Japanese (And Korean) Players In The WPBL Draft

 

The Women's Pro Baseball League (WPBL), the latest attempt at a women's professional baseball league (which is somewhat explanatory by the name) in the US, held its draft last week and I got curious about how many of the drafted players had any experience playing in either the Japan Women's Baseball League (JWBL) or for any of the women's teams associated with NPB teams (specifically the Lions, Tigers and Giants).  And, of course, which of those players might have baseball cards already.

What I found from looking over the list of drafted players was that there were ten Japanese players drafted along with four players from South Korea.  I think, though, that there was only one player who had played in the JWBL - which isn't super surprising since the league's been gone for five years now (and suffered a huge loss of players after 2019 due to issues with how the league was run).  Seven of the players, however, have played for one of the NPB team associated women's teams (including one of the Korean players) and six of them have played for an incarnation of their country's women's national team.

I'll go over the Japanese and Korean players on a team by team basis, starting with the Los Angeles team which has the most of them.  LA took Ayami Sato as their top pick and the second overall pick.  Sato, of course, is a legend in women's baseball and for the longest time was regarded as the best female baseball player in the world.  She's the only player that I know for sure played in the JWBL and also the only one I know for sure has baseball cards.  I did a post just about a year ago showing all the cards I had at the time of her and, since then, I've added the autographed card from the 2018 Epoch JWBL set that appears above.  In the seventh round, LA took Emi Saiki who spent two seasons (2023-24) with the Hanshin Tigers.  The Tigers have issued some cards for their women's team as giveaways with bento boxes so it is possible that she might have a baseball card or two as well.  Suzu Nasasaki, who spent 2020-22 with the Saitama Seibu Lions as a teammate of Sato's, was LA's 11th pick.  They went back to the Lions' roster with their 20th pick, selecting Rio Obitsu who was with the team in 2024-25.  Obitsu had played for Samurai Japan in the 2019 Women’s Baseball Asian Cup and was named the MVP of the tournament.  LA's 24th pick was pitcher Ayuri Shimano who had spent four seasons (2022-25) with the Yomiuri Giants.

With four players, San Francisco took the second most Asian players in the draft.  As far as I've been able to tell, however, none of them played for any of the NPB team associated women's teams.  San Francisco took Ayaka Yamamoto with their sixth pick, Jua Park with their ninth pick, Hinani Beppu with their 15th pick and Hanna Miura with their 19th pick.  Park played for the South Korean National Team in the 2023/24 Women's World Cup though (although they only participated in the 2023 portion of the tournament).

New York drafted three Asian players.  Their third pick, Rakyung Kim, was a member of the Korean National Team for the 2018 Women's World Cup and played for the Lions last season - she was the first Korean player on the Lions.  Their seventh pick, Natsuki Yonetani*, was a teammate of Obitsu's on the 2019 Women's Baseball Asian Cup Samurai Japan team and led the team in batting.  Their final Asian player was their 29th pick, a Korean infielder named Minseo Park.

* The league website has her name as "Yonetani Natsuki" but Samurai Japan's webpage for the 2019 tournament implies that her family name is Yonetani.

Finally, Boston took two Asian players in the draft.  Their first round pick was a Korean catcher named Hyeonah Kim who was also a member of the 2023/24 Korean Women's World Cup team.  Their ninth round pick was Suzuka Yamamoto who played on the Tigers in 2021-22 and may have had baseball cards.

I may have missed where some of these women have played.  I relied heavily on the Japanese Wikipedia pages for the Tigers, Lions and Giants women's teams as well as their page 2023/24 Women's Baseball World Cup.  I also used the Samurai Japan website as well as the WPBL's site.

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.

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:

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.

Madonna Japan Members In Australia

The 2024 Australian Women's Showcase will be played next week in Lismore, New South Wales and there are five members of Madonna Japan, the Japanese women's national team, who will be participating in it.  Three of those five are veterans of the Japan Women's Baseball League (JWBL) so I thought I'd do a quick post on them.

2018 Epoch JWBL #52

Akari Hoshikawa played four seasons in the JWBL with Reia (2017), Kyoto Flora (2018) and Aichi Dione (2019-20).  2019 was probably her best season when she hit .339 and had a league leading .480 on-base-percentage.  She won the Best Nine award that year at third base.   Since leaving the JWBL (and the league folding), she's been playing for the Awaji Brave Oceans.

2018 Epoch JWBL #53

Tamaki Muramatsu was probably the best catcher in the JWBL's final couple seasons.  She spent five years in the league with her first two seasons with Reia, which was essentially a farm team for the other three teams in the league.  When she graduated to the Kyoto Flora in 2018 she hit .331 and won the Rookie Of The Year award and her first Best 9 award.  She led the league in RBIs in 2019 and won a second Best 9 award.  After the league folded, she was a founding member of the Hanshin Tigers women's team although she ultimately only played for them for one year.  She's been playing for the Hatsukaichi Sun Blaze since 2022.

2018 Epoch JWBL #27

Miwa Naraoka spent six seasons (2013-18) playing for Saitama Astraia and had a career batting average of .311.  She won three Best Nine awards (2016-18), two Golden Gloves (2016-17) and led the league in hits in 2016.  She also pitched in a handful of games in 2014-15.  After retiring from the JWBL, she spent several years playing for the Agec Women's Baseball Club before founding the Kyushu Honeys with Yuki Kawabata.

It doesn't look like either of the other two players, Erika Nakae and Miwa Tanaka, ever played in the JWBL.  Tanaka is currently a member of the Yomiuri Giants' women's team but I'm not sure what team Nakae plays for.

The tournament will be held from May 9th through the 12th and features the Adelaide Giants, Brisbane Bandits and Victoria Aces.  Hoshikawa, Muramatsu and Tanaka will be joining Adelaide for the weekend while Nakae and Naraoka will be with the Aces.

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).