1995 Maui Sting Rays Team Roster Poster

I was browsing Ebay recently, looking to see what was available from the Hawaiian Winter League, when I came across an interesting item.

Of course, before I get into that, I should probably quickly explain what the Hawaiian Winter League was.  It was a four team league in Hawaii that existed from 1993 to 1997.  Games were played each year between October and December.  The unique thing about this league is that it featured players from MLB, NPB and KBO.  Some of the big names from Japan who played in the league included Ichiro, Hiroki Kokubo, Kazuo Matsui, Atsunori Inaba, Kenji Johjima, Tsuyoshi Shinjyo, Hideki Okajima and Nobuhiko Matsunaka.  

Sadly, the only year that baseball cards exist for the league was 1996 (despite claims to the contrary) so there's only a handful of cards of Japanese players available.  So I was pleasantly surprised to come across a poster showing the roster of the 1995 Maui Sting Rays on faux baseball cards:

The key player on this poster is, of course, Hall Of Famer Todd Helton, so the asking price on it is nearly $600 (but down from the original $900).  What's of more interest to me, though, is that there are five Japanese players on it, all members of the Seibu Lions.

This is very much a case of "one of these things is not like the others" as the five Lions are Atsuhiro Chihara, Katsuhiko Miyaji, Koji Tahara, Hirofumi Teramoto and...Kazuo Matsui.  I thought I'd do some quickie bios of the five players and show baseball cards of each of them.

Actually, I can't show a baseball card of Atsuhiro Chihara because, as far as I know, he never had any.  He was a sixth round pick by the Lions in the 1991 draft which was before BBM started including cards of each team's entire draft in their flagship set each year (and before they started doing "comprehensive" team sets featuring all the players on a team's 70 man roster).  He was with the Lions from 1992 to 1997 but never played for the ichi-gun team.

1998 Calbee #092

I suspect that Kazuo Matsui needs no introduction here but you can check out the post I did for him when he retired in 2018 after a 25 year career split between NPB and MLB.

2002 BBM Lions PL Champs #L25

Katsuhiko Miyaji probably had the second best career out of these five players after Matsui.  He was the Lions fourth pick in the 1989 draft and had a 17 year career between the Lions (1990-2003) and Hawks (2004-06).  He blossomed with the Hawks in 2005 at age 33, making the Opening Day lineup for the first in his career.  He played in 125 games and hit .311, making the All Star team and winning a Best 9 award.  Sadly, he hurt his wrist on Opening Day of 2006 and didn't play much.  He was released after the season and hung up his spikes after one year in independent ball.

2006 Lions Original Player Card #68

Koji Tahara, Seibu's sixth pick in the 1992 draft, had a fifteen year career with the Lions as a backup catcher, mostly on the farm team.  He only played in 99 games with the top team over the course of his career and 46 of those were in 2005.  He retired as a player after the 2008 season and, appropriately enough, has been a bullpen catcher for the Lions ever since.

1995 BBM #527

Hirofumi Teramoto was Seibu's fifth pick in the 1994 draft he played for the team through the 2001 season.  A shoulder injury derailed his career in 1997 and he ultimately only pitched in 16 games at the ichi-gun level, none of which were after 1998.