Teruaki Sato Rookies

I recently came across an article on SI.com's Collectibles web page entitled "The Top 4 Cards of Teruaki Sato, the Next NPB Superstar" and, I have to say, I was not impressed with it.  According to it, the top card of Sato is an autographed card from the 2025 Epoch NPB Luxury Collection.  A PSA 10 graded instance of this card sold for $2,450 back in August, the highest sale of any of his cards to date.  Well, I'm guessing that it's the top card because it's the first one mentioned in the article.

The second card pictured in the article is Sato's card from the 2019 Panini USA Baseball Stars & Stripes set which I'm pleased got mentioned although the card is misidentified somewhat.  The article labels it as an "autograph patch" card that's /13.  While it is /13, the card is actually a "Silhouettes Signatures Jerseys Prime" card which is an autographed JERSEY card, not a patch card.  There are other versions of his cards from that set that have smaller print runs so I'm not sure why this particular one was picked.

The article then mentions that the "second-highest sale for any of his cards was $2,200" but at no point does it say what card fetched that price.  Was it the Panini card?  Is that why it's being shown?  There's absolutely no context given for that card in the article at all.

Similarly, the third card listed in the article - a PSA slabbed 2021 Epoch Tigers Rookies & Stars autographed card - is shown before a paragraph stating that the third highest sale ever for one of his cards was for $2,000.  But again, there's no indication of which card it was that sold for that amount.  Was it the Rookies & Stars card?

So we're three quarters of the way through the list and I'm kind of like "well, ok".  I like the Panini card and the 2025 Epoch card is ok, I guess.  I'm not sure why you'd pick the 2021 Epoch auto instead of one of the BBM ones from that year but, eh, whatever.  But now the writer has decided that he needs to include a base rookie card for Sato.  Again, ok, that makes sense.  And his choice is this:

2021 Topps NPB #191

Really?  The 2021 Topps NPB card?  You've got to be kidding me.  (BTW - the card is mislabeled in the article as #N16 in the set when it is, in fact, #191.  He also mentions the Chrome version of the card and doesn't attempt to list the card number for it.  It's #31, not #191 or #N16 - the Chrome cards that year didn't necessarily have the same numbers as the non-Chrome cards despite the Chrome set essentially being an ugly parallel version of the non-Chrome set.)

I decided that I needed to do a post showing all of Sato's base set cards from 2021, his rookie season.  By my count, there are 23 in all - of which I have 18.  Keep in mind that these are base cards only so no inserts, no parallels, no "secret version" image variants, no autographed cards and no memorabilia cards.  (TCDB lists 172 total 2021 cards for him which includes all 33 Epoch One cards as well.)  I'm not going to rank these but I will mention the ones I like the most as well as the least when I finish.

First off, here are the cards I have of him - this is roughly in the order that they were published that year:

2021 BBM Rookie Edition #081

2021 BBM Icons - Progress #22

2021 BBM 1st Version #209

2021 BBM 1st Version #CT23

2021 Epoch NPB #281

2021 Calbee Series Two #117

2021 BBM Tigers #T48

2021 BBM Tigers #T76

2021 BBM Tigers #T79

2021 BBM Tigers #T80

2021 BBM Tigers #T81

2021 BBM 2nd Version #510

2021 Calbee Series Three #188

2021 BBM Tigers History 1935-2021 #86

2021 BBM Legendary Rookies #LR90

2021 BBM Fusion #29

2021 BBM Fusion #55

And here are the other five that I don't actually own:

2021 Epoch Tigers Rookies & Stars #25

2021 BBM Genesis #069

2021 BBM Rookie Edition Premium #RP22

2021 Epoch Tigers Stars & Legends #26

2021 Topps NPB Chrome #31

I need to point out that the Stars & Legends card I'm showing is not the base card but a parallel.  It was the only image of the card I could find on-line.  

I should also point out that the Topps Chrome card wasn't actually published until 2022.

I think my favorites of all these cards are his Rookie Edition, Calbee Series Three and BBM Tigers team set (#T48) cards.  My least favorites are the Topps Chrome card (because I think the Chrome cards are hideous) and the Genesis and Rookie Edition Premium cards (because I prefer cards with actual backgrounds - which I why I didn't buy those sets in 2021).  If I ranked them all, the non-Chrome Topps card would probably fall in the middle of the pack or maybe a little lower.  I like that it's got a unique photo compared to the others but the card design itself is pretty unattractive.  The big thing that stood out with the 2021 Topps cards - both the NPB and MLB versions - was that the player name on the front was way too small, especially for old eyes like mine.

I guess what really bothers me about the article isn't just that I disagree with the base rookie card he picked, but just how crappy it is.  I feel like someone asked the author to write something about Sato's baseball cards and he threw this together by looking up what three cards sold for the most and then added the Topps base card because it didn't take any research.  He also added in some minimal details about Sato's NPB career along with a couple boiler plate introductory paragraphs about players coming to MLB from "Nippon Professional Baseball Organization"[sic] that has almost as much career information about Masanori Murakami as the rest of the article has about Sato.  My dude - players have been coming to MLB from Nippon Professional Baseball regularly for 30 years now.  You probably don't need to go into too much detail about it unless you've got a word count you're trying to meet.  It makes me wonder if they have any editors at SI.com.  Did no one else look at this before they published it?

I don't think the article is AI generated slop but it's certainly lazy.  I'm looking at some of the author's other "work" and it looks of a kind.  I especially like this article that shows this for Munetaka Murakami's NPB rookie card:

I think that's actually Claude Rains.

I don't know, maybe this is an elaborate practical joke on SI's part.  They certainly appear to be committed to the bit though.