Japanese Baseball Cards: Samurai Japan WBC Team Members Who Have Played In MLB

I mentioned in my post the other day about the new Topps Chrome Samurai Japan set that I had researched how many players on Japan's six WBC team rosters have played in MLB. There are 37 so far (with more on the way, of course, possibly as soon as next year). It turned out that the new set has only 16 of these players with the remaining players all being currently active in NPB so I decided that I'd do a post featuring all 37 players.

I thought it was kind of interesting that there were five players who played in MLB BEFORE they played in the WBC. Two of these are kind of obvious - both Ichiro and Atsunori Ohtsuka were in MLB before the first World Baseball Classic. Lars Nootbaar is also somewhat obvious as he's never played in NPB (although it wouldn't surprise me if he did at some point). One of the others was Yusei Kikuchi which was kind of surprising - you'd have thought he might have played on either the 2013 or 2017 teams. The last guy was Shohei Ohtani which, when I thought about it, made a lot of sense. He'd intended to play on the 2017 team but ended up skipping the tournament due to an injury that kept him mostly sidelined that year, his final one in Japan before leaving for Southern California.

I tried to pick cards for each of the 37 players that were "official" WBC cards as much as possible but there were a couple players who it was impossible for. For most of those players, I used other Samurai Japan cards. A couple of them were from "unofficial" WBC sets (mostly the 2017 Calbee Samurai Japan set) but I was forced to use a different Calbee Samurai Japan set for Hirokazu Sawamura, one that was not from the same year as the WBC. And since Kikuchi NEVER played for any Samurai Japan team before this year*, I'm using a card of his from the Lions.

* He has WBC cards from this year but since I stopped getting new cards, I don't have any

I also tried to not have more than one card from a particular set but that proved impossible as well.

Anyway, enough with the process details that no one cares about. Here are the players: