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.

Card Of The Week November 2

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):

Series MVP Hotaka Yamakawa (2024 Calbee Series Two #102)

"Fighting Spirit" Teruaki Sato (2024 Topps NPB Stadium Club #13)

"Outstanding Player" Koya Fujii (2023 Calbee Series One #010)

"Outstanding Player" Kazuki Sugiyama (2020 Epoch Hawks Rookies & Stars #11)

"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:

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:

2023 Persol Pacific League 12 Greatest

1994-95 BBM All Star MVP Inserts

BBM issued an annual All Star set in conjunction with NPB's All Star series each year from 1991 to 2012.  When I was first learning about Japanese baseball, these box sets were a pretty good way to get some idea who the better players were in NPB (with the usual caveats about All Star game rosters) although as I learned more, the sets got less useful.  

One of the standard parts of the sets when I started getting them (in 2001) were cards that commemorated the previous year's All Star MVPs.  I discovered, though, that the first couple All Star sets BBM put out did not have these cards.  It wasn't until the fourth edition, in 1994, that BBM added these cards.  What was kind of odd about the 1994 set was that BBM decided to play catchup.  Not only would the set have the MVPs for the 1993 All Star games, it would also have the MVPs for the 1991 and 1992 games.

Actually, I'm not being entirely accurate.  Unlike later editions of the set, the 1994 BBM All Star game base set itself did not include these MVP cards.  Instead, each box set contained the entire 62 card base set plus two of six possible MVP cards.  There were seven All Star games in 1991-93 - two in 1991, three in 1992 and two in 1993 - but one player - Atsuya Furuta - was MVP of two of the games.

I'm not entirely sure what possessed me to do this but I decided a few years back that I wanted to get all six of these cards.  I had the two that I had gotten close to 25 years ago when I had originally bought my set and I think I got another one of them from Ryan somewhere along the line.  I got two more of them from COMC and then I found the last one (Katsumi Hirosawa) on Ebay a few months back when someone had broken up their box set.  So here's all six cards:

1994 BBM All Stars #E1

1994 BBM All Stars #E2

1994 BBM All Stars #E3

1994 BBM All Stars #E4

1994 BBM All Stars #E5

1994 BBM All Stars #E6

One kind of interesting thing to note is that neither Hirosawa nor Komada are in the base set as neither one made the 1994 All Star teams.  Additionally, by 1994 Komada was not longer a member of the Giants - he'd joined the Baystars as a free agent that year.

BBM repeated this treatment of All Star game MVPs the following year.  The 1995 All Star box set contained 63 cards - the 62 card base set and one of two insert cards for the 1994 All Star game MVPs.  I had gotten the Koji Akiyama card with the set I had bought way back when but I decided to pick up the other one - Glenn Braggs - a few months ago once I had completed the 1994 cards.  I was able to find it on Yahoo! Japan Auctions and bought it via ZenMarket.  I paid way to much for shipping for it and a couple other things though, and that was before shipping from Japan became prohibitively expensive.  But be that as it may, here are the two 1995 insert cards:

1995 BBM All Stars #E1

1995 BBM All Stars #E2

The 1995 set was the last time BBM put insert cards in their All Star sets for the previous year's MVP winners.  They would be part of the base set until 2010.  In 2010, BBM changed the release date of the set from July to August which allowed the set to reflect that year's All Star games.  So starting in 2010, the All Star set included the MVPs of that year's games (which means that the 2009 All Star game MVPs never got commemorated).  The change wasn't enough to save the sets, though, as BBM stopped doing them after 2012, along with their other annual box set - the Nippon Series set.  I don't miss the All Star game sets much but I do miss the Nippon Series sets.

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).