Card Of The Week February 8

There was an interesting story on the NPB sub-reddit a week or so ago.  The Rocket City Trash Pandas of the Southern League will be hosting a three game "Global Baseball Series" from March 30th to April 1st, just before the regular season begins.  One of the teams taking part will be the Toyota Red Cruisers of the Japanese corporate leagues.  Toyota will be playing in two of the three games - they'll take on the Alabama A&M team on March 30th and the Trash Pandas on April 1st.  The Trash Panda's ballpark is just outside of Huntsville, Alabama in the town of Madison and the car company (which has a joint manufacturing plant with Mazda in that town) owns the naming rights to it.

Much as I'd love to see this Series, I don't see any way that I can make it to Huntsville for it.  But I can share a couple baseball cards of Toyota players from a couple of the JABA sets of corporate league players.  There's a number of Toyota players in the sets but I only have four cards that feature three players.  I have no idea of any of these guys will be in Huntsville or if they're even still with the team.

2021 JABA #21JP012

2022 JABA #22JP012

2022 JABA #22JP055

2022 JABA #22JP071

If Ryosuke Aizawa's name sounds familiar to you, it's probably because he's in the Japanese Collegiate Samurai Japan cards in the 2019 Panini USA Baseball Stars & Stripes set.  The 29 year old at least played for Toyota last year as he's in the 2025 JABA set.

Card Of The Week February 1

Last summer, the Baltimore Orioles (my local MLB team) inducted Adam Jones into their Hall of Fame.  Jones had finished his career in Japan, spending two seasons in Osaka with the Orix Buffaloes in 2020-21.  It made me wonder at the time how many members of the Orioles Hall of Fame had played in NPB.  

I finally took a look at the list and I think the answer is four.  In addition to Jones, there's Don Buford (Taiheiyo Club Lions 1973-75, Nankai Hawks 1976), Davey Johnson (Yomiuri Giants 1975-76) and Doug Decinces (Yakult Swallows 1988).  Here are Japanese cards of all four of them:

2010 BBM Lions 60th Anniversary #76

1975/76/77 Calbee #1222 (Johnson)

1988 Takara Swallows #15 (Decinces) 

2021 Topps NPB #76

There's an additional Orioles Hall of Fame member who played in the Far East.  Melvin Mora spent a portion of the 1998 season in Taiwan, playing for the CPBL's Mercuries Tigers.  I used to have his CPBL card but I traded it to Ryan years ago when I purged my collection of all my Taiwanese cards.  I was kind of surprised to discover I'd never put it in a post here on the blog but luckily, TCDB has it.

2026 Epoch One Cards

Today is February 1st which means that all the NPB teams opened their training camps today (although since it's already the 2nd in Japan, technically they did it yesterday).  For the third year in a row, Epoch is commemorating the event by releasing the first batch of their on demand Epoch One cards.  There are 71 2026 cards now available, the bulk of which (61 cards) are for the 2025 draft picks for the ten teams that Epoch issues these cards for - the Marines, Dragons, Hawks, Tigers, Fighters, Lions, Eagles, Swallows, Baystars and Giants or everyone other than the Carp and Buffaloes.  For everyone except the Tigers, it's just the draftees from the "regular" phase of the draft but the Tigers players include the two players they took in the ikusei portion.  These will be the first cards for many of these players, beating out their BBM Rookie Edition cards by several weeks.  And no, there's no card for Rintaro Sasaki, the first round pick of the Hawks as he has not signed with the team.

The remaining ten cards are for players who changed teams over the winter.  This includes Kenta Maeda, who returned to NPB after ten years in the US and signed with the Eagles as well as Hikaru Itoh (joined the Eagles), Toshiki Abe (Dragons), Go Matsumoto (Giants), Takahiro Norimoto (Giants), Hiroya Shimamoto (Fighters), Haruki Nishikawa (Fighters), Kohei Arihara (Fighters), Hiyu Motoyama (Tigers) and Torai Fushimi (Tigers).

This is the ninth year that Epoch has issued their Epoch One cards and I'm kind of amazed that everything about them has remained the same.  They're still just 500 yen apiece (including domestic shipping) and are only available for three days.  What's also apparently remained the same, unfortunately, is that there's no way to order these directly from overseas.

Spring Is Coming...Isn't It?

My part of the world got dumped on with a bunch of snow and ice on Sunday and the temperatures have dropped into the Arctic range so I want to focus on some recent announcements for card sets that will be coming out when the weather will hopefully be a bit warmer.

- I had made a prediction in my wrap up of Epoch's 2025 card sets that last year's edition of the Holographica set, one of their annual collaborations with the OB Club, was going to be delayed until March of 2026.  I was correct - the set will be released on March 14th.  This is another of Epoch's "ultra high end sets" with each six card box retailing for 16,500 yen (about $107).   Each box is guaranteed to include two autographed cards.  I don't think the full checklist has been settled on yet but there are at least 59 cards in the base set, each with a parallel version, and something like four different varieties of autographed cards.  Players in the set include Sadaharu Oh, Ichiro, Koji Uehara, Koji Yamamoto and Tsutomu Wakamatsu.

- BBM is issuing a box set dedicated to Munetaka Murakami called "Kiseki".  Each box will contain 37 cards which will include the 36 card base set plus one "special" insert card which could be a parallel card, one of ten different memorabilia cards or one of five different autographed cards.  The set will be out in mid-March.

- Jumping ahead a few months, BBM is releasing the 2026 edition of their 1st Version set in early May.  The details for the set look pretty much the same as it's been for every year since 2015.  There's the usual 324 player/manager cards (27 for each team), the 12 team checklist cards and the 36 "Cross Something" cards that will be continued in the 2nd Version set later in the year - this year the Something is "Forest".  That makes a total of 372 cards in the base set.  Nine cards for each team have several different facsimile autograph parallels.  There are also parallel versions for 71 of the rookie cards (or all the rookie cards).  There are three varieties of short printed photo variants - each team has a card with a rare "secret" version, a card with a rarer "ultra secret" version and a card with an even rarer "super ultra secret" version (and they could all possibly be variants for the same player).  There are two non-premium insert sets - "New Wonder" (12 cards - one rookie per team) and "Japonism" (12 cards - one per team) - and four serially numbered premium insert sets - "Amazing" (12 /50 cards - one per team), "Promising" (12 /50 cards - one per team) "Cross Foil Signing" (6 cards - all members of the Giants) and "3D Cross Forest" (12 cards - one per team as you probably guessed).  Some of the insert sets will probably have parallel versions but I don't see anything about them yet.  There are both autograph and memorabilia cards available, including cards with multiple autographs and cards with memorabilia from multiple players.  There will also be "buyback" autographs available.

- Bandai is returning to the NPB Collectible Card Game market for the first time since their final Owners League set back in 2015.  The new game is called "Professional Baseball Fan Stars" and appears to be a mobile game.   Bandai will be releasing two sets of cards in late March - a Central League Vol.1 set and a Pacific League Vol.1 set - in boxes containing ten packs containing seven cards each.  Both sets will have 120 cards - 48 "Normal", 36 "Rare", 24 "Star Rare" and 12 "Super Star Rare" (which will break down to 4 "Normal", 3 "Rare", 2 "Star Rare" and 1 "Super Star Rare" for each team).  I'm assuming there will be additional "volumes" released as the year goes on.  I don't know if this means that Bushiroad will not be continuing the "DreamOrder" cards but I kind of think it does - there are no new releases mentioned on their website.

- Bandai, of course, collaborated with Namco the past two years to produce the very fun "Pro Baseball Deforme Card Collection" sets which were distributed with bags of kaki no tane, a snack food.  The two are teaming up again this year to release more of the Collectible Card Game "Fan Stars" cards.  There will be 36 cards in the set - 12 "Normal", 12 "Rare" and 12 "Star Rare".  There are parallel versions of the "Star Rare" cards available.  The set will be released in April.

More Secrets

I got a nice little envelope full of baseball cards out of the blue last week from my friend Jason who used to run an Ebay store called "JK's Card Shoppe".  Jason knows that I really like BBM's the "secret version" image variations so he sent me a handful of them - along with the original version of the cards in all but one case.

I'll show that one case first - this is the "secret" version of Brandon Tysinger's rookie card from the 2021 BBM 2nd Version set:

2021 BBM 2nd Version #422 (SV)

The other cards were all from 2024.  Jason sent me three pairs of cards from the 1st Version set - I'm showing the original card first followed by the "secret version".  You can tell it's the "secret version" because the BBM logo is grey as opposed to red or green - I think BBM started doing this in 2022.

2024 BBM 1st Version #299

2024 BBM 1st Version #299 (SV)

2024 BBM 1st Version #129

2024 BBM 1st Version #129 (SV)

2024 BBM 1st Version #071

2024 BBM 1st Version #071 (SV)

The last pair of cards was from the 2024 BBM 2nd Version set:

2024 BBM 2nd Version #573

2024 BBM 2nd Version #573 (SV)

Thanks for the cards, Jason!

Card Of The Week January 25

It was announced last week that former Chiba Lotte Marine Takashi Ogino had signed with Draci Brno of the Czech Extraliga baseball league.  Ogino had been with Lotte since 2010 but was released at the end of last season.  He's the second former Marine heading to Europe to play in 2016, following Ayumu Ishikawa's signing with Twins Oosterhout of the Netherlands' Honkbal Hoofdklasse.

Here's a card of Ogino from the 2016 Calbee Series Two set (#086):

Andruw Jones

As you've no doubt heard by now, Andruw Jones was elected to the National Baseball Hall Of Fame in Cooperstown this past week.  What you may not know is that Jones spent the last two years of his career in Japan with the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles.  Jones is now the fourth player with NPB experience to be enshrined in Cooperstown, following Larry Doby (1962 Chunichi Dragons), Rich Gossage (1990 Fukuoka Daiei Hawks) and Ichiro (1992-2000 Orix BlueWave).

Jones signed with the Eagles in December of 2012.  His 434 home runs and 1,289 RBIs were the most ever by a foreign player entering NPB, beating out Frank Howard's almost 40 year old records of 382 home runs and 1,119 RBIs. Jones' timing couldn't have been any better.  2013, of course, was Masahiro Tanaka's amazing undefeated season and the Eagles rode it all the way to their first (and only to date) Nippon Series championship.  Jones would hit a paltry .243 but had 26 home runs and 94 RBIs.  He had 104 walks which helped him have a near .400 OBP (.391) although he also had 164 strikeouts.  He was elected to the Pacific League's All Star team as the DH.  He became the fourth player ever* to homer in both the World Series and the Nippon Series when he hit a three run shot in the first inning of Game Four at Tokyo Dome.  

*Following Johnny Logan, Roy White and Hideki Matsui.  Marwin Gonzalez was the fifth such player

His numbers dropped some in 2014,  His average dipped to .221, and he had just 24 home runs and 74 RBIs.  He drew a Pacific League record 118 walks so his .OBP was again near .400 (.394).  The Eagles released him at the end of the season and he spent 2015 in limbo before announcing his retirement in early 2016.

By my count, Jones had 25 "base set" NPB cards.  He had eleven cards in 2013 - BBM's 1st Version (#263), 2nd Version (#624), Genesis (#089 & #CW090), Eagles team (#E60 & #E84) and Eagles "First Win" (#26) sets; Calbee's Series Two (#138) and Series Three (#AS-23) sets; Bandai's Owners League 02 set (#109) and the Eagles team issued "Heat" set (#64).  He had another twelve in 2014 BBM's 1st Version (#016 & #337), 2nd Version (#461), Genesis (#009), Eagles team (#E57), Icons - Big Guns (#02 & #26) and Eagles "10th Year Memorial" (#88) sets; Calbee's Series Two (#088) and Series Three (#172) sets; Bandai's Owners League 03 set (#001) and the Eagles team issued set (#58).  His final two Japanese cards were from Epoch's two sets with the Japan Retired Foreign Player Association (JRFPA) in 2021 (#29) and 2022 (#25).  Here are the fourteen cards of his that I have, roughly in order of publication:

2013 BBM 1st Version #263

2013 Calbee Series Two #138

2013 BBM 2nd Version #624

2013 Calbee Series Three #AS-23

2014 BBM Eagles 10th Year Memorial #88

2014 BBM Icons - Big Guns #02

2014 BBM Icons - Big Guns #26

2014 BBM 1st Version #016

2014 BBM 1st Version #337

2014 Calbee Series Two #088

2014 BBM 2nd Version #461

2014 Calbee Series Three #172

2021 Epoch JRFPA #29

2022 Epoch JRFPA #25

It's kind of interesting - Jones is listed as an outfielder on the BBM cards when he was an active player but he was mostly a DH.  According to his Baseball-Reference page, he only appeared in one game in the outfield for the Eagles.  He did get into 48 games at first base, though, which may be why his 2022 Epoch JRFPA card lists him as an infielder.

1995 Densho Ichiro "Big Card"

I got a message from someone recently, asking me if I could identify a card he had.  He said he'd picked the card up in the early 2000s from someone who frequently traveled to Japan.  He included the following two photos showing the front and back of the card:

To be clear, the "card" is embedded in the upper center part of the larger sheet.  It has perforated edges, clearly intended to be punched out of the sheet.

The card owner included a few more details about the card:

• The card itself measured 6.75" x 4.75" with the full sheet being 9" x 7"
• The card stock is thinner than a normal baseball card but thicker than a typical magazine page

I had never seen anything like this before but my first impression was that this had been issued in a magazine of some sort.  The fact that there was something that looked suspiciously like page numbers on it ("13" in the lower left corner of the front and "14" in the lower right corner of the back) supported that theory.

I reached out to Gary Engel to see what he had to say about it.  Gary had never seen it before either but he was able to quickly figure out several things:

According to what it says on the card, it must have been an insert in a 1995 issue of Dengeki Shonen Magazine.  According to Japanese Wikipedia, Dengeki Shonen Magazine was produced from September 1994 through September 1996.  It was a Nintendo Gaming Magazine, but also contained comics having nothing to do with gaming.  According to Wikipedia, the concept of combining comics with Nintendo was a failure, and publication ceased after only two years.  I have the idea it was a monthly magazine, but I couldn't find out for sure.

The back of the card mentions that this card is the first of a series of Big Cards and that the series will continue in future issues.  The card is related to a contest in which those who can answer the four trivia questions about Ichiro on the back can receive free 10 card packs of 1995 BBM Baseball.  

I looked on Yahoo Japan and there aren't any copies of any issue of Dengeki Shonen Magazine for sale.  Therefore, maybe it is a rare magazine and thus the Ichiro is a rare card.  Apparently, most Nintendo gamers of the era weren't baseball fans. 

Gary also expressed surprised to continuously discover cards he'd never seen before.  "Even after being closely involved with Japanese baseball cards for nearly 40 years, I keep finding additional issues that were unknown to me on a weekly basis!"

I want to thank the owner of the card for reaching out to me about this and Gary for figuring out where it was from.

More 2026 Releases

There's been a couple new set announcement recently, with one of the sets actually being scheduled for release next week, so I figured it was time to do a quick round up of them.

- Calbee is releasing yet another "Pro Yakyu Spirits A" set next week on January 27th.  "Pro Yakyu Spirits A" is a mobile game and this will be the third set that Calbee's done as a tie-in.  This looks like it's a follow-on to the set Calbee released at the beginning of December as the card numbers in the new set are starting where that set ended (and now that I look more carefully at the card from that set that Kenny sent me, I see it says "Series 1" on it).  This new set will have 49 cards - 24 "2025 Prospi Selection", 24 "2025 Anniversary Players" and one "secret" card.  I think the "2025 Prospi Selection" cards (which I assume is something from the game) have kira parallels available while the "2025 Anniversary Players" cards have kira and/or facsimile signature parallels.  Not counting the "secret" card, there are four cards per team.  There's some big names in the set including Yuki Yanagita, Kensuke Kondoh, Hayato Sakamoto and Teruaki Sato.  It somewhat surprisingly includes Munetaka Murakami who I would have thought couldn't be a on an NPB card set for active players but clearly the licensing details aren't what I thought they were.  The checklist is kind of surprisingly heavy on foreign players with ten total including Raidel Martinez and Livan Moinelo.  What's a bit odd is at least three of those foreign players are, like Murakami, no longer the property of the teams they are listed with.  Tayron Guerrero is no longer a Chiba Lotte Marine and Tyler Austin and Trevor Bauer are no longer Yokokama DeNA Baystars.  I believe that this is the first time Bauer has appeared on a card in any of the major Japanese card manufacturers and I suspect it will be the last, at least as an active player.

- The Eagles annual team issued set has been issued by Epoch the past few years and I'm starting to wonder if it should still be considered a "team issued" set.  When the 2025 edition of this set was announced, I assumed it was the 1st Version set with a 2nd Version set to be released later in the year.  That turned out to not be the case so I won't make that mistake with this year's edition which will be released on February 11th.  The base set will contain 77 cards of active players, including development players.  I believe that the 2025 draft picks/2026 rookie class are included.  There are silver and gold facsimile signature parallels of each of these cards.  There are three insert sets - "Key Performances", "Mound Star" and "My Routine" and autographed cards of all the players with the exception of any development players who were not 2025 draft picks (if that makes sense).  There are also Rui Muneyama uniform cards along with the somewhat ubiquitous "GEM" premium insert cards in both "White" and "Black" varieties. 

- TIC (aka "Hits" or "Produce 216") is issuing their first "mini colored paper" or "mini shikishi" team set since their Hawks set last year and, not surprisingly, it's again for the Hawks.  Once again, there's 32 oversized cards available - 16 "normal" and 16 "special with foil autograph".  There's 16 players listed so everyone has a "normal" and a "special" card.  There are real autographs available as well.  This year's edition will be released on March 28th.

Card Of The Week January 18

Takahiro Norimoto is not coming to North America this year.  He'd qualified for international free agency after being with the Eagles since 2013 and was looking to move to MLB.  I heard that there was at least one team that showed some interest but apparently they couldn't come to terms.  Instead, Norimoto will join the Yomiuri Giants and be reunited with a former teammate, Masahiro Tanaka.  He was the Eagles' closer the past two years, replacing Yuki Matsui when Matsui left for the Padres, but the Giants will have him returning to a starting role.

Here's a Bushiroad DreamOrder card of Norimoto that was a giveaway at the Eagles game I went to in Sendai in 2024.  It appears to be a promo card that does not have an equivalent card in any of the DreamOrder sets.

RIP Kim Min-jae

Long time KBO infielder Kim Min-jae passed away from cancer this past week at age 53.  Kim was born in Busan and joined his hometown team, the Lotte Giants, after graduating from high school in 1991.  He spent eleven seasons with them before leaving for the SK Wyverns as a free agent after the 2001 season.  After four seasons, he moved on as a free agent again, this time to the Hanwha Eagles where he played the last four years of his career.  He was the first player in KBO history to play in over 2100 games although his 2,113 total games played has since been passed by other players.

He was considered a defensive whiz and was frequently selected for the Korean National Team, most significantly for the 2006 World Baseball Classic and the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where Korea won the Gold Medal.

Following his playing career, he coached for half the KBO teams - Hanwha in 2009-12, the Doosan Bears in 2013, the KT Wiz from 2014 to 2016, Lotte in 2017-18, back to Doosan for 2019-20, the SSG Landers from 2021 to 2023 and back to Lotte in 2024 and 2025.  He also was a coach for the Korean National Team for the 2023 WBC.

Because there weren't many KBO cards produced during his playing career, he didn't have a lot of baseball cards.  TCDB lists six although one of those is an autographed card and one is kinda-sorta an insert card.  I have three of the four base cards along with the insert - it's from the "Future Watch" insert set in the 2006 SP Authentic set.

1999 Teleca #47

1999 Teleca Premium #48

2000 Teleca #41

2006 SP Authentic "Future Watch" WBC-69

2026 Hall Of Fame Class

The Japanese Baseball Hall Of Fame has announced its 2026 inductees and the only one elected was Hideki Kuriyama.  Kuriyama had a seven year career with the Yakult Swallows from 1984 to 1990 and was the manager of the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters from 2012 to 2021.  He managed the Fighters to a Nippon Series championship in 2016 along with a Pacific League pennant in 2012 but I think it's pretty clear that he was elected for two reasons.  Reason number one is that he managed Samurai Japan to the 2023 World Baseball Classic championship and reason number two is that he was Shohei Ohtani's only manager in NPB.

Kuriyama is the fourth of the five Japanese WBC team managers to be elected to the Hall Of Fame, following Sadaharu Oh (2006 team), Tatsunori Hara (2009) and Koji Yamamoto (2013).  Only Hiroki Kokubo (2017) has not been elected and he probably will at some point (although at the Hall's glacial pace, the sun may have burned out by then).  Hirokazu Ibata, who will manage the team for this year's WBC, is also not a Hall Of Famer.

Kuriyama was elected on the "Experts" ballot while the other two ballots - the "Players" ballot and the "Special Awards" ballot - did not result in anyone getting the necessary votes.  Masahiro Kawai fell short of election by two votes on the "Players" ballot.  I think this is the first year there's only been one person elected to the Hall since 1984.

Here are cards of Kuriyama as player, Fighters' manager and Samurai Japan manager:

1989 Calbee #103

2015 Calbee Series Two #M-03

2023 Topps Samurai Japan #13

He took part in a First Pitch Ceremony at the first game at the Fighters' new ballpark on March 30th, 2023, less than ten days after winning the WBC.  Former Fighters managers Trey Hillman and Masataka Nashida also participated but only Kuriyama ended up with a card in BBM's 2nd Version:

2023 BBM 2nd Version #FP01

I wanted to share a couple other cards of him.  He hasn't shown up in many of BBM's OB sets but two of the more recent ones had great photos:

2018 BBM Time Travel 1989 #27

2022 BBM Swallows History 1950-2022 #31

Finally I want to share the card I got him to autograph for me when the Fighters did spring training in Peoria, Arizona back in 2016 - which somehow will be ten years ago next month!

2015 BBM 1st Version #055

Song Sung-Mun Of The San Diego Padres

It kind of got lost among the other signings and the holidays but the San Diego Padres signed former Kiwoom Heroes infielder Song Sung-Mun to a four year contract.  Song was originally drafted by the then-Nexen Heroes in 2015 and made his top level debut that season.  He spent a lot of the next few years on the farm team and missed the entire 2020 season fulfilling his military obligations (which pretty much involved playing for the Sangmu Phoenix, a team associated with the military that plays in the KBO Futures League, KBO's farm league).  He became a regular with the Heroes in 2021 and had the best two years of his career the last two seasons - hitting .340 with 19 home runs and 104 RBIs in 2024 and .315 with 26 home runs and 90 RBIs in 2025.  I think his only experience with the Korean National Team was during the 2024 Premier 12.

Given that there aren't anywhere near as many KBO sets as NPB sets, he doesn't have a whole lot of baseball cards.  TCDB lists only 19 cards for him but I think ten of those are parallels or autograph cards - it's hard to be sure since KBO sets can be somewhat complicated with multiple base set cards sometimes having the same number, making it hard to tell if a particular card listing is a base card or a parallel.  His earliest known cards are from the 2018 SCC sets - #SCCR-01/157 in the KBO League Regular Collection, #SCCR-02R/058 in the KBO Collection 2 Red set and ##SCC-02/171 KBO Premium Collection.  It's possible there are earlier, team-issued cards of him but they are not listed in TCDB.  Here are all the cards I have of him - it's not many as I stopped getting KBO cards after 2021 and he was not in any of the 2020 or 2021 sets:

2018 SCC KBO League Regular Collection #SCCR-01/157

2018 SCC KBO Collection 2 Red #SCCR-02R/058

2019 SCC KBO Regular Collection 1 #SCCR1-19/074

2019 SCC KBO Premium Collection 1 #SCCP1-19/084