Card Of The Week November 1

The 2026 NPB season drew to a close on Wednesday as the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks successfully defended their status as NPB champions by completing their four game sweep of the Yokohama DeNA Baystars.  The Series was closer then it sounds with the first three games all going into extra innings.  Game Three featured a walk off home run by the eventual Series MVP Tomoya Masaki who was the 18th player to ever hit one.  It was the 13th championship for the Hawks which ties them with the Lions for second place in NPB history (behind the Giants' 22).  Amazingly it was SoftBanks' ninth in the past 16 years - they won in 2011, 2014-15, 2017-20 and 2025-26. 

BBM used to issue a box set for the Nippon Series from 1991 until 2012 that included all the players who appeared in the Series as well as cards for the the Series MVP, the "Fighting Spirit" award winner (kind of a "MVP for the losing team" award) and the three "Outstanding Player" award winners.  Since BBM no longer publishes this set, I've been featuring those award winners in the first "Card Of The Week" post following the end of the Series since 2014 (since I didn't know they weren't going to do a set in 2013):

Series MVP Tomoya Masaki (2024 Hawks 2025 Season Vol. 1 #24SBH105)

"Fighting Spirit" Katsuki Azuma (2022 BBM 1st Version #137)

"Outstanding Player" Kazuki Sugiyama (2022 BBM Hawks #H19)

"Outstanding Player" Yudai Yamamoto (2024 Topps Now Samurai Japan #5)

"Outstanding Player" Yudai Shoji (2025 BBM 35th Anniversary/Shukan Baseball 4000th Issue #233)

Yudai Yamamoto presented a bit of a challenge as he'd been traded by the Baystars to the Hawks in the middle of the season and so far there's only a couple cards of him with SoftBank.  Needless to say, I don't have any of them.  But I didn't want to share any of his Baystars cards since I didn't want to mislead anyone that one of the "Outstanding Player" awards went to a member of the losing team (which is rare but happens sometimes).  So I decided to use a Samurai Japan card of him instead.

Yudai Shoji presented a different issue which I'm sure is going to become more and more common.  Since his rookie season was 2025, the year after I stopped getting new cards, I only have two cards of him.  I shared one of them a few weeks back and so I shared the other one here.  I expect that there will be more and more players doing things that I'd feature in posts like this that I'm going to have few or no cards of.  Not sure yet how I'm going to meet this challenge.