WTF Topps?

Topps is releasing three NPB sets this week - Stadium Club, Chrome and 206 - and there's information up on their Japanese website for all three of them.  The checklists for all three sets are available and from the very limited look that I took, I think all three sets contain the same players.  The base sets are each 216 cards which breaks down to 18 cards per team.  

While perusing the checklists today, I noticed something that I'm unsure how to describe my feelings about.  I was going to say "makes my blood boil" but that seems a bit excessive for a baseball card checklist.  I can't even say I was surprised because I really don't expect Topps to put any real effort into their NPB sets.  I guess annoyed and disappointed is the best way to describe my reaction.

I guess I should mention what caused this reaction, huh?  I'll get to that in a minute but first I'd like to remind you of what irritated me about their "flagship" set in both 2023 and 2024 - the sets weren't up-to-date.  All the photos had been taken the previous season and players who had changed teams over the off season weren't included in the sets.  It still seems incredible to me that Topps can't be "up-to-date" with a set that comes out a month after BBM's very "up-to-date" 1st Version set (which features photos taken in early training camp).  

The source of my ire with the new sets is centered around the inclusion of the team managers in the checklists.  According to these sets, the manager of the Lions is Kazuo Matsui, who stepped down as the team's manager in late May, over six months ago.  For whatever reason, Topps decided not to have cards of Hisanobu Watanabe, Matsui's replacement, instead.

All I can conclude is that Topps either doesn't care to put out a good product or is incapable of it.  They can get away with that crap in North American because they have a monopoly in MLB but they have actual competition in Japan.  My fear, though, is that instead of Topps improving their product, the other companies are going to decide they can get by with an inferior product.  I feel like Calbee is already heading down that path and some aspects of Epoch's NPB set this year worry me as well.  Hopefully, BBM will resist the "Topps-ification" of the NPB card market.

Card Of The Week December 8

It's funny how things work out sometimes.

A couple weeks back when I was researching Rich Duran's brief NPB career, I found what I thought was an interesting story about how the Kintetsu Buffaloes ended up with one of their best foreign players.  After parting ways with Charlie Manuel after the 1980 season, the team had struggled for a few years to find foreign players with productive bats.  Vic Harris, Ike Hamption, Larry Wolfe and Mike Edwards weren't really working out as hoped.  In 1984, the team signed the previously mentioned Duran along with four time All Star Don Money, the 37 year old veteran third baseman who'd spent 16 years in MLB with the Phillies and Brewers.

Money was quickly disappointed with what he had gotten himself into in Japan.  He was unhappy with the Buffaloes' facilities as well as his and his families experiences away from the ballpark.  While promised a brand-new condo to live in, the family instead was put up in an older apartment that had a cockroach infestation.  There were few English speaking residents nearby, causing his wife to feel very isolated and his daughter was having difficulty in the school she was going to in Kobe.  After three months in Kansai (but only a month or so of the regular season), the entire family left to go back to the States, with Money announcing his retirement from baseball.  He played in 29 games, hitting .260 with eight home runs.  Duran soon followed the Moneys back to the US, leaving Kintetsu to scramble to find two new foreign hitters.

They soon signed them - Mark Corey and Dick Davis.  The 28 year old Corey wasn't really an improvement over the other foreign players Kintetsu had had recently, hitting just .215 in 31 games, but the 30 year old Davis performed well.  He hit .310 with 18 home runs in 78 games over the remainder of the season and went on to hit .343 with 40 home runs in 1985 and .337 with 37 home runs in 1986.  His 1986 season was marred by his charging the mound after getting hit on the elbow by Osamu Higashio of the Lions.  He was suspended for ten days and fined 100,000 yen for the incident.

His numbers tailed off some in 1987 - possibly due to injury as he only played in 91 games - although he still hit over .300.  About halfway through the 1988 season, however, something off the field ended his career.  Due to complaints about loud parties, the police raided his apartment in Kobe and found cannabis along with "drug paraphernalia".  Davis claimed it was a treatment for a heal injury that a friend had given him and that he was unaware of what it was but Kintetsu released him (although they paid his full season's salary).

The Buffaloes had been doing a better job at signing foreign batters over the previous few years, with Bombo Rivera and Ben Oglivie having some good seasons, but the loss of Davis created a big hole.  But his replacement was already in Japan.

Prior to the 1988 season, the Chunichi Dragons had signed a 27 year old Dodgers farm hand to contract, The rules at the time only allowed two foreign players on the top team's roster and Chunichi had Gary Rajsich and Taigen Kaku filling those slots, so Ralph Bryant was relegated the farm in Japan as well.  

Scouts from the Buffaloes had liked what they had seen of Bryant in minor league games so the team ended up purchasing him from Chunichi to replace Davis.  He immediately paid dividends, hitting .307 with 34 home runs in just 74 games after joining the team in late June.  He followed that up with an amazing season in 1989, hitting 49 home runs with 121 RBIs and leading the Buffaloes to just their third Pacific League championship ever.  They lost to the Giants in the Nippon Series but Bryant was named the Pacific League MVP.  He'd spend six more seasons with Kintetsu and finished his eight year NPB career with 259 home runs.  The Buffaloes replaced him after the 1995 season with Tuffy Rhodes, probably the only better foreign player in franchise history.

So, just to recap, Don Money's abandonment of Kintetsu in 1984 led to them signing Dick Davis, who's drug bust in 1988 led to them signing Ralph Byrant, one the team's best foreign players ever.  Just like they planned it, I'm sure.

Here are cards of all three players:

2013 BBM Deep Impact #13

1988 Takara Buffaloes #15 (Davis)

1995 BBM #355

Calbee Checklists

I was kind of embarrassed that it took until early last year for me to realize that Calbee's always (or nearly always) had twelve checklist cards across their full set for a reason - there's one checklist card dedicated to each of the twelve NPB teams.  To be clear, what I mean by that is not the checklist cards list each team's cards separately but that each of the twelve cards shows a photo that's related to a different team.  So for example, in the two 2024 Calbee Series, the checklists in Series One showed photos from the Tigers, Buffaloes,  Carp, Marines, Baystars and Hawks and those in Series Two showed photos from the Giants, Swallows, Dragons, Eagles, Lions and Fighters.

I got curious and wondered when Calbee started doing this.  After all, I had done a big "Calbee History" series a couple years ago and never noticed it.  So I did a little research and discovered that they started doing it in 2004 which kind of makes sense.  Calbee didn't have checklist cards with their sets until 1997 and the themes for them varied from year to year.  I don't know what all of the themes were but they were sequential photos of certain players in 1998 (Hideki Matsui in Series One, Yoshinobu Takahashi in Series Two and Kazuhiro Sasaki in Series Three) and 2000 (Daisuke Matsuzaka in Series One, Koji Uehara in Series Two and Ichiro in Series Three); six card puzzles in 2001 (Matsuzaka and Matsui in Series One, Kazuhisa Ishii and Norihiro Nakamura in Series Two); player pairs in 2002 (with one player from each team represented) and game highlights in 2003 (2002 Nippon Series highlights in Series One and early season highlights in Series Two).  2003 was the first year that Calbee started following the lead of BBM and issuing the same number of "regular" player cards for each team but it wasn't until a year later that they did the same with the checklist cards.

Here's chart showing the break down of the checklists by team since 2004:

Year	Marines	Dragons	Hawks	Tigers	Carp	Fighters	Orix	Lions	Eagles*	Swallows	Baystars	Giants
2004	C-1	C-8	C-6	C-7	C-3	C-12	C-5	C-10	C-2	C-9	C-4	C-11
2005	C-12	C-5	C-1	C-10	C-7	C-4	C-2	C-11	C-3	C-8	C-6	C-9
2006	C-1	C-4	C-3	C-2	C-12	C-9	C-7	C-5	C-11	C-8	C-6	C-10
2007	C-7	C-2	C-5	C-4	C-10	C-1	C-9	C-3	C-11	C-6	C-12	C-8
2008	C-4	C-3	C-6	C-5	C-9	C-2	C-12	C-10	C-8	C-11	C-7	C-1
2009	C-7	C-6	C-11	C-4	C-8	C-5	C-3	C-1	C-9	C-10	C-12	C-2
2010	C-10	C-3	C-6	C-7	C-9	C-2	C-12	C-8	C-4	C-5	C-11	C-1
2011	C-8	C-11	C-12	C-9	C-3	C-6	C-4	C-10	C-2	C-5	C-1	C-7
2012	C-11	C-2	C-1	C-8	C-10	C-3	C-7	C-5	C-9	C-4	C-12	C-6
2013	C-3	C-10	C-7	C-4	C-6	C-11	C-12	C-9	C-5	C-8	C-2	C-12
2014	C-8	C-5	C-6	C-9	C-7	C-2	C-4	C-10	C-12	C-1	C-3	C-11
2015	C-7	C-8	C-1	C-4	C-6	C-5	C-3	C-9	C-11	C-12	C-10	C-2
2016	C-5	C-10	C-1	C-6	C-8	C-3	C-9	C-7	C-11	C-2	C-12	C-4
2017	C-5		C-3	C-8	C-2	C-1		C-7			C-6	C-4
2018	C-11	C-10	C-1	C-4	C-2	C-9	C-7	C-3	C-5	C-12	C-6	C-8
2019	C-09	C-10	C-03	C-12	C-02	C-05	C-07	C-01	C-11	C-04	C-08	C-06
2020	C-09	C-11	C-03	C-08	C-06	C-10	C-12	C-01	C-05	C-07	C-04	C-02
2021	C-03	C-06	C-01	C-04	C-10	C-09	C-11	C-05	C-07	C-12	C-08	C-02
2022	C-04	C-09	C-08	C-03	C-07	C-10	C-02	C-12	C-06	C-01	C-11	C-05
2023			C-03	C-07			C-01	C-05	C-06	C-02	C-04	C-08
2024	C-04	C-09	C-06	C-01	C-03	C-12	C-02	C-11	C-10	C-08	C-05	C-07

*Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes in 2004

You'll notice that there's two years - 2017 and 2023 - where several teams didn't have checklists.  In both of those years, Calbee had intended to publish three sets but ultimately only issued two.  As a result, each set only had eight checklists so four teams ended up without getting represented.

One of the things that I've liked about Calbee's checklist cards over the years is that they frequently have better photos than the "regular" player cards do.  Here's a handful of examples from over the years:

2005 Calbee Series Two C-5

2007 Calbee Series Two #C-7

2008 Calbee Series One #C-2

2009 Calbee Series One #C-1

2012 Calbee Series Three #C-11

2014 Calbee Series One #C-2

2015 Calbee Series Three #C-10

2016 Calbee Series One #C-3

2016 Calbee Series One #C-4

2017 Calbee Series Two #C-8

2018 Calbee Series One #C-3

2019 Calbee Series Three #C-09

2020 Calbee Series One #C-01

2021 Calbee Series One #C-01

2022 Calbee Series Three #C-10

Ayami Sato

The Toronto Maple Leafs of the semi-pro Intercounty Baseball League announced yesterday that they had signed Madonna Japan's legendary pitcher Ayami Sato to a contract, presumably for the 2025 season.  It's funny - I had never heard of this league before last week when the Hamilton Cardinals announced their signing of Fernando Rodney and now they've had two big news stories in as many weeks.

I thought I'd take this opportunity to show off the cards I have of Sato.  I'm pretty sure I've shown all of these before but never in a single post.  All the cards I have of her are from the Japan Women's Baseball League sets from either AIAIO or Epoch - as far as I know, there are no cards of her with either Madonna Japan or the Lions' Women's team.

2015 AIAIO JWBL #D15-18-01

2016 Epoch JWBL #43

2017 AIAIO #D17-18-05

2017 AIAIO (unnumbered)

2018 AIAIO #18-18-C1

2018 Epoch JWBL #13

That's Minami Takatsuka with Sato on the unnumbered 2017 card.

I have one more card of Sato although she's not identified on it.  The unnumbered 2015 AIAIO card features a photo with a single member of each of the four JWBL teams:

Sato's obviously on the top left with Yuki Kawabata on the top right.  Not positive about the other two players but my best guesses are Yasuko Ohsawa on the lower left and Haruna Tadano on the lower right (although I easily could be wrong).

I'll close this post by mentioning that I was fortunate enough to see Sato pitch during my trip to Japan in 2019.  I went to a JWBL game between Aichi Dione and Saitama Astraia in Ichinomiya, Aichi and Sato was the starter for Dione.  She gave up three runs in the top of the first and loaded the bases with no one out in the second before bearing down and getting out of trouble without giving up any more runs.  She did end up losing the game, however.  Here's a couple not very good photos of her on the mound:

More Samurai Japan Cards

Just wanted to do a quick post to mention that Topps put eight more Samurai Japan Topps Now cards up for sale on their website.  Each card is still 1342 yen ($8.72) if you live in Japan but only 1220 yen ($7.92) if you're in the States although you'll have to pay 4000 yen for shipping in that case (I think shipping is free in Japan).  It looks like there's two cards for sale for the game against the US on November 21st, two cards for the game against Venezuela on the 22nd, three cards for the game against Taiwan on the 23rd and, surprisingly, a card for the championship game from the 24th (that Japan lost).  These cards will be available for purchase until January 1st.

This brings the total number of Samurai Japan cards for the Premier 12 team to 22.  I'm still expecting an actual team set to go on sale as well, probably later this month.

Norichika Aoki

Long time Tokyo Yakult Swallows outfielder Norichika Aoki announced his retirement a few months back.  Aoki had been a pitcher in high school but a broken shoulder made him switch to the outfield when he entered college in 2000.

He was a star on a loaded Waseda University team that included Takashi Toritani and Tsuyoshi Wada.  The team won four consecutive titles for the first time in its history during his tenure with the team.  He batted ,332 over his collegiate career (including a league leading .463 in the spring 2003 season) and won three Best 9 awards.  He also set a Tokyo Big Six record by scoring five runs in a game against Todai.  Yakult scouts who came out to Waseda games to see Toritani were impressed with Aoki and the Swallows took him in the fourth round of the fall 2003 draft.

He spent most of the 2004 season on the farm but his performance there (an Eastern League leading .372 batting average) ensured that he wouldn't be there for long.  That winter, Atsunori Inaba left the team as a free agent, opening up an outfield spot, and Aoki won the job in training camp that next spring.  He ended up having a breakout season, leading the Central League with a .344 average and becoming only the second batter in NPB history to get more than 200 hits in a season.  As you'd expect, he won the CL Rookie Of The Year award that year.

I won't go year-by-year for the rest of his career but suffice it to say that he continued performing at a high level for the Swallows for the next six years, hitting over .300 each year until 2011 when he "only" hit ,292.  He had 209 hits in 2010, becoming the only batter in NPB history to top 200 hits in a season twice.  The Swallows posted him after the 2011 season and the Brewers won the bidding.  He spent the next six seasons in MLB, splitting time between Milwaukee (2012-13), Kansas City (2014), San Francisco (2015), Seattle (2016) and the Mets, Astros and Blue Jays in 2017.

He returned to Japan and the Swallows in 2018 and, for a few seasons at least, it was like he never left.  He hit .327, .297 and .317 his first three years back but his average dropped into the .250's over the following three years.  He hit only .229 in limited playing time this season and announced his retirement in mid-September.  

Aoki won three Central League batting crowns (2005, 2007 & 2010), led the league in OBP twice (2007 & 2009); steals once (2006) and hits twice (2005 & 2006)*.  Besides his Rookie Of The Year award, he also won seven Best 9 awards (2005-11) and seven Golden Glove awards (2006-11 & 2020).  He made the All Star team eight times (2005-11 & 2018) and won a Nippon Series with the Swallows in 2021**.

* Yes, despite getting 209 hits in 2010, he did not lead the league in hits - Matt Murton of the Tigers had 214.  Tsuyoshi Nishioka had 206 hits that year as well so three of the seven 200 hit seasons in NPB history happened in 2010.

** He was awarded a World Series ring by the Astros in 2017 but did not play in the Series that year (he ended that season with the Blue Jays) so he is not a member of the "dual champions" club.

He suited up for the Japanese National Baseball team four times - the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2006, 2009 and 2017 World Baseball Classics.  He hit .324 in the 2009 WBC and made the All Tournament Team.

His first baseball cards were in BBM's Rookie Edition (#61) and 1st Version (#308) sets in 2004.  His first Calbee card was #125 in the 2005 Series Two set.  Here's a bunch of his cards:

2004 BBM 1st Version #61

2004 BBM 1st Version #308

2005 BBM All Stars #A61

2006 BBM 1st Version #436

2007 BBM 1st Version #M2

2008 Calbee #S-12

2009 BBM 1st Version #522

2010 BBM Swallows #S60

2011 BBM Legend Of Tokyo Big 6 #085

2012 BBM 1st Version #393

2017 Topps TBT #32

2018 Calbee #ES-12

2019 Swallows Bento Box

2020 BBM 1st Version #317

2021 Calbee #IL-12

2022 Topps NPB #10

2023 BBM 1st Version #182

2024 Epoch NPB #133

Card Of The Week December 1

Fumiya Kurokawa of the Eagles is wintering in Australia, spending the first half of the Australian Baseball League's 2024-25 season with the Perth Heat.  This weekend, the Heat were in Adelaide, playing a four game set against the Giants.  The two teams played a double-header on Friday and Adelaide was up 1-0 in the top of the third of the nightcap when Kurokawa came to bat with the bases loaded.  He promptly un-loaded them, hitting a grand slam over the right field wall on the first pitch of the at bat from fellow NPB import Ryusei Yamada (of the Yomiuri Giants):

Kurokawa's slam made it 4-1 in favor of Perth who went on to win the game 9-3.  Here's his 2021 BBM Eagles card (#E51):