Series MVP And Winning Manager

A year ago, I went down a rabbit hole based on something that NPB on Reddit had posted about how Daisuke Miura was the 25th player to win a Nippon Series as both a player and a manager.  This year, NPB on Reddit has provided a new rabbit hole to go down by reporting that Hiroki Kokubo of the Hawks was the the sixth person to win the Nippon Series MVP award as a player and the Nippon Series as a manager.  I, of course, had to go research this and figure out who the other five were.  Here they are, in order of when they achieved the feat (i.e. when they won their first Nippon Series as manager) along with a card of them as a player and as a manager.  Like last year's post, I tried to get cards from the years they won the MVP or managed the champions but it wasn't possible in a couple cases:

Tetsuharu Kawakami: Series MVP - 1953; Series Winning Manager - 1961, 1963, 1965-73

1958 "Who Am I?" JCM 54

1997 BBM Giants #89

Masahiko/Masaaki Mori: Series MVP - 1967; Series Winning Manager - 1986-88, 1990-92

1999 BBM Mr Giants #G21

1991 BBM Nippon Series #S1

Shigeo Nagashima: Series MVP - 1963, 1965, 1969, 1970;  Series Winning Manager 1994, 2000

1964 Marukami JCM 14g

1994 BBM Nippon Series #S1

Koji Akiyama: Series MVP - 1991, 1999; Series Winning Manager - 2011, 2014

1999 BBM Nippon Series #S64

2014 BBM 1st Version #082

Kimiyasu Kudoh: Series MVP - 1986, 1987; Series Winning Manager - 2015, 2017-20

1987 Calbee #130

2020 Epoch NPB #037

Hiroki Kokubo: Series MVP - 2011; Series Winning Manager - 2025

2011 BBM Nippon Series #S58

2024 BBM Hawks #H01

Kokubo, of course, has become the 26th player to win a Nippon Series as both a player and a manager.

I was a little surprised to discover that Sadaharu Oh never won a Nippon Series MVP award.

I got curious to see if anyone had ever done the equivalent in MLB - win a World Series MVP award as a player and the World Series as a manager.  Nope, it's never been done.  In fact, I could only find six World Series MVP winners who went onto manage in MLB at all - Frank Robinson, Pete Rose, Bucky Dent, Alan Trammell, Ray Knight and Paul Molitor.  And I could only come up with two league MVP award winners who had ever managed a World Series champion - Mickey Cochrane and Joe Torre - while the list of NPB MVPs who managed Nippon Series champions is quite long (not that I've made a list.  Yet).  The reason for this, of course, is that a star player in MUCH more likely to become a manager in NPB than MLB.

I was a little surprised to discover that the Nippon Series MVP Award predates the World Series MVP award.  The Nippon Series MVP has been award for every Nippon Series which started in 1950.  The World Series MVP award was first awarded in 1955, which means there's 50-ish World Series that do not have an MVP.