Kazuma Okamoto, formerly of the Yomiuri Giants, signed a four year deal worth $60 million with the Toronto Blue Jays a few days ago. Okamoto was the Giants' first round pick in the 2014 draft out of Chiben Gakuen High School. Okamoto spent most of his first three seasons as a professional on the farm team, not becoming a regular with the ichi-gun squad until 2018. He had a breakout season that year, hitting .309 with 33 home runs and 100 RBIs. That would be the first of six consecutive seasons that he'd hit over 30 home runs with a high of 41 in 2023. He dipped to "only" 27 in 2024 and was injured for much of last season, causing him to hit just 15 home runs in only 69 games.
Okamoto led the Central League in home runs three times (2020-21 & 2023) and RBIs twice (2020 & 2021). He's won two Best 9 awards (2020 & 2024) and three Golden Gloves (20-22 & 2024) and is a five time All Star (2018-19, 2021, 2023-24) - he was selected in 2022 but withdrew due to having caught COVID.
TCDB lists 14 rookie cards for Okamoto from 2015 and that number isn't as inflated by parallels, memorabilia and autographed cards as Imai and Murakami's counts were. I think he has seven rookie cards from base sets. As usual, his first card is from BBM's Rookie Edition set (#054) - actually his first TWO cards are from that set as he also appears in the "Then & Now" subset (#112). His other BBM cards are in 1st Version (#186), the Giants team set (#G50 and #G78 in the "Star-To-Be" subset) and the Rookie Edition Premium set (#RP19). His only non-BBM rookie card is from the Bandai Owners League 02 set (#66) which may actually be a short-print or insert card. Here's three of his BBM rookie cards:
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| 2015 BBM Rookie Edition #054 |
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| 2015 BBM 1st Version #186 |
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| 2015 BBM Giants #G50 |
Here's a card of him from every year for the rest of his career up until 2024 (when I stopped buying new cards):
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| 2016 Giants Players Day |
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| 2017 Epoch Giants #28 |
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| 2018 Calbee Series Two #131 |
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| 2019 BBM 1st Version #233 Secret Version |
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| 2020 BBM Fusion #TH04 |
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| 2021 BBM 1st Version #176 |
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| 2020 Epoch NPB #092 |
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| 2023 BBM 1st Version #259 |
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| 2024 Topps Stadium Club NPB #81 |
I want to end this post with a couple Samurai Japan cards of Okamoto. He's played in a handful of the friendly matches with foreign teams (the 2018 MLB All Star tour, the March 2019 games against Mexico and the November 2022 games against Australia) but the only major tournament he's played in was the 2023 World Baseball Classic. He had six WBC cards that year and he also appeared in the 2019 Calbee Samurai Japan set and the Topps Now singles and team set for the 2022 games. Here are cards from each of these groups:
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| 2019 Calbee Samurai Japan #SJ-27 |
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| 2022 Topps Now Samurai Japan team set #SJ-20 |
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| 2023 Topps Now WBC #WBC-52 |
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