It was a busy week last week, with the three top professional baseball leagues in the world completing their championships. On Thursday, the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks defeated the Hanshin Tigers 3-2 in 11 innings in Game Five of the Nippon Series to win the Series four games to one. This was the Hawks first championship in five years.
BBM used to issue a box set for the Nippon Series from 1991 until 2012 that included all the players who appeared in the Series as well as cards for the the Series MVP, the "Fighting Spirit" award winner (kind of a "MVP for the losing team" award) and the three "Outstanding Player" award winners. Since BBM no longer publishes this set, I've been featuring those award winners in the first "Card Of The Week" post following the end of the Series since 2014 (since I didn't know they weren't going to do a set in 2013):
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| Series MVP Hotaka Yamakawa (2024 Calbee Series Two #102) |
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| "Fighting Spirit" Teruaki Sato (2024 Topps NPB Stadium Club #13) |
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| "Outstanding Player" Koya Fujii (2023 Calbee Series One #010) |
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| "Outstanding Player" Kazuki Sugiyama (2020 Epoch Hawks Rookies & Stars #11) |
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| "Outstanding Player" Yuki Yanagita (2017 BBM Hawks #H59) |
On Friday, the LG Twins knocked off the Hanwha Eagles 4-1, which was both the score in Game Five of the Korean Series and the outcome of the Series (LG defeated Hanwha four games to one). The Series was actually a little closer than it seemed. LG had won the first two games of the Series at home in Seoul but the Eagles took Game Three at their ballpark in Daejon and were leading 4-1 going into the ninth inning of Game Four when disaster struck. A two run home run from Park Dong-won put the Twins within one and later in the inning, Kim Hyun-soo came through with a two out, two RBI hit that put the Twins ahead for good. LG would ultimately score six runs in the inning to win the game 7-4. The Eagles had been one out away from tying the Series but instead were down three games to one and Game Four seemed somewhat anti-climactic. Kim was named MVP of the Series:
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| 2018 SCC KBO Collection #SCCR-01/141 |
And finally, last night (or early this morning), the Los Angeles Dodgers defeated the Toronto Blue Jays 5-4 in Game Seven of the World Series to win the MLB championship four games to three. Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto was named MVP of the Series, becoming just the second Japanese player to win the award (following Hideki Matsui in 2009). Yamamoto was not the MVP of the Nippon Series the year his Buffaloes won (2022) so Matsui is still the only player to win both a Nippon Series MVP and a World Series MVP. Here's a card of Yamamoto from his NPB days with the Orix Buffaloes:
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| 2023 Persol Pacific League 12 Greatest |
Awesome blog, by the way. Is Yoshinobu Yamamoto's first rookie card the 2017 BBM Rookie Edition #51? I would think that's the case given how the Rookie Edition is usually issued in the beginning of the year. Also, have you seen a gold facsimile version of that card? I've seen some silver versions numbered to 100, but no gold versions. Finally, do you know why Calbee didn't have Yamamoto in their 2017 set? Is it because he wasn't established as a notable player at that time?
ReplyDeleteThanks!
DeleteYes, Yamamoto's first card is #051 from the 2017 BBM Rookie Edition set. You might be interested in a post I did a few years back talking about his cards and what came out in 2017. All the regular phase draft picks in the Rookie Edition set had the silver /100 facsimile signature parallels but only the first round picks had the gold /30 or red /17 parallels. He was a fourth round pick so he only has the silver one.
Calbee's sets are small enough that they usually don't have many rookies in them so it's not terribly surprising that a fourth round 2016 draft pick didn't make the 2017 set. Especially when he didn't make his ichi-gun debut until August, after Series Three would have already gone to press. That said, his first start and win on August 31st was commemorated in the 2017 BBM Fusion set so BBM at least felt he was worth doing an extra card for.)
Thanks for the information -- and for the link to your 2023 post. Very informative. His Rookie Edition cards haven't been cheap in some time, but they are getting even less affordable now given the newfound interest in his origin story.
ReplyDeleteThat's not a big surprise. I should probably put a couple NPB cards of him up on Ebay (no rookies, though)
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