Discord Server

I was contacted a few weeks ago by someone who had just gotten into collecting Japanese baseball cards and wanted to know if there was any sort of on-line community.  When I said that I really didn't know of one, he decided that he'd go off and try to set one up.  What he's done is set up a Discord server called "Japanese Baseball Cards" and if you're interested in joining it, you can use this link.

When I started this blog back in 2007, I had two goals.  The first was to inform folks about what cards were out there and I think I've succeeded at that.  The second was to provide a place for collectors to connect with each other and I don't think I've really done that at all.  I tried doing some swapmeet posts way back when but I don't think anyone every really got anything out of them and I stopped doing them.  So maybe this Discord server can do a better job than I did.

1999 BBM Mr Giants set

I had mentioned a while back that among the cards I got from Ryan in that big box in July were the last cards I needed to complete the 1999 BBM Mr Giants set.  Here's the post about the set that I promised (threatened?) to do back then.

In 1999, BBM issued a set dedicated to Shigeo Nagashima - aka Mr. Giants.  I'm not exactly sure if there was any particular reason they decided to do a Nagashima set as, at the time, he was in the seventh year of his second stint as Giants manager and he'd manage for two more seasons after this.  This would be just the second "historic" set that BBM would produce (following the 1994 Perfect Pitching set) and the first that would be sold in packs rather than as a complete set.

What distinguishes this set from other "single player" sets is that not all of the cards feature Nagashima.  Well, that's not exactly true as all but one of the cards have his picture on them somewhere.  But some 59 of the 108 cards in the base set feature players with some connection to Nagashima - teammates on the V9 Giants or players who played under him.

The base set is split into 11 separate subsets that ranged in size from five cards to 30 cards (12 subsets if you count the two checklist cards).  The first six subsets deal with his playing career from 1958 to 1974 while the remaining five cover aspects of his two stints managing the Giants (1975-80 and 1993 to when the set was published).  I thought I'd go over each subset and show the front and back of a card (or two) from it.

The first subset is labelled something like "Chronology Of Shigeo Nagashima".  Each of the 17 cards in the subset covers a separate season in his playing career.  Here's the one for his 1960 season:

There's two things I want to point about this card.  The first is that kind of ghostly image of Nagashima on the left side of the card.  That image is on almost every card for his playing career and it'll be replaced by another image of him as a manager on almost every card from his managerial days.  The second is that the back of the card has a blue background which indicates that it's a card from his playing days.  The managerial cards have a green background.

The second subset features nine players who were teammates of Nagashima on the V9 Giants (the team that won nine straight Nippon Series championships between 1965 and 1973), including manager Tetsuharu Kawakami.  The other players are Tsuneo Horiuchi, Kazumi Takahashi, Masahiko Mori, Shozo Doi, Yukinobu Fukuroe, Shigeru Takada, Isao Shibata and Toshimitsu Suetsugu.

The third subset is labeled "Famous Scene" and each of the ten cards in it commemorate some significant event in Nagashima's playing career.  Included are his collegiate career at Rikkio University, his signing with the Giants in 1957, his first game in 1958 when he struck out four times against Masaichi Kaneda and the Swallows, the Emperor's Game in 1959 (June 25, 1959 to be exact), and his retirement in 1974.  There are also cards for his wedding in 1964 and his four children (note that there's one card showing his kids, not a card for each one).  Here's the card for him signing with the Giants (and featuring another photo of Kawakami in a kimono on the back):

The fourth subset is called "Close Up" and each of the five cards describes a different characteristic of his playing career.  There are cards for the tendency for his helmet to fly off when he swung (although that card doesn't actually show that happening), his fielding, his base running and his home run hitting.  The last one, which I'm showing here, has his full career batting record on it:

The fifth subset is "Rival Pitchers" and features five significant pitchers (one from each of the other Central League teams) that Nagashima faced during his career - Masaichi Kaneda (Swallows), Minoru Murayama (Tigers), Shohachi Aniya (Carp), Senichi Hoshino (Dragons) and Masaji Hiramatsu (Whales).  Each card shows how he did against each pitcher - he hit Kaneda the best (.313) and Hiramatsu the worst (.193).  I suspect a partial explanation for that was that he faced Kaneda during the early part of his career and Hiramatsu during the last part of his playing days.  Here's the Kaneda card:

The last subset dedicated to Nagashima's playing career is labeled "Shukan Baseball Covers" and, as you'd expect from that name, all five cards show a different cover of Shukan (Weekly) Baseball magazine featuring him.  The text on the back appears to be from the issue.  This is the only one of the playing career subsets to not have the photo of Nagashima on the left side of the card.

At thirty cards, the first subset for Nagashima the manager is the largest one in the set.  Entitled "30 Warriors", it features thirty (obviously) players from the 1999 Giants, including rookie Koji Uehara and Tomohiro Nioka.  Other players include Hiromi Makihara, Masaki Saitoh, Kazuhiro Kiyohara, Yoshinobu Takahashi and Hideki Matsui:

You'll notice two things about this card.  The first is that, as I mentioned above, the backs of the managerial cards have a green background.  The second is that, again as I previously mentioned, the image of Nagashima on the left part of the card has changed to one of him as a manager.

The eighth subset is the five card "Victory" subset.  These cards celebrate the four Central League pennants that the Giants won under Nagashima (1976, 1977, 1994 and 1996) and the one Nippon Series Championship they won (1994).  (He'd win another pennant and championship in 2000, one year after this set came out.)  Here's the card for the 1977 championship:

This next subset is the one I find the most interesting.  It's called "#1 Draft Picks" and the nine cards feature players who were taken in the first round of the draft by the Giants in some - but not all - of the years that Nagashima managed the Giants.  The players are Shoji Sadaoka (1974 draft), Toshio Shinozuka (1975), Kazuaki Fujishiro (1976), Kazuhiro Yamakura (1977), Hideki Matsui (1992), Junichi Kawahara (1994), Yusaki Iriki (1996), Yoshinobu Takahashi (1997) and Koji Uehara (1998).  Most of the cards feature photos taken at the team's press conference announcing each year's draft class and include Nagashima (the fronts of the cards in this subset does not include the photo of Nagashima on the left side).  The other cards show the player on the field with Nagashima.

I think these are the first ever "draft pick" cards that BBM did - at least the first ones that came in packs (there had been a card included in an issue of Sports Card Magazine in early 1999 that I think was the actual first BBM "draft pick card").

I got curious - because of course I did - about why not every draft under Nagashima was included in the subset.  Three of the missing number one picks - Yasuhiro Hayashi in 1979, Matsuhiro Mino in 1993 and Shunsuke Hara in 1995 - had combined for a grand total of one game with the ichi-gun Giants by the time this set went to press (Hara eventually played in 68 games with the top team in 2003-06).  There was no number one pick for the Giants in 1978 - they had boycotted the draft due to the Suguru Egawa affair.

Speaking of Egawa, he's one of the players in the next subset which was entitled "Students".  All six players had retired by 1999 but had played under Nagashima as manager.  Five of them - Egawa, Kiyoshi Nakahata, Tadashi Matsumoto, Mitsuo Sumi and Takashi Nishimoto - had played for him during his first stint and the last - Tatsunori Hara - had finished his career during Nagashima's second stint.  I'm not sure what makes these guys "students" of Nagashima though.

The final subset is a return to the earlier "Close Up" subset, only this time the five cards deal with things that happened while Nagashima was manager.  There's a card for the Giants' 14 game winning streak in 1976, Toshimitsu Suetsugu hitting a sayonara home run in 1976, two players throwing no-hitters and the Giants beating the Dragons on the last day of the 1994 season to win the pennant as well as card with his full managerial record on it.  Curiously, the photos on the fronts of the cards seem to be unrelated to the text on the backs.  Here's the card with his managerial record:

The base set also included two checklist cards that form a little panorama of Nagashima waving to the fans on the day he retired as a player:

#107 (left) & #108 (right)

Card #108 is the only card in the set that does not show a picture of Nagashima.

There are two insert sets associated with this set.  The ten card "Nagashima Titles" set feature cards dedicated to awards and/or statistical titles that he won - MVP, Rookie Of The Year, Best 9, Golden Glove, Batting Crown, Home Run Crown, Hall Of Fame, etc.  The five card "Giants Heroes" cards are cards printed on clear plastic that include players from the 1999 Giants - Masaki Saitoh, Masumi Kuwata, Kazuhiro Kiyohara, Yoshinobu Takahashi and Hideki Matsui.  I only have one of the "Nagashima Titles" cards - the one dedicated to the ten times he lead the Central League in hits:

There's something that seems kind of odd to me about this set.  I realized when decided to try to build the set a few years ago and started to really understand how it was put together that someone was missing from it - Sadaharu Oh.  It seems strange that someone who would be closely associated with Nagashima for sixteen of the seventeen years of his career would be excluded from the set.  I mean, it would make perfect sense for Oh to appear in the "V9" subset.  In contrast, BBM's "single player" set for Oh from 2008 included four cards showing Oh with Nagashima.  I don't know why Oh's not in this set.

Wrapping up, it's an odd set and probably not all that appealing if you're not super-into Shigeo Nagashima.  I'm kind of questioning why I decided to complete it and thinking it was mostly due to it being the first pack-based "historic" BBM set.  Most of the cards were reasonably cheap, with the two Matsui cards probably being the most expensive (and I don't think either of them were more than 500 yen).  

Card Of The Week October 26

The Tigers and Hawks split the first two games of the 2025 Nippon Series this weekend in Fukuoka, with the Tigers eking out a 2-1 victory in Game One yesterday and the Hawks administering a 10-1 beat down in Game Two today.  Ukyo Shuto of the Hawks had five hits today, setting a new record for more hits in an Nippon Series game (H/T NPB Reddit).  Here's my periodic reminder that Shuto was originally drafted as an ikusei player by Softbank, who've probably used the development player draft better than any other team to sign talent over the years - the big name, of course, being Kodai Senga.  This is Shuto's 2018 BBM Rookie Edition card (#007), the only card I know of showing him as an iuksei player - the three digit uniform number is the giveaway:

It's very likely that there are team-issued cards by the Hawks that show him as a development player but I haven't seen them.

2025 NPB Draft

It was draft day in NPB today and, as always, my friend Deanna has posted the results in English on her blog.  I've been able to track down six players who were drafted today that already have baseball cards.  Three of them were drafted out of the corporate leagues and so had cards in the JABA sets from recent years.  One of them was drafted off of the independent farm team Oisix Niigata Albirex but had previously played in the corporate league so he, too, appeared in the JABA sets.  One player appeared in the 2024 Panini Stars & Stripes Japanese Collegiate National Team autographed/memorabilia inserts and the last one is Rintaro Sasaki, who has a boatload of cards from various Panini sets.  I should add that I still have not generated a checklist for the 2023 JABA set and I don't know much about the team sets issued for the various independent teams so it's entirely possible there are others who already have cards.

Here's the list of players with a list of their cards (except Sasaki because there's too many to list).   Some of the cards here are mine and some are images swiped from Mercari:

Taisei Chinen, Oisix Niigata Albirex, Giants 5th ikusei

2022 JABA #22JP079

2021 JABA #21JP084
2022 JABA #22JP079

Hiromi Katayama, Honda, Baystars #4

2022 JABA #22JP010

2022 JABA #22JP010

2025 JABA #25JP007

Shota Masui, Toyoda, Swallows #4

2025 JABA #25JP024

2025 JABA #25JP024

Asahi Miyashita, Toyo University, Baystars #3

2024 Panini Stars & Stripes USA Baseball #JPN-AM Autographed Version

2024 Panini Stars & Stripes USA Baseball #JPN-AM

2024 Panini Stars & Stripes USA Baseball #JPN-AM Autographed Version /58

2024 Panini Stars & Stripes USA Baseball #JPN-AM

Rintaro Sasaki, Stanford, Hawks #1

Too many to list here

Takanori Takahashi, JR East, Hawks #5

2025 JABA #25JP046

2025 JABA #25JP046

I did track down a card of Chinen with Albirex from this season but I don't know if it was part of team set or some sort of one off:

I want to note that Miyashita is the last player from the 2023 collegiate Samurai Japan set commemorated in the 2024 Panini Stars & Stripes USA Baseball set to graduate from college.  20 of the 26 six players on that team have now been drafted while the other six are playing in the corporate leagues.  I think all six were eligible to be drafted this year (collegiate players who don't declare for the draft upon graduation and instead go play in the corporate or indy leagues have to wait two years before they can enter the draft.  High school players have to wait three years) but none of them were.

Card Of The Week October 19

It's been an interesting week of playoff baseball over the past week and I wasn't sure who all to write about this week.  Despite the outstanding games from Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto in the NLCS, I decided to concentrate on the NPB players as I just wrote about those two last month.  So while we wait to find out if the Nippon Series will be a rematch of the 1962 Series or the 1964 and 2014 Series, let's talk about a couple stars from last week...

The Hanshin Tigers clinched their berth as the Central League's representative in the Series on Friday behind an outstanding start by Haruto Takahashi.  He took a no-hitter into the eighth inning while striking out seven Baystars.  I have a soft spot for Takahashi as I've seen him pitch twice.  The first time was in 2019 when he was coming back from an injury and beat the Giants at Koshien for his first win in over a year.  The second time was last year when he was an ikusei pitcher on the Tigers' farm team in a game against the Kofu Hayate Venturers in Shizuoka.  He'd had Tommy John surgery in 2022 and shoulder issues the following year so the Tigers had released him and resigned him to a development player contract after the 2023 season.  He worked his way back to the 70 man roster in the middle of last season and has pitched pretty well in limited use for the Tigers since then.

2021 BBM 1st Version #196

The CL Climax Series MVP was Shota Morishita, who batted .667 and had the game winning hits in the first two games, including a walk off home run in Game Two.

2023 Epoch One #527

Over in the Pacific League, things have gotten a little interesting.  The Hawks won the first two games which, combined with their one win advantage due to their first place finish, put them on the brink of returning to the Nippon Series.  However, the Hawks have dropped the last three games, getting out-scored by the Fighters 22-4 over those games.  The game tomorrow will determine the Pacific League representative for the Nippon Series.

The winning runs for the Hawks in Game Two were driven in courtesy of a three run home run off the bat of Yuki Yanagita.  It was 'Gita's 10th Climax Series home run, putting him into a tie with Seiichi Uchikawa for the most ever.

2024 Topps NPB #101

Should the Fighters beat the Hawks tomorrow, Franmil Reyes will likely win the Climax Series MVP award.  Reyes has hit four home runs which ties the record for most home runs in any stage of the Climax Series history.  The other players are Sho Nakata, Seiichi Uchikawa and Hideto Asamura.

2024 BBM Fusion #07

It'll be interesting to see if either Yanagita or Reyes (or both!) hit tie-breaking home runs tomorrow.

(H/T to NPB Reddit for the home run trivia)

2004 BBM Giants 70th Anniversary Magazine Cards

Now that I have all of them, I wanted to do a quick post showing the cards that were distributed in the mook (magazine/book) that BBM published in 2004 to celebrate the 70th Anniversary of the Yomiuri Giants.  Each issue had an envelope embedded in it that contained two of the five possible cards - Eiji Sawamura, Tetsuharu Kawakami, Shigeo Nagashima, Sadaharu Oh and Tatsunori Hara.

I first became aware of these cards when I picked up the Sawamura card from Rob Fitts off of Ebay back in 2021.  Neither Rob or I knew where the card had come from but it didn't take too long before I not only figured out that it came from a magazine but I found a copy on Yahoo! Japan Auctions that I asked Ryan to pick up for me.  That issue contained the Oh and Hara cards.  I didn't hold out a whole lot of hope that I'd find the other two cards but I was pleasantly surprised.  I found the Kawakami card at SportsCard BITS in Nagoya last year and the Nagashima card on Yahoo! Japan Auctions (via Ryan) earlier this year.

I've shown all these cards in previous posts but I wanted to show them all in one post.  Here's the front and back of all five cards:

I didn't notice until I was doing this post that the Kawakami card has his signature on it.  Unfortunately it appears to be printed on the card and not a real autograph.  I don't think it's a parallel as the image of the card on the envelope embedded in the magazine shows the signature on Kawakami's card but no signatures on the other cards.  So I think all of the Kawakami cards have the facsimile signature on them.  I suspect that the image BBM used for the card had the signature on it.  I will say it's odd that they used that image since it's not like photos of Kawakami as a player are rare (unlike Sawamura).

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