Ryan is not the only one that I get cool stuff in the mail from. I received a package yesterday from Dani that had a bunch of goodies in it. We have kind of an ongoing trade in progress - I sent her a bunch of cards last year, she sent me a bunch of cards this week so I need to get some cards together for her now.
Here's what she sent me. First up, a couple random cards. She sent me what I think is a Weekly Baseball insert of Ryota Wakiya from 2006:
Next a Calbee Star Card of Shuichi Murata from 2012:
2012 Calbee #S-42
Next she sent me a card from last year's Nippon-Ham Home Run Sausage set. I've been wanting to get a complete set of these but complete sets are nowhere to be found on Yahoo! Japan Auctions so I will settle for just this one. As a bonus, I'm pretty sure this picture of Shogo Yagi was taken in Arizona last spring:
2016 Nippon-Ham Sausage #2016N-34
The bulk of what she sent me was a bunch of her extras from last year's Pro Yakyuu Ai "street clothes" set for the Fighters. She had sent me a couple cards from this set last year but she bought another box and sent me more of her doubles. She said she tried to find the "least goofy" cards for me "but well they are all goofy". She gave me 10 more of the base set cards:
2016 Pro Yakyuu Ai #02
2016 Pro Yakyuu Ai #16
2016 Pro Yakyuu Ai #18
2016 Pro Yakyuu Ai #22
2016 Pro Yakyuu Ai #28
2016 Pro Yakyuu Ai #33
2016 Pro Yakyuu Ai #42
2016 Pro Yakyuu Ai #43
2016 Pro Yakyuu Ai #52
2016 Pro Yakyuu Ai #56
She also sent me a "Shop Campaign Card" for Kensuke Kondoh. I'm not quite sure what this is but it looks like there's one to a box.
She also sent me an empty pack along with the "Original Binder Application Ticket". Apparently there was some sort of lottery you could enter to get a binder for the set:
I was tempted to call the set "Professional Baseball Affection" but Dani says that that's the name of the magazine put out by Pro Yakyuu Ai. I now have at least one card for each of the nine players in the set - that'll probably be enough.
I saved the best part of the package for last though. For any number of reasons I was unable to make it to Arizona last month for the Fighters training camp. I felt I had a little unfinished business there from last year, however, and I knew Dani would be going again so I asked her for a favor and she graciously agreed. I mailed her a card that I wanted signed in late January and she got it done on her very first day in Arizona:
I need to get a good screwdown case to put this in.
Thanks so much for everything Dani! I'll be getting some cards together for you but they probably won't be as cool as these were.
Sho Nakata appears to like playing on the international stage. In the 2015 Premier 12, he hit .429 with 3 home runs and 15 RBIs in 8 games. In four games so far in the 2017 World Baseball Classic, he's hitting .357 with 3 home runs and 8 RBIs. He was the big hero in today's nail-biter 8-6 victory by Japan against The Netherlands, with a three run home run in the third and the game winning two RBI single in the 11th.
Here's a card of Nakata from the "Cosmic Cross" set that was distributed in six card quantities in each issue of Sports Card Magazine in 2014:
I discovered the other day that BBM has an official YouTube Channel. There's only a couple videos so far - box breaks for Rookie Edition and the "Fast Break 2nd Half" basketball cards for the B.League and this video showing off the Shohei Ohtani and Seiya Suzuki memorabilia cards from the upcoming 1st Version set:
Ten years ago BBM issued a box set called "HR Chronicle" which celebrated the top home run hitters in NPB history. I've been wavering on picking one up for a while (I almost bought one at Wrappers in Tokyo four years ago) but it wasn't until I found one on Yahoo! Japan Auctions a few months back for 400 yen that I finally decided to get one. Ryan once again was nice enough to pick it up for me, saving me a bunch of proxy service fees. I'm glad I finally got it because it's a nice little set.
The original set had 47 cards in it - a 45 card base set and 2 "premium" cards (which could be photo cards, film cards, bat cards and autographed cards). I only got the box set (which you could have probably figured out by the 400 yen price). The cards are a nice thick stock and feature a photo of the player on the front (well, duh) with the player's total number of NPB home runs in the lower left corner and the player's career home run totals broken into a bar graph by season. Here's the front and back of Sadaharu Oh's card (#01) as an example:
There's a little crown on each year the player led the league in home runs. Players who played in MLB or the KBO have their home runs shown on the back of their card as well (with purple bars) but those home run obviously aren't included in the total on the front. The home run totals are through July 1, 2007 which of course only affects the 11 active at the time players in the set.
The player selection is a bit interesting. My first thought was that the set featured the top 45 career home run hitters in NPB history. But then I noticed that the last card was of Seung-Yuop Lee who only had 100 NPB home runs at the time. Surely there had been more than 45 guys with over 100 home runs in NPB. The answer is yes, there have been.
I don't have a list of home run totals as of July 1, 2007 but I do know where to find a list as of the 2011 season - the Japanese Baseball Database. Eyeballing that list and accounting for differences in totals for players still active in 2007 and later, it looks like the set includes everyone who had more than 300 home runs at press time - that accounts for the first 31 cards in the set. The top player on the list not included is Akinobu Mayumi with 292 home runs. The set includes 35 of the top 37 guys on the 2011 list - the only ones missing are Alex Ramirex and Michihiro Ogasawara who had a much lower home run total in mid 2007 than after 2011. The remaining cards include a bunch of the big home run hitters from the early days of professional baseball in Japan - Noboru Aota, Yasumitsu Toyoda, Futoshi Nakanishi, Fumio Fujimura, Hiroshi Ohshita and Kaoru Bettoh as well as Randy Bass and the aforementioned Seung-Yuop Lee.
One thing I like about the set is that most of the photos are not ones that BBM has used in other sets - the Oh one is a notable exception but since it shows him hitting home run #756 I think it's undertandable. Here's some more sample cards:
#14
#19
#28
#29
#42
Ryan included the box the set was came in so I took a couple pictures of it to show off how the set was packaged:
One of the sets I asked Ryan to pick up for me was the complete (I assume) 2015 Lions Fan Club set. I had seen an auction on YJA for it for only 600 yen so I figured it was time to see what a complete team issued set looked like. I previously wrote about a couple cards I had from this set in a post I did on Lions team issued cards.
The set contains 70 cards total. It appears to contain the entire 70 man roster of the Lions that year (which actually was only 66 players) plus four ikusei players. It does not contain a card for the Lions manager at the time Norio Tanabe. The cards are unnumbered except for the player's uniform number.
I did a comparison of the players appearing in this set and the players appearing in the 2015 BBM Lions set. Tanabe was the only in the BBM set but not in this set. Three of the four ikusei players (Kyohei Maegawa, Daichi Mizuguchi and Daisuke Togawa) do not appear in the BBM set - the fourth one (Ryo Hayashizaki) was moved to the official roster on June 1 that year and so appears in the BBM set. (Mizuguchi was moved to the official roster on July 23 so the Fan Club set must have gone to press before June 1 and the BBM set must have gone to press between June 1 and July 23.)
I don't know a whole lot about the Japan Women's Baseball League (JWBL). The league was founded in 2009 as the Girls Professional Baseball League (GPBL) and was renamed in 2013. There have apparently always been four teams in the league although the names have changed constantly. Currently the teams are Hyogo Dione, Kyoto Flora, Reia and Saitama Astraia. Ryan knows a lot more about the league of course as he's actually gone to at least a couple games - up in Sendai and near Yokohama. The league has an official YouTube channel with some nice highlight videos:
Ryan has reported in the past on baseball cards related to the league. BBM did cards in at least 2010 and 2011 (no idea how they were distributed) and an outfit called AIAIO has been issuing cards for the league since 2012 maybe although they appear to be either a give away with tickets or possibly sold through AIAIO itself. Last October thought, Epoch issued what I believe is the first national release of baseball cards for the league. It was a 78 card set issued as a traditional pack based set - it was sold in boxes of 20 packs of 5 cards each. It actually was the ONLY set Epoch issued last year as a traditional pack based set instead of a ridiculously overpriced box containing a handful of cards for more than 10,000 yen. There were no insert cards to go with the base set although there were possible autographed cards as well as "checki" cards.
The cards for each team include a card of the mascot, the manager and a coach. There are 22 cards for Hyogo Dione, 21 cards for Kyoto Flora, 13 cards for Reia and 21 cards for Saitama Astraia. Each of the teams has a former NPB player as either coach or manager - Hyogo coach Tomoya Kawaguchi (Orix), Kyoto coach Heisyu Ohhara (Yakult), Reia coach Takanobu Tsujiuchi (Yomiuri) and Saitama manager Shinsaku Katahira (Nankai, Seibu & Taiyo).
I've no idea why Reia has much fewer cards than the other three teams. What's also odd is that Hyogo, Kyoto and Saitama have only one "Rookie" card but Reia has four. Since I don't know anything about the league, I don't know if the player selection is leaving anyone out. I do know that the two players I was aware of - Shingo Kawabata of the Swallows sister Yuki and Minami Takatsuka who had a promo card for the 2015 Real Venus set in SCM #114 - are both in the set.
The cards themselves are pretty attractive and for the most part feature action photos of the players:
#54
#59
#01
#14
#73
#70
#22
#40
I have to say that I find their mascots a bit on the creepy looking side:
#77
If you've been paying attention you'll have noticed that the total number of cards I listed for the teams adds up to only 77. The other card is yet another "First Pitch" card for Ami Inamura:
#78
Despite not knowing much about this league, I really like this set. One of the things I like about it is that unlike BBM's Real Venus sets there's no attempt to glamorize the ballplayers - they're not treated as anything other than the athletes they are. This set would look pretty much exactly the same if the players in the league were all men - of course the name of the league wouldn't make much sense then. (And in fairness I think the 2010-11 BBM sets and the AIAIO cards are the same way.) As a father of two young women that means a lot to me.
You can as always see all the cards at Jambalaya. They have a handful of the autographed cards on line as well.
NPB Reddit shared an article from the Japan Times a little over a month ago about Kawasaki Stadium and a famous pair of games there. Kawasaki Stadium was built in the early 1950's and was home to first the Taiyo Whales (before they moved to Yokohama in 1978) and then to the Lotte Orions (before they moved to Chiba in 1992) as well as the Takahashi Unions from 1954-56. The ballpark was converted into a football venue in 2000 but some of the old baseball park still remains.
The article discusses a double header played on October 19, 1988 between the Kintetsu Buffaloes and the Lotte Orions. The Buffaloes needed to sweep the last place Orions to pass the Lions (who had already completed their schedule) and clinch the Pacific League pennant. They won the first game 4-3 but were unable to hold a similar 4-3 lead in the second game when Hideaki Takazawa homered in the bottom of the eighth to tie the game up. The game ended as a tie after 10 innings (which was the limit at the time) and the Lions won the PL pennant (and went on to beat the Dragons in the Nippon Series). This particular doubleheader is known in Japan simply as "10.19"
BBM's 2016 "Historic Collection" set celebrating events at old ballparks (The Ballpark Stories) has three cards that deal with this day. I'm fairly certain that the photos on the cards are from the games. There's a card of Buffaloes pitcher Hideyuki Awano, who got the save in the first game and I think gave up the home run to Takazawa in the second game:
2016 BBM The Ballpark Stories #134
There's a card of Yoshio Mizukami of Lotte who I think made a game saving play on a ball hit by Hiromasa Arai (at least if I'm understanding this correctly):
2016 BBM The Ballpark Stories #110
And finally there's a card showing Takazawa's home run:
