Rui Muneyama of Meiji University, Yuto Nakamura of Aichi Tech and Mishi Nishikawa of Aoyama Gakuin University.  All four players were first round picks in last fall's draft - Kanemaru by the Dragons, Muneyama by the Eagles, Nakamura bu the Swallows and Nishikawa by the Marines.  Their inclusion in the set means the four of them have pre-rookie cards which is pretty rare in Japan.  Here's all four of their cards:

#8 Yumeto Kanemaru

#20 Rui Muneyama

#12 Yuto Nakamura

#26 Mishi Nishikawa

As you can see, the cards are reasonable attractive, at least on the fronts.  As usual, however, Topps made almost no effort on the backs.  Other than the player's name and position, there's no information about the players on the card backs.  As has been standard for the Samurai Japan team sets, all the backs (except for the "team card" shown at the top of this post that has the team roster on its back) just say when and where the games occurred - they don't even have the scores of the games.  Here's the back of manager Hirokazu Ibata's as an example:

I'm a sucker for Samurai Japan sets so I really like this one.  I feel like these are one of the few things that I've really liked that Topps has done in Japan.  Of course, they don't have the Samurai Japan license anymore which means they won't be doing any more of these.

UPDATE - Almost forgot to mention that you can see all the cards in the set (along with all the other 2024 Topps Now Samurai Japan cards) over at Jambalaya.