RIP Bob Horner

Bob Horner passed away yesterday at the age of 68 years old.  Horner was a star player at Arizona State in the 1970's, winning the first ever Golden Spikes award in 1978.  He was the number one overall pick in the MLB draft that year and was immediately put on the Atlanta Braves' major league roster, skipping the minor leagues entirely.  He'd hit 23 home runs in just over half a season and was named National League Rookie Of The Year.  He'd would team up with with Dale Murphy to be a deadly middle of the lineup combination for much of the next nine seasons in Atlanta, hitting 215 home runs over that time span.  And then, in 1987, Bob Horner went to play in Japan.

Horner had become a free agent following the 1986 season and wanted a contract for $2 million.  No major league team would offer him that but the Yakult Swallows did.  Horner signed and headed overseas.

A major league star at the peak of his career signing with a Japanese club was unheard of at the time (and pretty much still is).  These were the days of Japan's global economic dominance and it seemed like it was just another example of the Japanese buying up everything.  Robert Whiting used Horner's signing and experience playing in Japan as the opening chapter in his 1988 book "You Gotta Have Wa" and put the signing in context:

Japan was at the height of its economic muscle.  Japanese interests owned 54 percent of all the cash in the world's banks, 65 percent of all Manhattan real estate, and 3 percent of the entire U.S. national debt.  A staid Japanese insurance company had paid 39 million dollars for Van Gogh's painting Sunflower.

And now, in what one TV commentator had called the piece de resistance, a Japanese baseball team had outbid the American major leagues for a prime American player: James Robert Horner.

What Whiting didn't know or account for at the time was that the main reason the Swallows were able to sign Horner was that the major league owners were illegally conspiring to not sign each other's players.  Almost no free agents changed teams that winter.  What he also couldn't know was that the Japanese economy would stagnate starting in 1990.  Horner's signing by the Swallows was not a harbinger of things to come but basically a one-off due to unique circumstances - Japan's economic clout and MLB collusion.

The Swallows issued Horner uniform number 50 with the implication that he'd hit that many home runs, despite not joining the team until mid-April.  For the first few weeks, it looked like that was a possibility.  He homered in his first game and hit several more in his next games.  But inevitably the league adjusted to him and and pitchers stopped challenging him.  He finished 1987 with a .327 average, 31 home runs and 73 RBIs in 93 games.  

The Swallows offered him a three year contract for $10 million dollars but Horner had had enough of Japan after one season.  He returned to MLB and signed a one year deal with the Cardinals.  He was invited to spring training with the Orioles in 1989 but retired instead.  

Horner was one of only two Golden Spikes winners to play in NPB (with Trevor Bauer being the other) and one of only four number one overall picks to do so (along with Danny Goodwin, Floyd Bannister and Bryan Bullington).  

As far as I can tell, he only had six cards showing him with the Swallows that came out in 1987.  Five of these were in that year's Calbee set, numbers 101, 111, 121, 201 and 319.  The other was from the Play Ball set which was an unlicensed set issued in the United States, possibly to capitalize on Horner's presence on the Swallows.  He's only appeared in two OB sets since he retired - the 2013 BBM Legendary Foreigners and the 2020 Epoch OB Club Career Achievements sets.  Here are the cards I have of him:

1987 Calbee #101

1987 Calbee #111

1987 Calbee #121

1987 Play Ball #1

2013 BBM Legendary Foreigners #35

In rereading Robert Whiting's book when doing research for this post, I saw that he mentioned a commercial Horner had done for Suntory beer.  I went spelunking through YouTube and found this, although I'm not positive it's the one Whiting meant:

Japanese MLB Players With No NPB Experience

Rikuu Nishida made his MB debut with the White Sox today.  Nishida was born in Osaka, Japan but played college baseball in Oregon for Mt. Hood Community College and the University of Oregon.  He was drafted by the White Sox in 2023 and has been working his way up their farm system ever since.

I think that Nishida is the seventh Japanese baseball player to make it to MLB without having played in NPB first but I'm not positive.  Part of the uncertainty is defining what "Japanese baseball player" means.  Does it mean being born in Japan?   That would mean that someone like Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, who was born in Okinawa to an American serviceman father and Japanese mother, or Lee Jung-hoo, who was born in Nagoya while his father Lee Jong-beom was playing for the Dragons, would count.  I'm not sure folks like that are what most people think about when thinking about "Japanese baseball players", however, so I'm going to go with "players who could reasonably be expected to hold a Japanese passport".

The six previous players by my definition are Mac Suzuki, Michael Nakamura, Kazuhito Tadano, Junichi Tazawa, Gosuke Katoh and Lars Nootbaar.  I'm a little iffy on whether or not Nootbaar has a Japanese passport but obviously he meets the definition of "Japanese" for the purposes of the World Baseball Classic.  I suspect Nootbaar would probably not want to let anyone know he's got a Japanese passport if he ever decided to play in NPB as he would then be subject to their draft rather than being a free agent (which is why Katoh was drafted by the Fighters despite being born in California to Japanese parents).

Four of these six players eventually played in NPB with Tazawa and Nootbaar (so far) being the exceptions.  Three of those four joined the Fighters oddly enough.  Tazawa had wanted to join NPB but was pretty much blackballed after spurning the league for MLB in the late 00's.  He had made himself available for the 2020 NPB draft but wasn't taken by anyone.

Here are NPB cards of the four plus a Japanese WBC card of Nootbaar:

2003 Calbee Series One #082

2006 BBM Nippon Series #S08

2013 BBM 1st Version #171

2024 Epoch Fighters Premier Edition #29

2023 Topps Samurai Japan #10

There have been a number of Japanese baseball players who started their professional careers in North America (but didn't necessarily make it to MLB) before ending up back in Japan with NPB.  I did a post on a bunch of them some years back (which included Suzuki, Nakamura and Tadano) but I don't know if I missed anyone or if there's anyone that's come in the years since then.

Card Of The Week May 24

Taisei Irie of the Baystars tied a dubious record yesterday when he threw 60 pitches in the first inning of his start against the Swallows.  He faced ten batters and gave up six earned runs on six hits (including three doubles) and a walk.  Incredibly, he gave up all the hits (and the walk) after having gotten the first two batters of the game out.  It was the only inning he pitched and the six runs were the only runs scored in the entire game.  

The record he tied was set 29 years ago by Bob Milacki of the Kintesu Buffaloes, who gave up 10 runs int the first inning against the Seibu Lions on June 27th, 1997.  Milacki's stint with Kintetsu was fairly short-lived, going 0-2 with an ERA of 7.30 in six games (including five starts).  Irie was the Baystars first pick in the 2020 draft so I suspect he'll be given a longer rope than Milacki was.

Here are cards of the two players:

2021 BBM 1st Version #265

1997 BBM #166

RIP Rick Krueger

I wanted to do a quick post on the passing of Rick Krueger, the former pitcher who was somewhat briefly a member of the Yomiuri Giants in 1979.  Krueger had signed with the Boston Red Sox in 1971 out of Michigan State University (I'm not entirely sure why he wasn't subject to the draft) and spent seven seasons (one of which he missed due to injury) in their organization, including 11 games in the majors between 1975 and 1977.  He was traded to Cleveland for Frank Duffy just before the 1978 season started and split that season between Triple-A Portland and the big league team.  

He joined the Giants in the spring of 1979 with the expectation that he'd be replacing Shigeru Kobayashi in the rotation - Kobayashi had just been dealt to the Tigers as part of the resolution of the "Egawa affair".  However, he made just one start before the team was concerned about his stamina and moved him to the bullpen.  He ultimately got into just 18 games, going 2-1 with an ERA of 4.66.  He was sent home by the team in mid-September and hung up his spikes after playing that winter in Puerto Rico (despite getting a spring training invite from Cleveland for 1980).  He would later coach at Cornerstone College and ran a baseball school.  He was 77 when he passed away on May 7th.

I wouldn't have thought that Krueger had many Japanese baseball cards but he had a couple more than I expected.  He didn't appear in any of Calbee's sets for 1979 but he did show up in that year's Takara Giants set.  He was also in a card set given away in Gekkan Giants magazine as uncut sheets of six cards.  The most common Japanese card of him, however, is from the 1979 TCMA set.  I have the TCMA and magazine cards:

1979-80 Gekkan Giants #19 

1979 TCMA #58

 I used his SABR biography as a source for this post.

Cards From Kenny

I received yet another envelope in the mail today from Kenny (Zippy Zappy) in Japan.  As he promised me a few weeks ago, this one contained some cards from the lastest Calbee set, 2026 Series One.  There were two base set cards and two insert cards.  Curiously, three of the four cards featured members of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows:

#007

#059

#L-4

#S-23

Now that I have some 2026 Calbees in hand, I see that my initial impression that this year's cards looked identical to last year's was pretty much correct.  (Sean has mentioned to me in an email that the only difference between this year's cards and last year's that he's seen is "a slightly different font size for the player name on the back".)  I really wish I had some insight in to why Calbee decided to stop making any sort of effort since at least 2023.

Regardless of Calbee's shortcomings, however, I'm grateful as always to receive the cards.  Thanks once again, Kenny!

Card Of The Week May 17

There was a trade last week in NPB.  Mid-season trades are nowhere near as common in Japan as they are in MLB but they do happen.  This was a bit unusual, though, as the Baystars shipped their starting catcher, Yudai Yamamoto, off to the Hawks in exchange for a couple of their former number one draft picks - Tomoya Inoue (first pick in the 2020 draft) and Shuto Ogata (first pick in the 2017 ikusei draft).  Here are cards for all three players:

2024 Topps NPB #37

2021 BBM Hawks #H50

2023 Hawks Volume 3 #23SBH329

Topps, Team Sets, Game Cards, 2nd Version and a KBO set

Time for another round up of recently announced NPB sets...

- Topps is back for their sixth year of doing NPB sets.  I'm not exactly sure of the details of this year's edition of their flagship set though - TradingCardJournal.com says the set will be released on June 12 but Topps' Japanese website says it'll be May 29th.  Neither listing says how big the set will be but I'm assuming it'll be the usual 216 cards (18 cards per team).  There will be insert cards but it beats the hell out of me what they'll be because Topps didn't bother including that information either - other than they're going to have one that uses the 1991 design.  There'll be the usual myriad of parallels but again there are no details other than they'll exist and some of them will be serially numbered.  There will be autographed cards of active NPB players, "active players currently playing in MLB" which I assume means active former NPB players (I don't expect to see Aaron Judge cards) and retired players (which have been some of Topps' more interesting inclusions).  The big news is that Topps will include relic cards for active players with this set for the first time.

- While I'm on the subject of Topps, I should mention that there are some World Baseball Classic inserts available in the recently released Bowman set but they're pretty rare and expensive.  The 25 card "Anime" insert set features anime-style cartoon images of a number of active and retired players including Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, Cal Raleigh, Paul Skenes and Bobby Witt, Jr. in their WBC uniforms.  One of the retired players in the set is Sadaharu Oh which is pretty cool and the active MLB players include Munetaka Murakami, Kazuma Okamoto and Tatsuya Imai.  There's a kanji variation of the "Anime" inserts as well that's only for the Japanese players (Ohtani, Oh, Murakami, Okamoto, Imai along with Hideo Nomo and Shotaro Morii, a farmhand in the Sacramento Athletics organization).  

- BBM has announced the final three of their "comprehensive" team sets for 2026.  As usual, each set has a base set of 81 cards, most of which are "regular" player cards featuring the manager and the players on the 70 man roster plus a couple subsets (which may not be fully defined yet) to fill out the set.  Each set also has 18 non-premium insert cards split into a variety of sets which also may not be fully defined yet (or may have title that doesn't translate to something that makes any sense).  The sets also have two or three types of premium inserts that are serially numbered - Treasure, Esperanza and Admirar.  BBM also introduced a new premium insert called "My Fave" with this year's Giants set so all four of these sets also have those available.  There will be rare parallel versions of some of the "regular" player cards that will feature photo variants or different backgrounds.

Release Date	Team	Regular Cards	Subsets	Inserts	Other
Early July	Buffaloes	69	Reborn(2), Samurai Soul(2), Heirloom Sword(2), Small But Amazing(2), Natural(4)	Go All Together(9), Beyond The Dream That Must Come True(3), Golden Egg(3), Three Pillars(3), Treasure(24), Esperanza(9), Admirar(6), My Fave(12)	Autograph cards
Mid July	Marines	68	Rising Young Players(4), Veteran Players(2), Specialists(3), Early Season Highlights(4)	Key Players(9), Promising Players(3), Veterans(3), Rookies(3), Treasure(23), Esperanza(9), Admirar(6), My Fave(12)	Autograph & Memorabilia cards
Late July	Dragons	69	Young Starting Pitchers(3), Infield Key Players(3), Tokai Heroes(6)	Unstoppable(9), No Limit(3), Rise Above(3), Shine Bright(3), Treasure(24), Esperanza(9), Admirar(6), My Fave(24)	Autograph & Memorabilia cards

- BBM has also announced that this year's edition of 2nd Version, the second part of their flagship set, will be released in late August.   The base set follows the pattern of almost all 2nd Version sets since 2015 - 216 player cards (18 for each team), 12 team checklists, 36 "1st Version Update" cards (three for each team), 36 "Cross Forest" cards (three for each team, numbered in continuation of the same subset in 1st Version) and a currently unspecified number of "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards.  The "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards are likely short-printed again, so the base set without them will be 300 cards.  There's six different insert sets - "The Beginning", "My Generation (Year Of The Rat)", "Hero's Theme", "Combined", "Treasure" and "Foil Picturesque".  All of these have 12 cards except for "Treasure" which has 36.  There's the usual plethora of parallels of the player cards along with the "Secret", "Ultra Secret", and "Super Ultra Secret" photo variations.  There will also be memorabilia cards and autographed cards - including autographed cards using the designs from BBM's team sets along with "buyback" autographs.

- Epoch has announced another "Premier Edition" team set.  This one is for the Fighters and will hit the stores on July 18th.  The base set will contain 45 cards - 37 for active players and eight for OB players.  There's a "hologram" parallel available for each of the base set cards.  The set has the usual large batch of inserts that all the "Premier Edition" sets have- three varieties of "Regular Foil Signature" ("silver", "gold" and "hologram") (18 cards each), two varieties of "Regular Decomori Signature" ("hologram" and "hologram parallel") (18 cards each), five varieties of "Time To Shine" ("A","B","C","D","E") (six cards each) and three varieties of "Decomori Signature" ("gold","green" and "hologram") (six cards each).  I think all the inserts are serially numbered.  There are also the "GEM" and "BLACK GEM" "special insert cards" (nine cards in each) that I think are much more limited.  There are five different types of autographed cards - "Authentic" 37), "Star" (6), "Rookie" (5), "Legendary" (8) and "Combo"6).  

- Bandai is issuing updates to their "Professional Baseball FanStars" collectible card game.  The Vol. 2 Booster Packs for both the Central League and Pacific League will be released on May 30th.  Both sets will have 96 cards - 36 "Normal", 30 "Rare", 18 "Star Rare" and 12 "Super Star Rare".  In addition, Bandai will issue a set called "EX Booster Pack Vol.1" on August 1 but there's not really any more information about it than that.  

- And finally, the first KBO set for 2026 has been announced by SCC.  It's called "Festa Set" and will be released on June 6th.  As is kind of standard for KBO sets, it's a bit confusing but I think the base set is 80 cards (eight per team) with all the base cards being labeled "Sporty".  There are also 80 "Treasure" cards but I'm not sure if these should be considered inserts or parallels or just 80 more base set cards.  There are 49 autographed cards available which works out to five per team except for SSG which one has four.