Card Of The Week December 24

This past weekend's games in the Australian Baseball League were the final ones of the season for the players on loan from NPB teams.  Eagles pitcher Takahisa Hayakawa, who's been playing for the Perth Heat, made a statement in his final game on Friday.  He took on the first place Adelaide Giants in the first game of a doubleheader in Adelaide and threw a near perfect seven inning game, striking out thirteen while walking none, giving up no runs and only one hit.  (Since it was the first game of a double header, the game only went seven innings so he gets credit for a complete game shutout.)  He was perfect until Anthony Quirion singled with one out in the sixth inning.   Here's all thirteen strikeouts:

Perth won the game 4-0, which ran Hayakawa's record to a perfect 4-0.  He didn't join the Heat until the third week of the season (he had pitched for Japan in the Asian Professional Baseball Championship) but he appeared in four games, making three starts and completing a game after it had been suspended due to rain.  He struck out 46 batters in 27 innings while only walking four.  His ERA was 1.00.

His dominance reminds me of another Japanese pitcher's stint in the ABL.  Shota Imanaga of the Baystars spent the first six weeks of the 2018 season as a member of the Canberra Calvary.  He went 4-0 in six starts, striking out 57 in 35 innings while only walking one(!) batter.  His ERA was 0.51.  Imanaga had a great season the following year so maybe Hayakawa will too.

There are no cards of Imanaga with Canberra and I'm not expecting any Perth cards of Hayakawa so here's an NPB card of each of them:

2022 BBM Icons-Rough Diamond #25

2023 BBM 2nd Version "Cross Moon" #CM58

Yuki Matsui Of The San Diego Padres

This past week former Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles pitcher Yuki Matsui signed a four year, $21 million contract with the San Diego Padres.  Matsui is expected to take over the closer role on the team from departing free agent Josh Hader.  UPDATE - between when I started working on this post this morning and when I finished it this evening, the news came out that the deal was actually for five years and $28 million.  I meant to update this before I published but forgot.

Matsui jumped on to everybody's radar pitching for Toko Gakuen High Schoole during the 2012 Summer Koshien tournament.  He struck out 22 batters (including 10 in a row) in the first round game against Imbari Nishi, then followed that up with 19 strikeouts in the second round game against Joso Gakuen.  He struck out 12 Urasoe Commercial batters in the third round and then 15 the next day(!) in a quarterfinal loss to Kosei Academy.  He had 68 strikeouts in 36 innings, good enough for third on the all time list for most strikeouts in a Summer High School Championship tournament.

He entered the 2013 NPB draft after graduating from high school and was selected in the first round by five teams - the Baystars, Dragons, Eagles, Fighters and Hawks - with the Eagles (who would win their first ever Nippon Series championship 10 days later) winning the lottery for his rights.

He spent most of his rookie season of 2014 with the top team and moved into the closers role in 2015.  He's pretty much been the Eagles' closer ever since with the exception of 2018 when I think he was recovering from an injury and 2020 when he switched to being a starter temporarily.  He's led the Pacific League in saves three times (2019, 2022 and 2023) and has 236 career saves.  He's a five time All Star (2015, 2017, 2019, and 2021-22) and was a member of the Samurai Japan teams for the 2015 Premier 12 and the 2017 and 2023 World Baseball Classics.

Matsui's first card was #001 from the 2014 BBM Rookie Edition set.  He had rookie cards in BBM's 1st and 2nd Version sets as well as their Classic, Genesis, Rookie Edition Premium and Eagles team sets.  He also appeared in Calbee's Series One and Three that year along with Bandai's Owners League 02 set and the Eagles team issued set.  Since then he's been a staple of everyone's flagship sets, appearing in every BBM 1st and 2nd Version set and at least one Calbee Series every year from 2014 until this year as well as every Epoch NPB flagship from 2018 to present and every Topps NPB flagship from 2021 to present.  Here's a bunch of his cards:

2014 BBM Rookie Edition #001

2014 Calbee #001

2014 BBM 1st Version #019

2015 Eagles Team Issue "Memorial Uniform" #SS1-01

2016 BBM Classic #031

2018 Topps Museum Collection #WBCPR-YM

2018 Epoch NPB #74

2019 BBM 2nd Version "Franchise Builder" #FB06

2020 BBM 1st Version #056

2021 BBM Eagles #E02

2022 BBM Fusion #TH20

2023 Calbee #C-06

I want to point out that he had a "virtual" card in an issue of Sports Card Magazine.  SCM #95 which was published at the end of September 2012 had a two page spread showing the front and back of four "SCM Fictional Cards".  The cards featured table tennis player Kasumi Ishikawa, volleyball player Saori Kimura and soccer player Yoko Tanaka and Toko Gakuen High School pitcher Yuki Matsui:

To be clear - this is NOT a physical card issued with the magazine, just a picture on the page.  If you see someone selling this card, it's not a legitimate card.

Yet More Topps World Baseball Classic Cards

I've some WBC baseball card news - some new and some "new to me" - to report.

- This past week Topps has issued yet another on line World Baseball Classic set called somewhat unimaginatively* the 2023 Topps World Baseball Classic set.  Ten card boxes are selling on Topps' website for $79.99 but before you balk too much at the price, I believe each box is guaranteed to contain an autograph or a relic card.  The base set contains 100 cards and includes six members of Samurai Japan (Yu Darvish, Munetaka Murakami, Lars Nootbaar, Shohei Ohtani, Roki Sasaki and Masataka Yoshida) and four members of the Korean team (Tommy Edman, Kim Ha-seong, Park Se-woong and Yang Eui-ji).  Ohtani, Nootbaar and Yoshida all have relic, autograph and autographed relic cards available.  There's some sort of "2006" insert set that includes Ohtani, Darvish, Sasaki, Murakami and Yoshida, "Captains Of The WBC" insert set with Ohtani and an "International Gems" one with Ohtani, Sasaki and Yoshida.  The most interesting insert set (to me anyway) is called "Global Grandeur" - the ten card set contains all Samurai Japan players - the six from the base set as well as Kensuke Kondoh, Kazuma Okamoto and Tetsuto Yamada plus a team card.  You can see all the checklists for the set over at Cardboard Connection.  The one positive thing I'll say about the set is it's the first one Topps has issued for the 2023 tournament that appears to feature at least one player from all 20 teams.

* Says the guy whose blog is called "Japanese Baseball Cards"

- The World Baseball Classic set is a little rich for my blood after dropping several hundred dollars on WBC cards earlier this year but I discovered there's some other WBC cards that may be a little more affordable.  Topps released their Japan Edition last month and I pretty much ignored it because it was an MLB issue.  However, I just discovered that there's several WBC related items with the set.  The most attractive one for me is a 25 card "Japanese National Team Set" featuring most (but not all) of the players on the Samurai Japan roster.  There's two cards of Ohtani in the set (because of course there are) but there's cards of other players who've only appeared in the Samurai Japan team set sold on Topps' Japanese website last spring like Hiromi Itoh and Shosei Togo.  Of less interest to me are the "WBC Japanese National Team Autographs" and "WBC Japanese National Team Patch Autographs" - both checklists contain Nootbaar, Yoshida and two different Ohtani cards.  Finally there are also ten "WBC Japanese National Team Patch" which if I'm not mistaken from what I've seen on Ebay are manufactured relics - they're not really from the WBC.  Again, Cardboard Connection has all the checklists. 

Topps Now Samurai Japan Cards - 2023 Asian Professional Baseball Championship Version

Christmas came a couple days early for me today as I received the latest batch of Topps Now Samurai Japan cards.  These cards were issued on Topps' Japanese website in commemoration of the 2023 Asian Professional Baseball Championship which was held in mid-November.  I was a little surprised the other day when I got an email telling me the cards had shipped as they are still for sale on Topps' website (and will be for another 20 hours or so).

There are 16 cards in all which feature 14 different players (Makoto Kadowaki has two cards) along with manager Hirokazu Ibata.  Samurai Japan played four games in the tournament - their preliminary round games against Taiwan (which they won 4-0), Korea (2-1 victory) and Australia (10-0 victory) and their final round game against Korea (4-3 walk-off victory in 10 innings).  The 16 Topps Now cards are split evenly among the games with cards 1-4 being for the game against Taiwan, cards 5-8 for the game against Korea, cards 9-12 are for the game against Australia and cards 13-16 are for the final against Korea.  Here's all 16 cards:

#1

#2

#3

#4

#5

#6

#7

#8

#9

#10

#11

#12

#13

#14

#15

#16

A couple comments:

- I'm amused that the the home runs by Maki and Mannami were perfect but Morishita's was merely "excellent"

Excellent Bill And Ted GIFfrom Excellent GIFs

- That's Australian catcher Jake Burns who's partly visible behind Yuki Nomura.

- Topps has added this new "1st Samurai" icon to many of the cards to indicate that it's the first time that particular player has suited up for Samurai Japan.  It's a bit misleading though as I know off the top of head that a couple of these guys - Sato, Hayakawa and Morishita - played on the collegiate version of the team.  And Sato played on the team that played friendlies against Australia last year (and was in last year's Topps Now Samurai Japan cards).  Maybe they mean "first time playing for Samurai Japan in a professional tournament"?

- The card backs are completely what I expect from Topps' Japanese issues - total lack of effort.  The backs simply list the date, opponent and location of the game featured on the front in both Japanese and English but - like last year - don't bother to mention the score of the game:

I'm a sucker for Samurai Japan cards so I'm very happy with these.  I'll be ordering the full team set soon.  I'll be curious if Topps does Topps Now cards for the friendlies that Samurai Japan will be playing against the European All Stars in March and for next fall's Premier 12 team.

2023 Epoch NPB Luxury Collection

Late last year Epoch released the first edition of their "NPB Luxury Collection" set, the upscale version of their flagship set.  I wasn't very interested in it as I felt it was pretty much just an ugly Chrome-ish parallel of a quarter of the original 2022 NPB set.  Here's an example to show what I mean:

2022 Epoch NPB #166 (left), 2022 Epoch NPB Luxury Collection #039 (right)

So I wasn't expecting to be too interested in this year's edition of the set.  But since there was one card in the set last year which was significantly different than the original card I figured I'd take a look and see if any of the cards featured new photos.  What I found surprised me:

All the photos were different!  Every single card had a new photo on it.  Granted, some of them weren't TOO different but still...

2023 Epoch NPB #215 (left), 2023 Epoch NPB Luxury Collection #33 (right)

I was intrigued enough by the new photos that I decided to break character for a second time in a month and pick up the set through ZenMarket.  I was able to get one reasonably cheap (1500 yen plus 510 yen for shipping plus 300 yen for ZenMarket's fee) which was around $16.  I received the set late last week and had my second surprise about it:

The cards don't have a "Chrome-ish" finish on them!  As you can tell by the scan above, the cards have pretty much the same appearance as the original set.  The biggest difference that I can see is that the Luxury Collection cards appear to be a little thicker than the original set's cards.  

Besides the new photos and the lack of the "Chrome" finish, Epoch made another more basic change to the set.  Last year's set contained 108 cards split evenly between the 12 NPB teams so that there were nine cards per team.  This year Epoch shrunk the set to just 90 cards and - as you may have already figured out by doing the math - the cards aren't split evenly between the 12 teams.  

Actually, I'm being a little misleading as there's an eight card "Legendary Player" subset in the set (which I'll talk more about in a minute) so there's really only 82 cards for current players.  But there's still no way to make 12 go into 82 evenly.

Epoch somewhat unsurprisingly decided to center this set around rookies.  Or at least "rookies" in the baseball card sense which means "players taken in last year's draft" rather than the official "players with less than x number of at bats or x number of innings pitched".  It's standard for both BBM and Epoch to include all the players taken in the "regular" phase of the previous year's draft in their flagship sets (1st Version and NPB respectively).  Epoch decided to also include all of these players in the NPB Luxury* Collection which accounts for 69 of those 82 active player cards.  Each team drafted between five and seven players last year which is why the number of cards isn't evenly divisible.

*"Luxury" should ideally be pronounced the same way Graham Chapman said it during the "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch.

Epoch had a decent variety of poses on the rookie cards.  My only gripe at all is that some of the players who had studio photos in the original set still have studio photos in this set - but just using a different pose.  Here's some examples of the rookie cards:

#45

#14

#18

#40

#06

In addition, Epoch included 12 cards of veterans - one for each team.  There's a lot of star power amongst these twelve players as they include Roki Sasaki, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Munetaka Murakami, Yuki Yanagita, Shugo Maki, Masahiro Tanaka and Teruaki Satoh.  Here's a couple examples:

#75

#77

#71

If you're counting along, you'll find that we've accounted for 81 of the 82 active player cards.  Who's the other card for?  Dragons pitcher pitcher Shinya Matsuyama was the team's first pick in the development player (ikusei) portion of last fall's draft and was moved onto the 70 man roster in early June.  Epoch included a card of him in this set although he did not appear in the original NPB set.  This is the only card of Matsuyama as a registered player - all the other cards of him this year (BBM's Rookie Edition, Epoch's Dragons Premier Edition and the Bowman NPB set) have him as an ikusei player.

#70

What I find kind of odd about Epoch including Matsuyama is that he wasn't the only player from last year's development player draft who ended up on the official roster of their team this year.  If I'm counting right, I think there were nine in all.  I don't understand why he's in the set but none of the other eight are, especially considering that one player - Tokumasa Chano of Orix - was registered to the 70 man roster before the season started and played in 91 games with the ichi-gun squad.  It could be a simple as they needed one guy to even out the number of cards in the set.

I mentioned that there were eight "Legendary Player" cards in the set.  These are OB players and are similar to the 12 "Legendary Player" cards from the original NPB set.  The big difference is that only one of the 12 players from the original set is included in this set and that player - Seiichi Uchikawa - is shown with the Hawks in this set while being a Baystar in the NPB set.  Actually that's not entirely true as there's another "Legendary Player" who's in the original set - he's just not a "Legendary Player" there but manager of the Lions - Kazuo Matsui.

#83

#84

I want to mention two things about this set that I was very amused by and they both involve the Fighters.  The first is that the card of two-way rookie Kota Yazawa shows him batting while his card in the original set showed him pitching (in fairness, a great deal of his cards this year show him batting rather than pitching):

#29

If you look at the design of the cards, you see that the border on the front of the card more or less matches one of the team's primary uniform colors.  The Fighters cards have a blue border, the Marines cards have a black border, the Eagles cards have a Maroon border, etc.  The other thing that really amused me about the set is that two of the Fighters cards show the players wearing those crazy black and red alternate uniforms that Tsuyoshi Shinjo designed.  On both of those cards, Epoch changed the border color to black to match those uniforms rather keeping them blue like the rest of the Fighters cards:

#76

#34

I just wish Itoh's card had the name in red as well.

So it's probably pretty obvious now that I like this set although I'd be hard pressed to explain why.  I guess it's just nice to see a card company put out a higher end set that I don't hate.  You can look at all the cards in the set over at Jambalaya and see what you think.

First 2024 Set And More Topps Now Samurai Japan Cards

Quick update on some recently announced sets:

- the first set announced for 2024 is the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles 1st Version set which will be out on February 1st, just in time for the opening of training camp.  The set will include 61 "regular" player cards of Eagles players although probably only the ones ended the season with the team and are still on the roster plus the new draftees.  There's 26 cards celebrating the team's 20th Anniversary and ten "Rising Eagles" cards but I'm not sure if those are insert cards or part of the base set.  There's five different varieties of autographed cards available - "Authentic - horizontal", "Authentic - vertical", "Record Achievers", "2024 Rookie Autograph" and "20th Anniversary Legends Autographs".  The last two are sticker autographs while the other three are "on card" autographs.  The "20th Anniversary Legends Autographs" lineup include Hisashi Iwakuma, Kazuo Fukumori, Casey McGehee and Andruw Jones.  There are also jersey (and patch and letter) memorabilia cards for Hideto Asamura.  The most intriguing thing is that they appear to be doing some sort of cross over with Epoch as the set will also have nine "Gem" inserts.  These are pretty rare - the rate is around one per carton with there being 10 boxes in a carton and 20 packs in a box.

- I wondered about this next item when Topps announced Topps Now cards for some of the Samurai Japan players from the Asian Professional Baseball Championship last month and there was confirmation of it today - Topps is doing an on demand Topps Now Samurai Japan team set for the tournament.   I think the set has 28 cards - 26 player cards plus a card for manager Hirokazu Ibata and a team/cover card.  The set sells for 8800 yen if you live in Japan but only 8000 yen if you don't (the extra 800 yen is tax).  On the other hand, shipping is free if you live in Japan but 2000 yen if you want the set shipped to the US.  With shipping the total cost is 10,000 yen or roughly $70.  The sets will be on sale until 5 PM on January 17th in Japan (3 AM EST in the US).

Card Of The Week December 17

Here's a quick bit of trivia for you - who was the oldest player ever taken in the NPB draft?  The answer is Norio Ichimura, who was 30 years and five months old when he was taken by the Dragons in the third round of the 1982 draft.  

Ichimura had played baseball at Toyo University and went into the corporate leagues after graduation.  I'm not positive but I think he must have played eight or nine years for Denden Kanto (now NTT Kanto) before entering the draft.  He spent three seasons in Nagoya before being dealt to the Seibu Lions at the beginning of the 1986 season for Yasutomo Suzuki.  He retired after the 1988 season, having gone 5-2 in 163 appearances exclusively out of the bullpen over six seasons with a 3.95 ERA.  

He had four baseball cards during his career - all Takara cards from 1984 to 1987.  His only "modern" card (and the only one I have) is from the 2014 BBM Lions Legends set (#09):

Had Junichi Tazawa been taken in the 2020 NPB draft, he would have become the oldest drafted player at 34 years and four months.