2025 NPB Draft

It was draft day in NPB today and, as always, my friend Deanna has posted the results in English on her blog.  I've been able to track down six players who were drafted today that already have baseball cards.  Three of them were drafted out of the corporate leagues and so had cards in the JABA sets from recent years.  One of them was drafted off of the independent farm team Oisix Niigata Albirex but had previously played in the corporate league so he, too, appeared in the JABA sets.  One player appeared in the 2024 Panini Stars & Stripes Japanese Collegiate National Team autographed/memorabilia inserts and the last one is Rintaro Sasaki, who has a boatload of cards from various Panini sets.  I should add that I still have not generated a checklist for the 2023 JABA set and I don't know much about the team sets issued for the various independent teams so it's entirely possible there are others who already have cards.

Here's the list of players with a list of their cards (except Sasaki because there's too many to list).   Some of the cards here are mine and some are images swiped from Mercari:

Taisei Chinen, Oisix Niigata Albirex, Giants 5th ikusei

2022 JABA #22JP079

2021 JABA #21JP084
2022 JABA #22JP079

Hiromi Katayama, Honda, Baystars #4

2022 JABA #22JP010

2022 JABA #22JP010

2025 JABA #25JP007

Shota Masui, Toyoda, Swallows #4

2025 JABA #25JP024

2025 JABA #25JP024

Asahi Miyashita, Toyo University, Baystars #3

2024 Panini Stars & Stripes USA Baseball #JPN-AM Autographed Version

2024 Panini Stars & Stripes USA Baseball #JPN-AM

2024 Panini Stars & Stripes USA Baseball #JPN-AM Autographed Version /58

2024 Panini Stars & Stripes USA Baseball #JPN-AM

Rintaro Sasaki, Stanford, Hawks #1

Too many to list here

Takanori Takahashi, JR East, Hawks #5

2025 JABA #25JP046

2025 JABA #25JP046

I did track down a card of Chinen with Albirex from this season but I don't know if it was part of team set or some sort of one off:

I want to note that Miyashita is the last player from the 2023 collegiate Samurai Japan set commemorated in the 2024 Panini Stars & Stripes USA Baseball set to graduate from college.  20 of the 26 six players on that team have now been drafted while the other six are playing in the corporate leagues.  I think all six were eligible to be drafted this year (collegiate players who don't declare for the draft upon graduation and instead go play in the corporate or indy leagues have to wait two years before they can enter the draft.  High school players have to wait three years) but none of them were.

2024 NPB Draft

The 2024 NPB draft was held today and there's at least eight players who were drafted who already have baseball cards.  As always, I'm relying on Deanna's post about the draft while supplementing it with the Japanese Wikipedia page for it as she hasn't gotten around to doing the ikusei portion of the draft yet (she left for Japan today after transcribing the regular phase of the draft).

The cards for the draftees come from three different sets - the Topps Now set for the "Global Games" Samurai Japan team that played Team Europe in a couple friendlies last March, the 2024 Panini Stars & Stripes Japanese Collegiate National Team autographed/memorabilia inserts and the JABA corporate league sets from the last few years.  That Samurai Japan team from last March featured four collegiate players and all four of them were drafted today.  Similarly last year's Japanese Collegiate National Team featured in the Panini set had four players who were eligible to be drafted (two of whom were on the Samurai Japan team) and all four were drafted.  Since I haven't been able to generate a checklist for the 2023 JABA set, I don't know for sure how many players drafted from the corporate leagues had cards.  I know that there were no players drafted who had cards in the 2021 or 2022 sets and there were two drafted players in the 2024 set (at least one of which was also in the 2023 set).

OK, enough talking about the cards - let's see them.  I should mention that I don't have any of these.  Yet.  Ryan had ordered the Topps Now Samurai Japan team set for me so I'll get that when I get my next shipment from him.  All of these images were swiped from the internet - Jambalaya, Ebay and Mercari.

Yumeto Kanemura, Kansai University, Dragons #1

2024 Topps Now Global Games Samurai Japan Team Set #8

Raiku Katayama, NTT East, Buffaloes #6

2023 JABA #23JP109(?)

2024 JABA #24JP006 & #24JP051

Rui Muneyama, Meiji University, Eagles #1

2024 Topps Now Global Games Samurai Japan Team Set #20

2024 Panini Stars & Stripes USA Baseball #JPN-RM

Yuto Nakamura, Aichi Tech, Swallows #1

2024 Topps Now Global Games Samurai Japan Team Set #12

Misho Nishikawa, Aoyama Gakuin University, Marines #1

2024 Topps Now Global Games Samurai Japan Team Set #26

2024 Panini Stars & Stripes USA Baseball #JPN-MN

Tai Sasaki, Aoyama Gakuin University, Carp #1

2024 Panini Stars & Stripes USA Baseball #JPN-TS

Seiya Watanabe, Osaka Shogyo University, Lions #2

2024 Panini Stars & Stripes USA Baseball #JPN-SW

Ryoma Yamanaka, Mitsubishi Juko East, Buffaloes #4

2024 JABA #24JP041 & #24JP086

2023 NPB Draft

The 2023 NPB draft was held today and for the first time since 2018, I don't have any "pre-rookie" cards of any of the players.  For the past four years there were at least three players each year who were in either the 2019 or 2020 Panini USA Baseball Stars & Stripes set as representatives of the 2018 or 2019 Collegiate Samurai Japan team respectively.  The last two players to graduate from college were both drafted last year (Shota Morishita and Ryosuke Kodama Mikiya Tanaka) so I was left to wonder if any of the ten players from the teams who went to the corporate leagues after college would be drafted (assuming any of them are still playing).  None of them were so there's a very good likelihood that all the players from those sets who are going to get drafted have been drafted.  The youngest player from the group is Kento Ogo who turned 25 about a month ago so they're all getting a bit old to be entering professional baseball.

There is, however, another possible source of "pre-rookie" cards for the drafted players.  In 2021 and 2022, JABA (the Japanese Amateur (or possibly Adult) Baseball Association), the organization in charge of the corporate/industrial league, issued baseball card sets.  The 2021 set was supposedly 90 cards but may have actually been a little larger - I've been attempting to put a checklist together and I've seen card numbers as high as 92.  The 2022 set is reportedly 88 cards.  Each set contains players from various teams in the corporate leagues.  I've identified roughly 80% of the 2021 set so I compared the list of players drafted from corporate league teams today with the checklist I have and found exactly one player who already had a card - Shunya Morita of Honda Suzuka, the second round pick of the Yomiuri Giants.  He is card #33 in the set.  I don't have this card but I swiped images of the front and back of it from an auction on Mercari (the auction is for three copies of the card which explains the "x3" on the image of the front of the card:

Morita brings the number of known players from the 2021 set who have been drafted to six.  There may be others - I'd actually be surprised if they're aren't - but until I see or generate a complete checklist, I won't know for sure.

2022 NPB Draft

NPB held its annual draft today and as usual I took a look to see who already had baseball cards.  There still haven't been any collegiate cards published in Japan that I know about since BBM's final set for the Tokyo big Six back in 2013 but Panini included autographed memorabilia cards of the 2018 and 2019 Japanese Collegiate National Team in their USA Baseball Stars & Stripes sets in 2019 and 2020 respectively (along with a non-memorabilia version of the cards in 2019) and this is now the fifth year that players from those teams have been drafted.  As always I'm using Deanna's draft post as a reference although I also used the Japanese wikipedia page for the draft since at the time I was writing this post, Deanna hadn't added the ikusei rounds of the draft yet.

There were three players from these sets drafted.  One of the players - Ryosuke Kodama - was actually a member of both the 2018 and 2019 teams.  He's the fifth and final player who appeared on both teams to be drafted (following Hiromi Itoh, Masato Morishita, Toshiya Sato and Takashi Umino).  The other two players were both on the 2019 team and were the last two players on that team still in college.  Here's all three players:

Ryosuke Kodama, Kyushu Sangyo University/Osaka Gas, Lions #6

Shota Morishita, Chuo University, Tigers #1

Mikiya Tanaka, Asia University, Dragons #6

If it's not clear, Kodama had attended Kyushu Sangyo University but played for Osaka Gas for a couple years after graduating.

There are now only ten players from the two sets - 7 from the 2019 set and 3 from the 2020 set - who have not been drafted.

I should mention that there's a fourth player who was drafted today who also already has baseball cards - Gosuke Katoh, who is currently in the Mets organization, was taken in the third round by the Fighters.  I haven't heard if he has any intentions of playing in NPB but you figure the Fighters probably know something that the rest of us don't.  Anyway, he's been playing in MLB organizations for about 10 years now so he has a bunch of baseball cards already (although no Japanese cards).

2021 NPB Draft

It was draft day today in NPB and as usual I want to do a quick post about the handful of players drafted who already have baseball cards.  There haven't been any collegiate cards published in Japan since 2013 (at least that I know about) but Panini included autographed memorabilia cards for the 2018 and 2019 collegiate Samurai Japan teams in the 2019 and 2020 USA Baseball Stars & Stripes sets respectively.  I used the list translated by Deanna Rubin as well as in this thread on NPB Reddit to figure out that there were three players in those sets who were drafted today.

Daigo Kamikawabata, Nihon University/NTT East, Fighters #9

Kazuya Maruyama, Meiji University, Swallows #2

Shunsuke Sato, Tsukuba University, Lions #2

If it's not clear, Kamikawabata attended Nihon University but spent a couple seasons playing for NTT East in the corporate leagues before entering the draft.  He's the first player from these Panini sets to go professional after playing in the corporate leagues - all the other players from the sets went professional directly after leaving college.

Kamikawabata is from the 2019 set (which means he also has a non-autograph/memorabilia card in the "rack set" version of the team set).  The other two cards are from the 2020 set.  I don't actually own the Sato card - I found the image off a completed Yahoo! Japan Auction.

I was a little disappointed that Seiya Tanaka, who is in the 2019 set, was not drafted today.  I saw him pitch for Rikkio University in 2019 and he's been playing for Osaka Gas since graduating.   I don't think he had submitted his name for the draft so it's not like he was rejected by all 12 teams.  Hopefully he'll try next year.  There were a couple Shikoku Island League players drafted but it didn't look like any of them had played for the 2019 All Star team that played in the Can-Am League.

16 of the 24 players from the 2019 Panini set and 18 of the 24 players from the 2020 set have now been drafted.  Two of the six undrafted players from the 2020 set have one more year of college - Shota Morishita of Chuo University and Mikiya Tanaka of Asia University.  I believe that the remaining eleven players (Ryosuke Kodama is in both sets) are all playing for various corporate league teams.

2020 NPB Draft

The NPB draft was held today and as usual Deanna live blogged it.  With cards for the Japanese Collegiate All Star teams from 2018 and 2019 being included as an insert in both the 2019 and 2020 editions of Panini's USA Baseball Stars & Stripes set respectively there are already cards available for ten of the players drafted.  These cards are all serially numbered autograph/memorabilia cards (plus some non-memorabilia cards from 2019).  I only have cards of three of the guys drafted today (and only one of those is an autograph/memorabilia card) but I swiped images from COMC and Ebay of the other seven players.

Yudai Furukawa, Jobu University, Fighters #3

Takahisa Hayakawa, Waseda University, Eagles #1

Hiromi Itoh, Komazawa University Tomakomai, Fighters #1

Shugo Maki, Chuo University, Baystars #2

Hiyu Motoyama, Tohoku Fukushi University, Swallows #4

Shoki Murakami, Toyo University, Tigers #5

Ryusei Ogawa, Kokugakuin University, Marines #3

Teruaki Sato, Kinki University, Tigers #1

Takuma Uchima, Asia University, Eagles #4

Iori Yamasaki, Tokai University, Giants #2

Satoh's cards are from the 2019 set while Itoh is in both the 2019 and the 2020 sets.  All of the other players are from the 2020 set.  15 of the 24 players on the 2019 cards have now been drafted while 16 of the 2020 cards have been drafted (four of the five players who appear in both sets have now been drafted as well).

The three cards that are mine are the Itoh, Ogawa and Satoh cards.

One other draftee of note - Daiki Ishii of the Shikoku Island League's Kochi Fighting Dogs was the eighth pick of the Tigers.  I think he was the last player taken in the "regular" (non-ikusei) part of the draft.  Ishii was a member of the Shikoku Island League All Star team that played in the Can-Am League last year.  He's the third member of the All Star team to get drafted following Junichiro Kishi (Lions #8) and Hayato Hirama (Giants ikusei #1) last year.

One last note - somewhat surprisingly former MLB pitcher Junichi Tazawa was not drafted by anyone.  He is 34 years old and hasn't pitched particularly well in a number of years but still it was a bit of a shock no one took him.  I don't know if this now means he's free to sign with any team or not.

2019 NPB Draft

Today was draft day for NPB.  In the past I've always mislabelled the draft by using the following year in identifying it (for instance calling the draft that happened in October of 2015 the "2016 Draft") but since I haven't done a post for the draft in two years I figure it's time to correct this.  You can see the results (as always) over at Marinerds as well as this post over at NPB Reddit.

I didn't think I'd be doing another draft post since BBM hasn't done a collegiate card set in over six years now but luckily Panini put out a bunch of autograph/memorabilia cards (as well as what are basically some non-autograph/non-memorabilia insert cards) for the 2018 Japanese Collegiate All Star team with their USA Baseball Stars & Stripes set last spring.  A couple of those players were taken in today's draft:

Shoki Katsumata, Kokusai Budo University (Buffaloes #5)

#JCS-SK (Samurai Japan Patch)

Masato Morishita, Meiji University (Carp #1)

#JC-MM (All Star Signatures)

Toshiya Sato, Toyo University (Marines #2)

#12

Takashi Umino, Tokai Univ (Hawks #2)

#JCS-TU

Eight other players in the set were taken in last year's draft so with the addition of these four players half of the 24 players are now in NPB (assuming all four of these players sign).  I had been particularly interested in where Morishita got drafted as I saw him pitch last May.  I was a little disappointed that another Tokyo Big Six pitcher that I saw (Rikkio's Seiya Tanaka) did not declare for the draft.  Deanna Rubin told me that he's "got a job with Osaka Gas" (i.e. will be playing for Osaka Gas's industrial league team) for the next two years and will see how things go after that. She thinks he's concerned he's too short to be a professional pitcher.  Tanaka is also in the Panini set.

One other note about the draft - two members of last summer's Shikoku Island League All Star team that played in the Can-Am League were drafted - Junichiro Kishi was taken in the eighth round by Seibu while Hayato Hirama was taken in the first round of the ikusei draft.  Both had played for the Tokushima Indigo Socks (oh, wait, that's the 2019 Shikoku Island League Champion AND 2019 Grand Champion Tokushima Indigo Socks).  I don't know if there are any cards available for them.  There were two other players drafted from the SIL but neither of them played on the Can-Am League team last summer.

UPDATE - I missed one player from the Panini set.  Pitcher Yuki Tsumori from Tohoku Fukushi University was taken in the third round by the Hawks.

2018 NPB Draft

It was draft day for NPB today.  Officially it's the 2017 draft but since I started mislabelling the draft some years back based on what's on the back of BBM's baseball cards I'm going to call it the 2018 draft.  As usual Deanna pulled an all nighter to live blog the draft and Gen has the round by round lists up as well.

I was kind of surprised to still be doing these posts since it's been four years now since BBM last did a set for the Tokyo Big Six league.  But there was actually someone drafted out of the industrial leagues who appeared in one of those sets.  There's also the virtual cards from the Tokyo Rocks app - all five players who were drafted out of the Tokyo Big Six league today had cards in both last year's and this year's "sets" (this year's set is actually split between spring and fall versions - they issued another 66 cards in early September.  I only have cards for two of the drafted players from the fall set).

One thing I did not check was if any of the former Tokyo Big Six players taken out of the industrial leagues had cards in Tokyo Rocks 2016 set.

Masaki Iwami, Keio (Eagles #2)

2016 Tokyo Rocks

2017 Spring Tokyo Rocks

Takahiro Kumagai, Rikkio (Tigers #3)

2016 Tokyo Rocks

2017 Spring Tokyo Rocks

2017 Fall Tokyo Rocks

Kohei Miyadai, Tokyo (Fighters #7)

2016 Tokyo Rocks

2017 Spring Tokyo Rocks

2017 Fall Tokyo Rocks

Kotaro Otake, Waseda (Hawks #4)

2016 Tokyo Rocks

2017 Spring Tokyo Rocks

Hiromasa Saitoh, Meji (Lions #1)

2016 Tokyo Rocks

2017 Spring Tokyo Rocks

Shunsuke Saitoh, Rikkio by way of JX-ENEOS (Baystars #4)

2013 BBM Tokyo Big Six #28

I'm not positive about this but I believe that Miyadai was the first player drafted from Tokyo University since Takahiro Matsuka was taken by the Baystars in the ninth round of the 2004 draft.