Card Of The Week May 31

Tomo Ohka got called up by the Indians the other day. I actually hadn't realized that he was still pitching. He came in and pitched 5 innings in a mop-up role on Saturday against the Yankees, giving up only three runs after Fausto Carmona had been knocked out of the game. To my knowledge, Ohka has only two BBM cards from his days with the Yokohama BayStars - his 1994 rookie (#493) and a card from the 1997 set (#224). Here's the 1994 card:

2009 BBM Tokyo Big 6 Spring Version

Got my 2009 BBM Tokyo Big 6 Spring Version set in the mail today. Like last year's set, this is a 60 card box set which features nine player cards and a team card from each of the six universities in the Tokyo Big Six Collegiate Baseball League - Hosei, Keio, Meiji, Rikkio, Tokyo and Waseda. I don't know who many of these guys are, so I've been reading Deanna Rubin's posts on the Big 6 games she's been going to to try to learn who they are.

The cards are very nice again. Here's a couple examples - Hosei catcher (and team captain) Shuhei Ishikawa (#28), Meiji infielder (well, the card says he's an infielder although he played center in the Big 6 Championship game) Fumiya Araki (#24) and the Waseda team card (#55):

Final 2009 BBM Team Sets

BBM released information on their website today about the final three team sets for the year - the Lions, Hawks and Giants.

The Lions set contains 99 cards including 71 player and manager cards, a checklist, a six card "LIONHEART" subset (featuring cards of Hiroyuki Nakajima, Yasuyuki Kataoka, Takeya Nakamura, Takumi Kuriyama, Hideaki Wakui and Takayuki Kishi - I think), a six card "shared number" subset featuring OB and current players who have the same uniform numbers, a six card "title holder" subset and a nine card puzzle. There's also the ubiquitous nine card "Shining Star" insert set and the usual memorabilia/autograph cards. There's no release date listed on the site for the set.

The Hawks set will be released in July. It is also a 99 card set with 77 cards for players and managers, a checklist, a four card "Next Generation" subset, an eight card "Kyushu" subset (I'm guessing featuring Hawks players from Kyushu?) and a nine card puzzle. And as expected there's a nine card "Shining Star" insert set and an assortment of memorabilia and autograph cards.

At 126 cards, the Giants set is larger than all of the other team sets from this year. It has 78 cards for the players and manager, two "emblem" cards (maybe actually the mascots?), a checklist card, a 33 card "Giants Pride" subset, a three card "Giants Of Tomorrow" subset and a nine card "WONDERBOY" subset that appears to be devoted to Hayato Sakamoto. Along with the expected nine card "Shining Star" insert set there is a seven card "Giants Seventh" insert set and the usual memorabilia and autograph cards.

As always, I'm trying to figure this out from the Babel Fish translations, so I may have gotten things wrong. In addition, BBM sometimes changes things between when they first announce the set and when the set is actually released, so your mileage may vary.

New WBC Cards

Topps has issued a couple new sets of World Baseball Classic cards in the last month. The first of these is a 20 card subset in the new Bowman set featuring WBC prospects. The subset includes two members of the Japanese team - Yu Darvish (#BW1) and Shinnosuke Abe (#BW6).



I have a couple of issues with this set. First of all, only six of the players in the set did not appear in the 55 card box set Topps put out earlier. But worst of all, of the 14 players that appear in both sets, seven of them (Abe, Phillippe Aumont of Canada, Tao Bu of China, Fu-Te Ni and Cheng-Min Peng of Taipei, Yulieski Gourriel of Cuba and Gift Ngoepe of South Africa) have the EXACT SAME PICTURE used in both sets. (You can see this with the Abe card in this post and here.) That's just plain lazy.

The second new set of WBC cards is a 25 card insert set for Topps 2. These cards remind me of the early 60's Fleer cards - the background of the photos has been replaced with just a blue backdrop. There are four cards in the set from the Japanese team - Darvish, Ichiro, Shuichi Murata (#BCS22) and Hiroyuki Nakajima (#BCS4).



I'm still not real happy with the player selection in the set - 19 of the 25 players appear in box set and one of the others appears in the Bowman set. Only five players only appear in this set. It'd have been nice to have seen cards for maybe someone like Hisashi Iwakuma or Kevin Youklis instead of yet another card of Derek Jeter or Ichiro.

The kind of cool item that Topps produced actually is not something new - Topps produced 8 card sheets that were give aways in Tokyo (Pool A) and Toronto (Pool C) for the first round. (I have not been able to find out if they produced sheets for Mexico City or San Juan.) The sheets feature two players from each of the four teams in the pool. The sheets are promotional items for the 55 card box set, so the cards on them have the same design. However, some of the cards on the sheet feature different photos than the box set or even different players. Here's the Pool A sheet from Tokyo:


While the cards of the Chinese and Japanese players (and Jin Young Lee of Korea) are identical to the cards in the box set, the two Taipei players and the other Korean player (Byung Hyun Kim) are not in the box set (probably because two of them didn't appear in the WBC). The Pool C sheet is even more dramatic in that none of the eight cards are actually in the set - it features four new players (Jeff Francis of Canada, Vincent Sinisi of Italy and Carlos Zambrano and Omar Vizquel of Venezuela) and four new pictures (Justin Morneau of Canada, Lenny DiNardo of Italy and Derek Jeter and Chipper Jones of the USA). (Of course, the reason none of those four players didn't make the set is that none of them actually played in the WBC!)

I expect that Topps is not done with World Baseball Classic cards yet. I'm still hoping for a set that actual covers events from the actual game - like the Upper Deck "World Baseball Classic" moments set did.

2009 Calbee Series 2

Calbee's website is now listing information for their second series of the year. The set includes 96 "regular" cards (8 per team), four checklist card and a 12 card "Hot Player" subset. There are also subsets labeled "OP", "S" and "V" and I have no clue what they might be.

I don't see a release date for the set, so I don't know when it will be out. Come to think of it, I don't know if Series 1 ever came out. I assume it was out in March or April.

Update: According to a comment from Deanna, the "OP" cards are "Opening Game" cards, the "S" subset are "Star" cards and the "V" subset are "Veteran" cards. Each subset is an even multiple of 12, so you can expect that each team will be evenly represented.

Card Of The Week May 24

There was a question the other day in the comments to the Kaz Tadano post about who the most famous player in Japan with the last name "Fujimoto" was. I'm going to go with Hideo Fujimoto, even though he's list in the Japanese Baseball Hall Of Fame as "Hideo Nakagami". He won 200 games in his career stretching from 1942 to 1955 - all with the Giants except for the 1947 season when he pitched for Chunichi. He threw the first perfect game in Japanese history in 1950.

I'm curious as to why he changed his name and why he pitched one season for the Dragons. I have no idea in either case.


2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 #125.

The other Hall Of Famer named Fujimoto was Sadayoshi Fujimoto, who managed six different teams between 1935 and 1968.

Kazuhito Tadano

I made a mistake in this post where I said that Makoto Suzuki was the only Japanese player to play in the States before he played in Japan. As Deanna Rubin pointed out, Kazuhito Tadano appeared in 15 games for the Indians in 2004 and 2005 before he ended up with the Fighters last year. Here's his 2008 BBM 2nd Version "Breaking Now" subset card (#746):


And I'm very amused at who the sponsor for Tadano's Baseball-Reference page is.