Samurai Japan WBC Team Members Who Have Played In MLB

I mentioned in my post the other day about the new Topps Chrome Samurai Japan set that I had researched how many players on Japan's six WBC team rosters have played in MLB.  There are 37 so far (with more on the way, of course, possibly as soon as next year).  It turned out that the new set has only 16 of these players with the remaining players all being currently active in NPB so I decided that I'd do a post featuring all 37 players.

I thought it was kind of interesting that there were five players who played in MLB BEFORE they played in the WBC.  Two of these are kind of obvious - both Ichiro and Atsunori Ohtsuka were in MLB before the first World Baseball Classic.  Lars Nootbaar is also somewhat obvious as he's never played in NPB (although it wouldn't surprise me if he did at some point).  One of the others was Yusei Kikuchi which was kind of surprising - you'd have thought he might have played on either the 2013 or 2017 teams.  The last guy was Shohei Ohtani which, when I thought about it, made a lot of sense.  He'd intended to play on the 2017 team but ended up skipping the tournament due to an injury that kept him mostly sidelined that year, his final one in Japan before leaving for Southern California.

I tried to pick cards for each of the 37 players that were "official" WBC cards as much as possible but there were a couple players who it was impossible for.  For most of those players, I used other Samurai Japan cards.  A couple of them were from "unofficial" WBC sets (mostly the 2017 Calbee Samurai Japan set) but I was forced to use a different Calbee Samurai Japan set for Hirokazu Sawamura, one that was not from the same year as the WBC.  And since Kikuchi NEVER played for any Samurai Japan team before this year*, I'm using a card of his from the Lions.

* He has WBC cards from this year but since I stopped getting new cards, I don't have any

I also tried to not have more than one card from a particular set but that proved impossible as well.

Anyway, enough with the process details that no one cares about.  Here are the players:

Shogo Akiyama 2017

2017 Topps Now Team Japan #JPN-7

Norichika Aoki 2006, 2009, 2017

2017 Topps Throwback Thursday #32

Yu Darvish 2009, 2023

2009 Konami Baseball Heroes WBC Edition "Special" #W09S001

Kyuji Fujikawa 2006, 2009

2009 Konami Baseball Heroes WBC Edition #W09R092

Shintaro Fujinami 2017

2017 Topps Museum Collection Primary Pieces #WBCQR-SF

Kosuke Fukudome 2006, 2009

2009 Bowman Sterling #BCR-KF

Yoshihisa Hirano 2017

2017 Calbee Samurai Japan #SJ-19

Shota Imanaga 2023

2023 Topps Now Samurai Japan #WBCJPN-12

Hisashi Iwakuma 2009

2009 Konami Baseball Heroes WBC Edition All Tournament Team #W09A002

Akinori Iwamura 2006, 2009

2006 Upper Deck SPx Winning Materials #WM-AI

Kenji Johjima 2009

2009 Topps WBC #54

Munenori Kawasaki 2006, 2009

2006 Upper Deck Sweet Spot Update Sweet Beginnings #SW-MK

Yusei Kikuchi 2026

2018 Epoch NPB #39

Kenta Maeda 2013

2013 Konami Baseball Heroes Extra Version #B13SJ004

Kazuhisa Makita 2013, 2017

2017 Calbee Samurai Japan #SJ-16

Kazuo Matsui 2013

2013 Topps Tribute WBC #59

Yuki Matsui 2017, 2023

2023 BBM Infinity #20

Daisuke Matsuzaka 2006, 2009

2006 SPx WBC All-World Team #AWT-28

Munetaka Murakami 2023, 2026

2023 Topps Now WBC #WBC-66

Tsuyoshi Nishioka 2006

2006 Upper Deck Inaugural Images #II-3

Lars Nootbaar 2023

2023 Topps Japan Edition Samurai Japan #WBC-4

Shohei Ohtani 2023, 2026

2023 Topps Now All Tournament Team #WBCA-12

Atsunori Ohtsuka 2006

2006 Fleer Flair Showcase WBC Moments #CM-21

Kazuma Okamoto 2023, 2026

2023 Topps Samurai Japan #25

Roki Sasaki 2023

2023 Marines SGA

Hirokazu Sawamura 2013

2016 Calbee Samurai Japan #SJ-06

Kodai Senga 2017

2017 Topps Now WBC #W-62

Tomoyuki Sugano 2017, 2026

2017 Bowman Paper Prospects #BP98

Ichiro 2006, 2009

2006 Upper Deck WBC #29

Seiya Suzuki 2017, 2026

2017 Topps Museum Collection Primary Pieces #WBCPR-SS

Masahiro Tanaka 2009, 2013

2009 Topps Ticket to Stardom Ticket Stubs Plus Memorabilia #TSP-66 

Yoshitomo Tsutsugoh 2017

2017 Topps Allen & Ginter #WBCR-YT

Koji Uehara 2006

2006 Upper Deck SP Authentic Future Watch #WBC-60

Tsuyoshi Wada 2006

2006 Upper Deck WBC Jersey Collection #WBC-TW

Yasuhiko Yabuta 2006

2008 Topps WBC

Yoshinobu Yamamoto 2023, 2026

2023 Topps Global Stars #27

Masataka Yoshida 2023, 2026

2023 Topps WBC #91

2026 Topps Chrome Samurai Japan set

I feel like there's been a dearth of World Baseball Classic cards from Topps this year so I was intrigued when I heard that Topps was going to release a Samurai Japan set.  The initial promo information on it didn't have a checklist, it just showed several sample cards which included a Shohei Ohtani base card, a "Sensational Samurai" insert card depicting Ichiro with cherry blossoms and Mt Fuji, a "Samurai Spirit" insert card for Yoshinobu Yamamoto, a "Neon Nights" insert card showing Munetaka Murakami in front of the Kabuki-chō Ichiban-gai neon sign in Shinjuku and an autographed card of Roki Sasaki.  From the players displayed, I wondered if the set was just going to feature players from the Japanese World Baseball Classic teams that have played in MLB.  Which, of course, made me wonder what the list of players from Japanese WBC teams that have played in MLB was.  I checked the rosters and came up with a list of 37 players.

I had a bit of an "a-ha!" moment when more details came out about the set.  The base set has 74 cards BUT there's only 37 players in it - each player has two cards in the set.  "I was right!" I thought to myself, "The set contains cards of all the MLB players who've played for all six of the Japanese WBC teams."

And then I looked at the checklist and was somewhat surprised to discover I was wrong.  The 37 player thing was a coincidence.  While there were a couple retired players from the 2006 and 2009 teams (specifically Ichiro and Munenori Kawasaki), the bulk of the players were from the 2023 and 2026 teams (along with Sadaharu Oh, the manager of the 2006 team).  What surprised me even more is that only 16 of the 37 players in the set ever played in MLB.  I decided to do a breakdown of the checklist and figure out which WBC teams got represented.

Before I show that, however, let me give a little more details about the set.  In addition to the 74 card base set, there are six short printed cards that are numbered from 75SP to 80SP.  Two of these are for Ohtani with the others being for Ichiro, Oh, Yamamoto and Sasaki.  There are four insert sets - "Generation Greats" (5 cards) and the afore mentioned "Neon Nights" (10 cards), "Samurai Spirit" (5 cards) and "Sensational Samurai" (10 cards) sets.  I've included the latter three sets in the checklist breakdown below but I left off the "Generation Greats" because each card features a pair of players.  The pairings are Ohtani & Oh; Ichiro & Seiya Suzuki; Yamamoto & Yu Darvish; Hiromi Itoh & Sasaki; and Murakami & Kazuma Okamoto.

In addition, there are 13 autographed cards and one autographed "Generation Greats" card - the one with Ohtani and Oh.  That card is apparently a 1/1 and will, obviously, command quite a price.  (As someone said on the Japanese Baseball Card Discord group, that's "a house in a card.  Possibly a very nice house.")

Here's the list of players in the checklist along with which WBCs they played in and whether they ever played in MLB.  I think it's odd that there was no representation from the 2013 team at all despite there being five MLB players on that roster including Kazuo Matsui, Kenta Maeda and Masahiro Tanaka.

#s	Player	WBCs	MLB?	Short Print	Autograph	Neon Nights	Samurai Spirit	Sensational Samurai
1, 38	Sadaharu Oh	2006		79SP	x
2, 39	Munenori Kawasaki	2006, 2009	x		x		x
3, 40	Ichiro	2006, 2009	x	76SP	x		x	x
4, 41	Yu Darvish	2009, 2023	x		x		x	x
5, 42	Kodai Senga	2017	x		x
6, 43	Seiya Suzuki	2017, 2026	x					x
7, 44	Roki Sasaki	2023	x	78S	x	x		x
8, 45	Shohei Ohtani	2023, 2026	x	75SP, 80SP	x	x	x	x
9, 46	Yoshinobu Yamamoto	2023, 2026	x	77SP	x	x	x	x
10, 47	Shota Imanaga	2023	x		x
11, 48	Masataka Yoshida	2023, 2026	x		x
12, 49	Chihiro Sumida	2026
13, 50	Hiromi Itoh	2023, 2026				x		x
14, 51	Yusei Kikuchi	2026	x
15, 52	Koki Kitayama	2026
16, 53	Tomoyuki Sugano	2017, 2026	x
17, 54	Ryuhei Sotani	2026
18, 55	Taisei	2023, 2026
19, 56	Shoma Fujihira	2026
20, 57	Hiroto Takahashi	2023, 2026				x
21, 58	Atsuki Taneichi	2026
22, 59	Yuki Matsui	2017, 2023	x		x
23, 60	Yuki Matsumoto	2026
24, 61	Hiroya Miyagi	2023, 2026
25, 62	Seishiro Sakamoto	2026
26, 63	Yuhei Nakamura	2023, 2026
27, 64	Kenya Wakatsuki	2026
28, 65	Kazuma Okamoto	2023, 2026	x		x	x		x
29, 66	Sosuke Genda	2023, 2026
30, 67	Kaito Kozono	2026
31, 68	Teruaki Sato	2026				x
32, 69	Shugo Maki	2023, 2026				x
33, 70	Taisei Makihara	2023, 2026
34, 71	Munetaka Murakami	2023, 2026	x		x	x		x
35, 72	Kensuke Kondoh	2023, 2026				x		x
36, 73	Ukyo Shuto	2023, 2026
37, 74	Shota Morishita	2026

Oh, I haven't bothered to list them but there's a metric sh*t ton of parallels of almost every card available because of course there are.  It IS a Topps set, after all.

The set is due to be released on October 16th.  The cards will only be available on Topps' website and will be sold in either a single, 7 card pack (each pack contains six base set cards plus one non-base set card) or a four pack "Collectors Box".  The MSRP for a pack is $40 and for the Collectors Box is $180 although they are selling on Ebay for much more than that - $450-ish.

I was tempted by this set but the combination of the price and the fact that it's a "Topps Chrome" set (I find Chrome to be extremely ugly although I realize I'm in the minority on this) has pretty much killed any thoughts of picking it up.

Samurai Japan Crosses Over

For the second time this year, I've been made aware of a card of Shohei Ohtani that I previously didn't know about.  But unlike the Konami Baseball Collection Location Test cards, this is a card that I would have liked to have picked up had I known about them when they were issued.

Late last week I got an email from William, a reader that I've exchanged messages with a few times in the past.  William was letting me know that he'd picked up a card of Sho Nakata from a "crossover set with the anime My Hero Academia":

The front, obviously, shows Nakata in his Samurai Japan uniform while the back shows Katsuki Bakugo, one of the characters from "My Hero Academia", wearing a Samurai Japan uniform.

William mentioned that there was a card of Ohtani in the set as well.  I tracked down completed sales for both a Nakata and an Ohtani on Mercari - the Nakata had sold for 800 yen while the Ohtani went for 225,100 yen ($4.92 and $1385.44 respectively).  I swiped the images from the Ohtani listing to share here:

The back of Ohtani's card shows Izuku Midoriya, the main protagonist from the anime.

William also came across a photo of a Tetsuto Yamada card from the set as well:

The "2013 Samurai Japan" text on the cards is very misleading.  I was pretty confident that these cards were NOT from 2013 for a couple reasons.  The Japanese National Baseball Team didn't adopt the name "Samurai Japan" until mid-2013 so these cards would not have been associated with that year's World Baseball Classic team.  In fact, the uniforms worn in the WBC that year were different that what's on these cards.  The first team to play under the name "Samurai Japan" was the team that took on the Taiwanese National Team in a three game set in Taiwan in November, 2013.  Neither Ohtani nor Yamada were members of that team although Nakata was (Nakata was also on the WBC team that year*).  So it seems unlikely that a 2013 Samurai Japan set would include the two of them.

*Just to be clear, neither Ohtani nor Yamada were on the 2013 WBC team either.  Yamada's breakout year wouldn't come until 2014 and Ohtani had just been drafted.  It'd have been really unlikely that he'd have made his professional baseball debut as a member of the WBC team. 

Of course, the biggest reason that it's unlikely that there'd be a crossover set between Samurai Japan and "My Hero Academia" in 2013 is that the anime didn't debut until 2016.  And the manga that it's based on wasn't published until 2014.

So when did the cards come out?  I did some searching on-line using the Japanese text for "Samurai Japan My Hero Academia" (僕のヒーローアカデミア 侍ジャパン) and pretty quickly got some answers.  The crossover event was announced in January of 2017 and was scheduled to take place at the "WBC Team Sendoff matches" on Feburary 28th and March 1st of that year where Samurai Japan would take on the Taiwanese WBC team in Fukuoka.  A number of items depicting characters from the anime wearing Samurai Japan uniforms would be available for sale at the games.  (UPDATE - I hadn't realized I'd forgotten to include the link to the crossover event announcement)

Most importantly, baseball cards would be distributed to fans attending the games.  Each of the first 3000 fans for each game would receive a single card from the ten card set.  Quickly doing the math, that means there were a total of 6000 cards given away those two days.  If we assume that they printed the same number of copies of each card, there's 600 copies of each card.

Only nine of the ten cards in the set depict an individual player.  In addition to Ohtani, Nakata and Yamada, the set included cards of Nobuhiro Matsuda, Hayato Sakamoto, Shogo Akiyama, Ryosuke Kikuchi, Yoshitomo Tsutsugoh and manager Hiroki Kokubo.  

I'm not positive, but I think the tenth card depicted all nine players (ok, the manager and eight players) and looked like this:

The back of this card depicted all nine of the anime characters that were paired with the players on their cards:

So I think we've pretty much definitely established that these cards are, in fact, from 2017 and not 2013.  So why do they say 2013 on them?

As I mentioned before, the Japanese National Baseball Team didn't officially adopt the name "Samurai Japan" until mid-2013.  And, more importantly, they didn't just adopt the name - they copyrighted it.  So that line of text is simply acknowledging that the name (and, more importantly, the logo) was copyrighted in 2013.  

It turns out that these aren't the only Samurai Japan cards that have this copyright line on them.  Check out the back of Ohtani's card from the 2016 Calbee Samurai Japan set, released just a couple months before these cards:

Just to be clear, I digitally added the red oval around the text.

I was somewhat surprised that there are two of the Ohtani cards up on Ebay right now.  They're both graded by PSA and are selling for $24,000 and $25,000 respectively.  Both cards are incorrectly labeled as "2013" issues.  I guess I'm not terribly surprised that PSA has it wrong (given some of their previous work with NPB cards) but I had been under the impression from Dan Skrezyna (aka Korean Cardboard) that PSA needed some sort of documentation about a set, like a checklist on TCDB, before they'd slab a card and id it.  I did a quick search on TCDB but didn't find this set listed.  So I don't know what basis PSA used to id the cards but they pretty clearly got it wrong.

I suspect that the fact that if the cards really were from 2013 they'd include a really rare Ohtani rookie card probably played into PSA being sloppy here but perhaps I'm being a little cynical.

My thanks to William for bringing these cards to my attention.  I wish I'd seen them in 2017!

UPDATE - William came across a listing for the tenth card on PSA's registry.  I was close on what I thought it would look like:

And, once again, they've got it mislabelled on which year it was.

New Acquisitions

I thought I'd do a quick post about some cards I recently picked up.  It's been about 18 months since I stopped buying new stuff but I do get a hankering every so often to get some new ones.

I put in an order with COMC in mid-April but, of course, I didn't actually receive the cards until late May.  I had decided to get serious about replacing a couple old Calbee cards that I'd picked up on my last trip to Japan two years ago but I was only able to find one of the cards.  I'd brought home this card of Shitoshi Sekimoto from the "Florida Project" subset of the 1974/75 Calbee set (#708) that someone had used a pencil to highlight Sekimoto on:

The new version looks much better:

Since I was already ordering from COMC, I figured I'd look around and see if there was anything else I wanted at a reasonable price.  I decided to pick up this card of Masato Morishita because (1) I've been a fan of Morishita since seeing him pitch for Meiji back in 2019 and (2) I wanted to have an example of the 1990 inserts from last year's Topps NPB set (#90-7):

I also picked up a couple cards from the 2023 Topps World Baseball Classic set.  I picked up the "image variant" of Masataka Yoshida's card (#91):

I already had the base version:

I also grabbed the "Captains Of The World Baseball Classic" insert card of Ha-seong Kim (#CC-14):

Moving on to some stuff I ordered from Ebay...

I'm kind of low key trying to get one of each of the autographed cards for the Samurai Japan Collegiate team that were in the 2024 Panini USA Baseball Stars & Stripes set.  This card of Ryuta Hirose got me halfway there:

Since the remaining 14 cards I need to complete the set include Misho Nishikawa, Seiya Watanabe, Rui Muneyama and Natsuki Takeuchi, I'm not expecting to ever actually finish the set.  As I've always said, I'm cheap, so I'm not willing to pay what it'd take to get those cards.  But I'll keep trying to get the low hanging fruit when I can.

The last two cards are for Rintaro Sasaki of Stanford University.  Sasaki was drafted last fall's NPB draft by the Hawks and is potentially going to get taken in next month's MLB draft.  The Hawks' rights for him expire at the end of July so he can see if any MLB teams are interested before deciding if he wants to join Softbank.  Panini has done about a gazillion cards of him (with another two gazillion parallels) so I decided to pick up a card of him from each of the past two years.  Generally I find Panini's cards kind of hideous but I was able to find two that weren't too bad.  This 2024 Onyx Vintage Extended card (#OVRISA) show him in what I think is a Trenton Thunder uniform with all the logos airbrushed/photoshopped off:

The 2025 Prizm card (#271) shows him in his Stanford uniform:

This batch of cards scratched an itch for a bit.  Ryan's still picking stuff up for me and, while I try not to take him for granted, Kenny's probably preparing another envelope of goodies for me, so I'm sure to be getting some more new stuff soon.