More Baseball Women

We now preempt our normally scheduled programming...

My original plan this evening was to publish the second in my series of posts about NPB Collectible Card Games.  The post is all written and I'm about halfway done with editing the 50-ish(!) scans for it.  But two things happened that are causing me to postpone finishing that post.  The first, and biggest, is that I received my latest package from Ryan today.  It's a little bittersweet as it's the last big package that I'm ever going to get from him, what with me not getting much new stuff anymore.  The second is that I learned that this is "Women In Baseball" week, and, amongst the ten pounds or so of Japanese baseball card goodies that Ryan sent me were a number of cards of female baseball players.  I'm busy the next two evenings so if I wanted to do a post about these cards duing "Women In Baseball" week, I need to do it now.  So without further ado...

First up are two cards from the 2011 BBM GPBL set ("GPBL" stands for the "Girl's Professional Baseball League", which was the original name of the "Japan Women's Baseball League" or "JWBL"):

2011 BBM GPBL #18

2011 BBM GPBL #55

I also received a number of JWBL cards produced by AIAIO.  I've expressed some confusion about the checklists for these cards in the past and what I received today doesn't help much.  I got eight cards from the 2013 set but they're only for three different players.  There's three cards for Miki Atsugase of South Dione:

All three cards have the same number on them (0192-4936) but obviously there's two different card designs here.  I believe those are real autographs on the card - they look like they were signed with Sharpies.

I got four cards of Asami Kawabata that, again, have the same card number (0227-1925).  Three of the cards share the designs from the Atsugase cards but the fourth is a little different.

I have four other AIAIO cards from 2013.  Two of them appear to use the same design as the first card from each of these groups (the ones that aren't autographed) but the other two share a different design.  So there's apparently four different designs for these cards.

The last 2013 card is kind of interesting.  That year the league put on something called the "Victoria Series" in which they basically merged North Reia and East Astraia into the All East team and West Flora and South Dione into the All West team for a nine game series (which was won by the All East team).  This card shows Shino Kokubo of North Reia playing for All East:

I also got two 2014 AIAIO JWBL cards:

These are the only 2014 AIAIO JWBL cards that I have and they share a similar design so I'm not confused about them.  At least until I get some more...

The last AIAIO card I got was from 2016:

I only have one other AIAIO card from 2016 and it uses a completely different design so I'm confused again.

I went to a JWBL game in 2019 and was on the lookout for baseball cards but I didn't see any.  I think AIAIO did cards for the league that year but I've never gotten any.  There was a 2019 card in the box from Ryan but it's not from AIAIO.  I think it's some sort of team issued card given away to members of Kyoto Flora's fan club:

The JWBL folded following the 2020 season and women's professional baseball in Japan has been in kind of disorganized state ever since.  At least three NPB teams - the Lions, Tigers and Giants - have established women's teams and a number of the stars from the JWBL have ended up on those teams.  I've looked around for any baseball cards for these teams but there doesn't appear to be much.  I was aware that there were cards for the Tigers Women's Team that were given away with bento boxes at their games but I couldn't find any for the longest time.  The one exception was the guy on Mercari that Ryan picked up the Miura cards from - he had a Tigers card of her but he wanted something like $68 for it which seemed excessive.

I eventually came across one 2024 card and two 2025 cards:

As far as I can tell, none of these three ever played in the JWBL.  Given that Mimura is 20 and Nishimoto is 18, that shouldn't be a big surprise, now that the league's been gone for five years.

I found a lot of cards of Minami Takatsuka (who went just by Minami then) from the 2020 BBM Shining Venus set that I asked Ryan to pick up for me.  There were five cards in all but I already had two of them:

2020 BBM Shining Venus #04

2020 BBM Shining Venus #05

The lot also included a parallel version of card #04.  It's serially numbered to 100 and the card I got was actually #100:

The lot also included an insert card of her:

2020 BBM Shining Venus #IN1

But the big card in the lot was an autographed card of her.  Unlike the AIAIO cards above, this is an "official" authentic autograph which is /93:

I saved the best card for last.  An authentic autographed card from the 2018 Epoch JWBL set of Ayami Sato, the best female pitcher in the world (or at least she was as of a few years back):

As always, thanks to Ryan for picking all this up for me.  There'll be a bunch of posts coming soon about the rest of the stuff he sent me.

GPBL Cards

Since I feel like I have a big backlog of cards to deal with, I'm going to kick off my trip-related posts with some posts about the cards I brought back.  This first post deals with some cards from the Girls Professional Baseball League (GPBL) which was the original name of the Japan Women's Baseball League (JWBL).  I had seen a four card lot of BBM's cards from the league a few months back and asked Ryan to pick it up for me.

There were four cards in the lot - two from 2010 and two from 2011.  Let's talk about the 2010 cards first:

2010 BBM Hyogo Swing Smileys #H08

2010 BBM Hyogo Swing Smileys #HS03

From just looking at the cards, it's not entirely obvious that they're from the same set.  The card number of the first cards has an "H" prefix while the second one has an "HS" prefix.  Luckily, the lot contained the envelope that the cards were distributed in and it has a checklist on it:

The Matsumoto card is in the first column while the Hagiwara card is in the second.  It looks like the "H" checklist and the "HS" checklist are the same.  I'm guessing the "S" in "HS" stands for something like "shiny" as the Hagiwara card has a foil finish on it.

These are the first 2010 GPBL cards I've gotten.  I assume these cards were distrubuted in the envelope at games that year but that's really just speculation on my part.  I know that that in 2011 there were essentially three GPBL sets by BBM (a Hyogo Swing Smileys team set, a Kyoto Asta Dreams team set and a 70-ish card set featuring all the players from both teams) but I have no idea if that was the case in 2010 also.  All I know for sure is that they did team sets for both Hyogo (which these cards came from) and Kyoto (which Ryan has the envelope from).  

Moving on to the 2011 cards...

2011 BBM Hyogo Swing Smileys #H21

2011 BBM Hyogo Swing Smileys #H15

It again is not completely obvious that these cards are from the same set but the checklist that Ryan sent me previously shows both of these cards.  It looks like cards 1-17 and cards 21-37 have the same players but have a slightly different design.

It also appears that BBM did not reuse the same photos for the team set and the 70-ish card GPBL set as neither card of Nonomura from the GPBL set (one of which can be seen here and the other can be seen in this post of Ryan's) use the same photo as the Nonomura card I have here.  Of course, that's just a data point of one so maybe it doesn't hold up for the rest of the cards.

I'd love to get more of these cards but it's so rare that I come across any.

JWBL Cards

Ryan had sent me a handful of cards for the Japan Women's Baseball League (JWBL) and I thought I'd do a quick post on them.

First up is a card from the 2011 BBM set for the league when it was still called the "Girl's Professional Baseball League" (GPBL).  I've written about this set before so really all I'm going to say about it is that it's the "kira" card for Maya Kawaho:

2011 BBM GPBL #40

AIAIO did cards for the JWBL from 2013 (if not earlier) to 2019 (if not later).  Ryan picked up these two unnumbered cards from the 2013 set for me:

He also picked up these two 2017 cards for me:

I believe that those are real signatures on the front of the cards although that could just be wishful thinking.  

These cards help a little in the ongoing struggle to make sense of the 2017 AIAIO JWBL cards.  Kawabata's card is the first 2017 card I've seen with a card number with an "04" suffix.  Taniyama's card number has an "05" suffix on it and the card design matches the design of the only other 2017 card I have with an "05" suffix - Ayami Sato (which is somewhat fitting to me personally since I saw these two pitchers face off against each other at the JWBL game I went to in 2019).  

Trying To Make Sense Of The 2011 BBM GPBL Cards

I had done a post a few weeks back about some cards from the late Japan Women's Baseball League (JWBL) that I had gotten from Ryan.  After Jason asked some questions about the cards I decided to dive into them in a little more depth.  Ryan had sent me a 2011 BBM card along with some AIAIO cards from 2017.  I did a bit of a deep dive into the 2017 cards earlier this week so now it's time to tackle the 2011 BBM cards.

In 2011 the JWBL was known as the Girl's Professional Baseball League and consisted of only two teams - the Hyogo Swing Smileys and the Kyoto Asto Dreams.  It was the second year that the league played and BBM did cards for at least their first two seasons.  I don't know much about the 2010 cards - I don't have any and Ryan only has a handful.  I have a bunch of the 2011 cards though - all from Ryan - and he has more than I do.

What I was surprised to discover with the 2011 card he sent me in his last package was that it wasn't from the same set as the other ones he had sent me.  It turns out that BBM actually did three sets for the GPBL that year - a 70-ish "regular" set along with a 37-ish card Hyogo team set and a 39-ish card Kyoto team set.  I decided that I'd try to put together a checklist for all three sets which may sound like a daunting task when you realize I only have 23 cards from the "regular" set, one card from the Kyoto team set and none from the Hyogo team set.  But I had a couple other things going for me - Ryan had posted a bunch of the cards that he had in 2015 and 2018 and he'd sent me the envelopes that cards from the team sets were distributed in that had the checklists for each set on them - although of course they're in Japanese:

The top envelope is from the Hyogo set while the bottom one is from the Kyoto set.

All of that was helpful but it was the way BBM did the card sets themselves that really allowed me to figure out the checklist.  For the "regular" set, the players are listed by uniform number - first the Hyogo players and then the Kyoto players.  There are 17 Hyogo players and 18 Kyoto players.  Now you're probably saying to yourself now "wait a minute - I thought there were 70 cards or so in this set but that only accounts for 35 of them" and you'd be right.  But what BBM did was include "foil" or "chrome" cards for all the players.  These aren't parallel versions - they have different photos and have checklist numbers from #36 to #70 while the non-foil cards are #01 to #35.  The foil cards are in the same order that the non-foil ones are so it's easy to extrapolate the number of the foil card if you have the non-foil one (add 35 to the card number) or vice versa (subtract 35 from the card number).  

What also came in really handy is a team card for Kyoto that Ryan had.  This card isn't a checklist but it does list all the players for the team with uniform numbers on the back while the front has photos of a couple players with their uniform numbers.  (The back also lists the manager and coach for the team along with an "MG" - none of those three have cards in the regular set).  I was able to use that to figure out the rest of the Kyoto players - some of the names I had to run through Google Translate and I then corroborated several of the names with other JWBL cards I had.  For the Hyogo cards I had to use the team set checklist for the players I didn't have - this wasn't very precise though as I wasn't able to corroborate any of the names of players I didn't have cards of.  Luckily Ryan took a look at the cards he had and was able to confirm all the names except one - a name that he thought was "Asako Hagiwara".  I found a Japanese Wikipedia page for her that confirmed that the kanji for her name matched the kanji on the team set checklist card, she played for Hyogo in 2011 and her uniform number is in the range that you'd expect - her number was 17 with the person before her in checklist wearing number 13 and the player after her wearing number 18,

That's probably more than enough information on how the sausage got made for this.  The upshot is that between everything, we were able to figure out who all the cards were in the set.  Let's show some cards - here are the fronts and backs of all 23 cards I have from this set:

Actually let me caveat that "we were able to figure out who all the cards were in the set". We were able to figure out who the first 70 cards in the set were.  Ryan had gone through his cards and discovered that he had a card #71 which showed Hyogo catcher Maya Kawaho in street clothes on the front of the card and has an interview with her on the back.  Now one thing we don't know is if there are any other of these "interview" cards.

The team sets mirror the "regular" set in that there are two cards for each player.  The players are listed in the same order that they are in the "regular" set although I don't know if the higher numbered cards are foil like the higher numbered ones in the other set.  Each set contains three additional cards - one for the manager (Toru Kawagoe for Hyogo and Kyosuke Sasaki for Kyoto), one for the coach (Toyoji Matsumura for Hyogo and Tomoya Kawaguchi for Kyoto) and one for something I haven't been able to translate in either set but I think might be the mascot.  Both checklists have the first cards for all the players, then the cards for the manager, coach and maybe the mascot, and then the other player cards.

I only have one card from either of these sets - this card of Tomoko Goda from the Kyoto team set:

Notice that the front has a slightly different design than the fronts in the "regular" set.  As far as I can tell from the cards that Ryan has posted, it looks like they didn't reuse the player photos.  The backs however look very much like the backs of the "regular" cards - notice though that the card number is prefixed with a "K" - the Hyogo cards are prefixed with an "H".

Here are the checklists for the sets - each set is on a different tabL

So I think there's still four questions that are left about these sets:

1. Are there any more interview cards in the "regular" set?

2. What set does the unnumbered Kyoto team card go with?  Ryan thinks it's from the team set but we don't know for sure.

3. Is there an equivalent team card for Hyogo?

4. Those two cards I couldn't figure out - #H20 of the Hyogo set and #K21 of the Kyoto set - are they mascot cards, 

If anyone has more information on these cards, please let us know!