Card Of The Week September 14

I'm a little late in reporting this but a week ago on September 7th, the Hanshin Tigers clinched the Central League pennant.  It was the earliest any team had ever clinched first in the Central League, beating the 1990 Yomiuri Giants by one day.  It was also the first time the Tigers won the CL pennant with a first year manager at the helm.  (H/T NPB Reddit for the trivia)

Since I don't have many cards from this year, I don't have any cards of that first year manager - Kyuji Fujikawa - as manager but I have many of him as a player.  Here's his appearance on the 2008 BBM 2nd Version set's Tigers checklist (#778):

I don't know if it was typical of Fujikawa to lose his hat when he pitched.  There's one other card I know of showing him losing it though.

Card Of The Week September 7

Each of the three games between the Dodgers and Orioles in Baltimore this weekend featured a Japanese starting pitcher.  On Friday, Shohei Ohtani started for the Dodgers and threw 3 2/3 scoreless innings.  He was not involved in the decision for a game that the Orioles ended up winning on a 2-1 walk off. 

On Saturday, Yoshinobu Yamamoto came close to making history.  He kept the Orioles hitless for 8 2/3 innings before Jackson Holliday hit a solo home run off of him.  Had he completed the no-hitter, he would have become the first pitcher to throw no-hitters in both NPB and MLB.  He also did not get a decision in the game - he was lifted after giving up the home run and the Dodgers bullpen proceeded to blow the game with the Orioles scoring four in the inning to walk the game off for the second straight night.

I attended this afternoon's game and was excited that Tomoyuki Sugano was starting for the Orioles.  I pointed out to my wife and some friends at the game that Sugano had thrown a no-hitter in Japan so maybe he could be the first to throw one in both leagues.  Well, he may do that someday but it didn't happen today - Ohtani hit his second pitch of the game into the center field stands.  It was not a good outing for Sugano, giving up four runs in three plus innings including three solo home runs (two by Ohtani and one by Mookie Betts) before being forced from the game after being hit in the leg by a line drive from Kim Hyeseong.  He was the only one of the three to get a decision, taking the loss as the O's fell to the Dodgers 5-2.

All three pitchers have suited up for Samurai Japan over the years.  Ohtani was part of the 2015 Premier 12 and 2023 World Baseball Classic teams; Yamamoto was on the squads for the 2019 Premier 12, 2021 Tokyo Olympics and the 2023 WBC and Sugano played on the 2015 Premier 12 and 2017 WBC teams.  I thought I'd share National Team cards of all three:

2016 Calbee Samurai Japan #SJ-07

2023 BBM Infinity #23

2017 Calbee Samurai Japan #SJ-02

Card Of The Week August 31

I have two things I want to mention this week, one being something I should have noticed a few weeks back.

First of all, Munetaka Murakami of the Swallows has been on a tear lately.  He missed most of the first few months of the season recovering from injuries and didn't make it back up to the top team until late July.  He's been making up for lost time though, having hit 14 home runs in 30-ish games since his return.  His three home run game yesterday put him into a three way tie for sixth place in the Central League home run leader board, despite him having played less than a third of the games that the others have played.  Here's a card of Murakami from last year's BBM Swallows team set (#S79) - I believe he has followed the instructions on the card:

I actually didn't know about this next story until I noticed it on NPB's website when I was looking up the CL home run leaders.  NPB holds something called the "Fresh All Star" game each year a few days before the top team All Star series.  It pits All Star teams from each of the two farm leagues - the Eastern and Western - against each other, although I think that sometimes teams will dispatch young players who've been on the top team to play in the game.  So it's kind of a combination of a minor league All Star game with the MLB Futures game.  What I found interesting is that the MVP of this years game was Taisei Chinen, a member of the Oisix Niigata Albirex BC team.  The reason I find this interesting is that Niigata is not affliated with an NPB team - it's one of the two independent teams that NPB added to their farm leagues last year to give each league an even number of teams.  Chinen hit a two run home run in the top of the first inning of the game which gave the Eastern League their margin of victory - they ended up winning the game 3-1.  Now, obviously one game is a small sample size so you shouldn't read too much into a guy from an independent team winning a game MVP award instead of guys who are actually on NPB rosters but Chinen did lead the Eastern League in batting last year with a .323 average so it's not the first time he's outperformed NPB's farmhands (in fairness, since he couldn't get called up last year, he was able to accumulate enough at bats to qualify for the title while his rivals for it couldn't).  He apparently drew some interest from NPB teams last year but he didn't get drafted.  I'll be curious to see if that changes this year.  

Before signing with Niigata last year, Chinen had spent five years in the corporate leagues with Okinawa Electric and was featured in JABA's sets in at least 2021 and 2022.  I got his 2022 card (#22JP079) from Ryan last month:

Card Of The Week August 24

Koki Yamaguchi of the Marines had a couple good nights last week against the Eagles.  On Wednesday night, he hit a three run home run in the bottom of the seventh, breaking a 2-2 tie and providing the margin of victory in Lotte's 5-3 win.  In his next at bat, in the first inning of the next day's game, he hit a two run home run.  Three innings later, he hit another two run home run.  In his next at bat, in the same inning, he hit yet another home run - a two run shot that capped off the Marines nine run fourth inning.  That put the Marines up 11-1 and ended up again providing the margin of victory in a game where the Eagles managed to claw back to make a game of it before Lotte held on for a 12-10 win.

Yamaguchi was the 15th player in NPB history to hit home runs in four consecutive at bats but was also the first one to do it with runners on base each time.  He was the 22nd player to hit two home runs in an inning. (H/T NPB Reddit)

This was not the first time Yamaguchi hit three home runs in one game.  He also did it back in 2022 against the Buffaloes in Osaka.  At 22 years and one month of age at the time, he was the youngest player in either league or team history to do it.  The event was commemorated in the 2022 BBM Fusion set (#94):

Card Of The Week August 17

Hanshin Tigers relief pitcher Daichi Ishii entered today's game in the eighth inning against the Giants and didn't give up a run.  It was Ishii's 40th appearance in a row in which he didn't allow a run, which broke the old record of 39 that was set by Kaima Taira of the Lions in 2021.

Ishii's route to the Tigers took him through the independent Shikoku Island League as he joined the Kochi Fighting Dogs in 2018 after graduating from high school.  Players who join an independent (or corporate) league team out of high school have to wait three years before they can enter the NPB draft (college players only have to wait two years) so Ishii spent three years in Kochi before being drafted by Hanshin in the eighth round of the 2020 draft.

His ERA for his three years with the Fighting Dogs was 1.69 and he went 14-16 in 56 games.  I think he was mostly used as a starter.  He had 313 strikeouts and only 59 walks in 265 2/3 innings.  He led the SIL in strikeouts in 2019 with 122.  He was a member of the Shikoku Island League All Star team that played in the Can-Am League League for a few weeks in June and July of 2019 (although he did not get into the game that I went to in Little Falls, New Jersey).  He went 2-2 in four starts with 35 strikeouts in 23 1/3 innings with an ERA of 3.09.  He was the only pitcher on the All Stars' roster with multiple wins (the team went 7-12 overall).

All this is leading up to the fact that he is one of the few NPB players who has pre-rookie cards, or cards from before they were drafted by an NPB team.  I have his card from the 2020 Kochi team set and, since I have the 2017 Kochi team set, I assume there are also 2018 and 2019 sets that he appears in.  Here's his 2020 card:

2020 Kochi Fighting Dogs team set #07

Card Of The Week August 10

Masanori Ishikawa started Thursday night's Swallows game against the Giants.  He got a hit that night which was his first hit this season.  He now has at least one hit in 24 consecutive seasons (H/T NPB Reddit) starting in his rookie season of 2002 which is second all time to Motonobu Tanishige who had hits in 27 consecutive seasons.  

It is unlikely that Ishikawa will catch up with Tanishige, though, and not because he's 45 years old right now.  On Monday of last week, the Central League announced that it would introduce the DH in 2027, meaning that the last league in which pitchers batted has relented.  Should Ishikawa continue to play, he'll have to settle for a 25 year streak (which, to be fair, is the record for most consecutive seasons with a hit for a player who signed out of college - he set that record two seasons ago).

Ishikawa was not the only pitcher in that game to get a hit.  Masahiro Tanaka, the Giants starter that evening, hit a double and scored a run.  Here's cards of both pitchers batting:

2023 BBM Fusion #24

2013 BBM 2nd Version #671

The Fusion card shows Ishikawa getting the hit that gave him hits in 22 consecutive seasons, setting the record for former college players.

Card Of The Week August 3

There was a huge trade in Korea last week as the NC Dinos sent the KBO's all time hit leader Son Ah-seop to the Hanwha Eagles for a third round pick in next year's draft and around $215,000 in cash.  Son has never played on a Korean Series champion.  He spent the first 15 years of his career with the Lotte Giants who have the longest current championship drought in KBO history - they last won the title in 1999 - and he'd been with NC since 2022, two years after their last championship.  Hanwha is currently in first place while NC is in seventh so this gives him a better shot at a title.  

Since I don't have many KBO cards after 2021, I don't have any cards of Son with NC.  Here's a card of him from his Lotte days:

2019 SCC Regular Collection 2 - Signature #SCCR2-19/139

Card Of The Week July 27

Four* former NPB players (including three former Hanshin Tigers) have been signed by Japanese teams over the past few weeks.  The Yokohama DeNA Baystars signed former Dragons star Dayan Viciedo who had been playing in Mexico (and who I prematurely did a retirement post for two months ago) and former Tigers pitcher Shintaro Fujinami (who was just released by the Mariners).  The Tigers re-signed former closer Rafael Dolis who'd been playing for the Kochi Fighting Dogs of the Shikoku Island League for the past year and half.  Finally, former Tiger Koyo Aoyagi was released by the Phillies last week and is reportedly signing with the Swallows although there's been no formal announcement.

*There's a fifth one - Mike Ford of the Baystars - but I don't have any of his cards from last year.  His only NPB cards that I know about are Epoch One cards. UPDATE - a commenter reminded me that he had an autographed card in last year's Fusion set too.

Here are cards of all four players:

2017 Epoch Tigers #05 (Variant **)

2024 BBM 1st Version #151

2019 BBM 2nd Version #578

2024 Epoch NPB #005

Card Of The Week July 20

Last Thursday night the Hawks were hosting the Marines at Kitakyushu Municipal Stadium.  This was one of NPB's "countryside" games where teams will play at ballparks other than their normal homes to promote baseball in areas that don't necessarily have easy access to it.  Kitakyushu is about 40 miles northeast of the Hawks' home in Fukuoka.  

The game was tied 2-2 going into the top of the sixth inning.  With nobody out and a runner on first, Marines first baseman Kyuto Ueda untied it with his first career home run:

Or it would have been his first career home run had nature not intervened.  There was a lot of rain in western Japan that day.  The Tigers and Buffaloes (who were playing in Kobe instead of Osaka Dome) were both rained out and the Baystars-Carp game in Hiroshima was called after six innings as a 1-1 tie.  In Kitakyushu, the rain started falling harder as the Marines extended their lead to 6-2 in the top of the sixth.  The umpires eventually halted play and ultimately determined that it was going to be impossible to complete the game.  Which meant that the score needed to revert to the last completed inning, erasing the Marines' four run lead as well as Ueda's home run (which is now being referred to as a "phantom" home run). 

Here's Ueda's 2024 BBM 1st Version rookie card (#212):

Card Of The Week July 13

Yudai Ohno of the Dragons pitched a complete game against the Carp yesterday, throwing 108 pitches while giving up four hits and only one run.  Of course, with this being Chunichi we're talking about, it's not a silly question to ask if the Dragons won the game.  They did, by a score of 7-1.  Here's Ohno's card from the 2021 BBM 1st Version set (#220):

Sorry for the lack of posts lately.  We've got some family visiting this week and I've been doing a bunch of work around the house to get it ready for them.  I've also been working on a post off and on for the last month or so that I hope to finally publish in the next few days.  And hopefully I'll be getting my latest shipment from Ryan in the next few weeks.  So things will probably pick up soon.

Card Of The Week July 6

Kento Inoue of the Baystars hit his first career home run at the ichi-gun level last Wednesday and he made it count.  It was a grand slam off of Dragons' ace Hiroto Takahashi in the bottom of the first that accounted for all of DeNA's runs in their 4-3 victory.  Inoue was the 94th player in Japan to hit a grand slam for their first ever home run.  Here's Inoue's rookie card from last year's BBM 1st Version set (#081):

Card Of The Week June 29

Interleague play wrapped up this past week with a makeup game on Tuesday between the Giants and the Marines.  The Hawks were the interleague champions for the ninth time (although the first time since 2019).  This was the twentieth season of interleague play - it started in 2005 but they didn't have it in the COVID-shortened 2020 season - and the Hawks have had the best record in almost half of those seasons.  No other team has won it more than twice.

Hawks outfielder Tatsuru Yanagimachi was named Interleague MVP.  Here's a card of him from last year's team issued "2024 Season Vol, 1" set (#24SBH152):

Card Of The Week June 22

Thursday night in Tokyo, Koki Kitayama of the Fighters came close to making history.  Pitching against the Giants in the ballpark that Nippon-Ham once shared with Yomiuri, Kitayama took a perfect game into the seventh inning before giving up a two out walk.  The no-hitter was still intact but, sadly, both it and his shutout ended with one out in the ninth inning on a solo home run by Takumi Ohshiro.  Kitayama had to settle for a complete game, one-hit victory as the Fighters beat the Giants 4-1.

Here's a card of Kitayama from last year's 2nd Version set (#370):

Card Of The Week June 15

There was kind of an interesting story that came out a couple weeks ago - former MLB player Eric Anthony, who was raised by a single mother and never knew his father, discovered that his father was former Dodgers star Willie Davis.  You can read all the details in the linked story but I just wanted to point out that both Davis and Anthony played in NPB.  Davis played for the Dragons in 1977 and the Crown Lighter Lions in 1978, their final season in Fukuoka before being sold to Seibu and moving to Kanto.  Twenty years later, Anthony spend part of the 1998 season with the Yakult Swallows.

Davis had a number of baseball cards in his two years in Japan.  Engel lists 15 in all including several Calbees and two Yamakatsus.  I only have two of his cards:

1977 NST #14

1978 Yamakatsu JY8 #8

Anthony, on the other hand, has no Japanese cards that I'm aware of.  I did find a picture of him in a Swallows uniform in the 1999 edition of the late Wayne Graczyk's annual "Japan Pro Baseball Fan Handbook & Media Guide":

Happy Father's Day to all you fathers out there!

Card Of The Week June 8

Koji Chikamoto of the Hanshin Tigers got his 1000th career hit yesterday.  I was thinking to myself that that was pretty impressive as Chikamoto hadn't been in the league wrong but then I realized that this is his seventh season already and he's 30 years old.  It turns out, though, that he was the eighth fastest player in NPB history to reach that milestone, so he still did it pretty fast.  (H/T NPB Reddit)

Here's his card from the 2021 BBM Tigers set (#T59):

Card Of The Week June 1

Two of hot rookies this year in the Pacific League are Rui Muneyama of the Eagles and Seiya Watanabe of the Lions.  Muneyama has gotten more hype than Watanabe - five teams took him in the first round of last fall's draft with Rakuten winning the lottery for his rights over Hiroshima, Nippon-Ham, Seibu and Softbank while Watanabe was taken in the second round by the Lions.  So far, however, Watanabe's been putting up better numbers - he's hitting .331 with four home runs in 34 games while Muneyama's hitting .251 with two home runs in 46 games.

Since I'm not getting any new cards, of course, I'm not able to get any cards of either of them on their NPB teams.  But I actually do have cards of them - they both played on the Collegiate Samurai Japan team in 2023 and so had autographed and memorabilia cards in last year's USA Baseball Stars & Stripes set from Panini.  The autographed cards have been going for more than I'm willing to pay but I've picked up the non-autographed memorabilia cards for both players off of Ebay (which haven't been cheap either):

#JPN-RM

#JPN-SW

There's a pretty good chance one of these two players will be this year's Pacific League Rookie Of The Year which means there will have been two players from 2023 squad (and the 2024 Panini set) to have won that award:

#JPN-NT

I'll mention that Muneyama also appears in the 2024 Topps Now Samurai Japan team set for the "Global Games" - two games against a European All Star team in March of last year.  I don't have that card in my hands yet but it will be in the next shipment of cards that I get from Ryan.

I had been wondering if Panini was going to include the Japanese college players in this year's edition of USA Baseball Stars & Stripes but apparently they will not.  Instead they'll include members of the Australian (U-16), Canadian (U-18) and Taiwanese (collegiate) National Teams.

Card Of The Week May 25

Teruaki Sato of the Tigers is leading the Central League in home runs right now and it's not a close race at the moment.  Sato has 12 home runs and the two players tied for second - Sato's teammate Shota Morishita and Shugo Maki of the Baystars - have seven apiece.  He's also three home runs ahead of the two players tied for the Pacific League lead - Chusei Mannami and Franmil Reyes of the Fighters.  Sato is also leading the CL in RBI with 34 although Morishita is only two behind him and Maki and Shota Suekane of the Carp are each three behind him.

It's a major turnaround for a player who a year ago had been banished to the farm team for three weeks after misplaying a bunt that lead to a late-inning loss to the Dragons.  I had seen the Tigers' ni-gun team play Hayate in Shizuoka a year ago Friday and was surprised to see him with them.  He was back with the top team by mid-June and played regularly to the end of the season.  He played in 120 games, hitting .268 with a career low 16 home runs.  With 12 home runs already this year, he's halfway to his career high of 24 home runs which he did in both 2021 and 2023.

Here's his rookie card from the 2021 BBM Tigers set (#T48):

Card Of The Week May 18

Last Tuesday night in Inchon, Choi Jeong of the SSG Landers became the first KBO player to hit 500 home runs.  Choi had become the all time KBO home run leader last year when he passed Lee Seung-yuop's total of 467.  Lee, of course, also hit 159 home runs in NPB so he still holds the record for most home runs by a Korean player with 646.  It'll be interesting to see if the 38 year old Choi will be able to catch Lee or not.

Here's Choi's 2019 SCC Premium Collection 2 card (##SCCP2-19/016):

Card Of The Week May 11

There was a no-hitter in Japan last Monday but you may not have heard much about it.  There's two reasons for that.  The first is that it was a combined no-hitter which NPB does not count as an "official" no-hitter.  The second is that it was in the Eastern League, one of NPB's two farm leagues.  Four Fighters pitchers kept the Swallows hitless at Kamagaya Stadium.  Starter Sun Yi-Lei went six innings, striking out four and walking two.  After that three relievers - Kodai Yamamoto, Aneutys Zabala and Takumi Yamamoto - each threw perfect innings to close out the 5-0 victory for Nippon-Ham.  Here are cards of all four pitchers - as Sun and Kodai Yamamoto are both development players (ikusei), they don't have a lot of cards for me to choose from:

2024 Epoch Fighters Premier Edition #25

2023 Bowman NPB #BP-48

2024 BBM 1st Version #306

2024 Epoch NPB #322

I got an email from someone this week asking me about Sun's 2023 Panini USA Baseball Stars & Stripes card.  I didn't know about it before he had asked, but that set contained autographed memorabilia cards for the 2022 Taiwanese collegiate national team (similar to the ones for the Japanese collegiate national team in the 2019, 2020 and 2024 editions of that set).  Sun's card apparently is in high demand and I suspect that will increase when the Fighters move him to the 70 man roster and he makes his ichi-gun debut, probably later this season.

I have to mention another event that happened this past week.  Yesterday's Fighter's 8-7 victory over the Eagles featured an event that had never happened before in NPB history.  In the top of the fourth, with the Eagles trailing 3-2, Itsuki Murabayashi hit a grand slam to put Rakuten up 6-3.  An inning later, Chusei Mannami hit a grand slam (his second home run of the game) to put the Fighters back in the lead, 8-6.  It was the first time ever that two players hit "come-from-behind" grand slams in the same game.  Here are cards of the players:

2021 BBM Eagles #E58

2024 Topps Stadium Club NPB #160

Card Of The Week May 4

2004 BBM Golden Arms #008

I came across the above card of Masaaki Koyama when I was preparing the memorial post I did for him last week and I found it very intriguing.  I've had this card for years but I had just now noticed that the batter was a Swallows player.  I had assumed that Koyama was with the Orions when this photo was taken since the logo on his hat was "TO" which had to be for "Tokyo Orions", right?  Since the Orions and Swallows were in separate leagues and there was no inter-league play until 2005, I figured the photo had to either be from an exhibition game or, perhaps, an All Star game.  I had gone so far as to look at which All Star games Koyama had appeared in for the 1964 and 1965 seasons and see which position players for the Swallows had been on the Central League teams in those years to try to identify the batter - my prime candidate was catcher Hiromitsu Negoro.  I figured I would add another bullet point to the list of "quick notes" at the end of the post to include my research.  But there turned out to be one little problem.

That's NOT a Tokyo Orions hat.

As a sanity check, I looked at my copy of History Of Uniform to see what years the Orions wore that hat.  They didn't list it.  It wouldn't be the first time that History Of Uniform didn't list something, though, so I wasn't too deterred by this.  I assumed it was a hat that they had worn in 1964 and 1965 since the team changed the name from Daimai to Tokyo Orions in 1964 and there was a somewhat significant uniform change starting in 1966.  But after doing all the All Star roster research I mentioned above, I had a sudden thought - what if that's a Tigers hat?  I grabbed History Of Uniform again and flipped to the Tigers section and, sure enough, the Tigers wore that hat in 1960, the final year they were known as the "Osaka Tigers".   That "TO" is really an "OT".

In the end I pulled the card from the Memorial post, figuring it was less attractive without the photo being from an All Star game.  But I thought the whole story might be interesting enough for a Card Of The Week post on a weekend when I'm away from home and can't do a post related to something timely.