JABA Cards

I've been constantly mentioning that Ryan had put some items that I wasn't expecting in the box he sent me a few weeks back.  The cards I'm going to talk about in this post were a mix of cards that I asked him to pick up and ones that I wasn't expectng.

The Japan Amateur Baseball Association (JABA) is the organization that oversees the corporate or industrial league teams in Japan.  They've put out baseball card sets for at least the four years between 2021 and 2024 - I don't know if they've done any this year or not.  I had previously gotten cards from the 2021, 2022 and 2024 sets via packs from either Ryan or Deanna but I had tracked down a handful of cards for sale on-line that I asked Ryan to pick up for me.  I was expecting something along the lines of six or seven cards so I was surprised to find around 36 in the box!

I find these kind of fascinating, despite not knowing really anything about most of the players or teams.  There's just something interesting about them to me.  If I could find a way to get more of them, I would, but they're kind of rare to find out in the wild.  It wasn't until about a year ago that I finally figured out the checklists for the three sets I had cards from, partly because they didn't show up in Mercari very often (and almost never on Yahoo! Japan Auctions).

I thought about showing a subset of what I got but I ultimately decided to show all the cards.  First up are ten from the 2021 set:

Next up are 23(!) cards from the 2022 set.  You'll notice some overlap in the players - there's actually a huge overlap in the checklists.  84 players appear in both sets.  The 2021 set had 92 cards and the 2022 set had 88 cards.

One of the cards that I asked Ryan to pick up was this card from the 2023 set.  This is actually the only 2023 card that I've ever seen.  All I can tell you about the set is that from the card number of this card, I assume there's at least 40 cards in it.

Ryan also picked up two cards from the 2024 set for me.  The design of these cards looks very similar to the 2023 card - the only difference I see is in the background of the black rectangle at the bottom of the cards:

Some comments about some of the players:

• Hiromasa Funabasama (2022 set #22JP025) was the fifth round pick of the Giants in the 2022 draft and was the 2024 Central League Rookie Of The Year
• Ryuji Komago (2022 set #22JP035) was the Eagles 2nd round pick in the 2022 draft
• Hiroki Fukunaga (2022 set #22JP065) was the Dragons 7th round pick in the 2022 draft
• I wonder if the photos on Kaisei Itoh's 2021 card (#21JP004) and 2022 card (#22JP004) were taken at the same game
• Motoki Mukoyama (2021 set #21JP092, 2022 set #22JP087) was a member of the 2018 Japan Collegiate National Team and appeared in the 2019 Panini USA Baseball Stars & Stripes set.  I know that he's also in the 2024 set so I assume he's probably in the 2023 set
• Ryoma Yamanaka (2024 set #24JP041) was the fourth round pick of the Buffaloes in the 2024 draft