I was having a conversation via Reddit with a collector who was on a trip in Japan recently. He was telling me about his experiences at some of the Mint stores. One of the things he mentioned was picking up the Shohei Ohtani card from the "'16 Crowns" subset of the 2017 BBM Fighters card. He mentioned that it was really cool that it not only showed Ohtani both batting and pitching on it, it also showed both the Fighters' home and away uniforms. He thought it might be the only one like that.
As you can probably guess, a statement like that gets me thinking that that's something that might make an interesting post. So I decided to do some research to see if I could figure out what were all of Ohtani's Japanese cards that showed him as both a batter and a pitcher. I was a little surprised that there appear to only be six and, luckily, I had five of them.
Here's all six, in roughly chronological order - I swiped a scan from Jambalaya for the card I didn't have:
2013 Calbee Series Two #D-07
2013 BBM Young Fighters #YF01
2014 Shukan Baseball Season Memorial #1/2
2016 BBM Fighters Autographed Edition Climax #01
2017 Calbee Series One #T-01
2017 BBM Fighters #F70
As you can see, he was right - the 2017 BBM Fighters card is the only one showing both a home and away uniform.
I will give an honorable mention to the "Two Sword Player" puzzle cards from the 2013 BBM Fighters set as the backs show him both hitting and pitching (and there's at least one card showing him pitching with the batting photo in the background):
2014 BBM Fighters #F93
There's also a promo card for the 2013 BBM Fighters set that combines the images on the two versions of his base set card onto one card. I don't have this card but I swiped a screen shot of it a while back and I'll reuse it here:
I tend not to count promo cards but I could be convinced to include this one too. Someone could argue that the Shukan Baseball card above should be considered a promo card too.
I am not including the Kamagaya promo version of his 2013 BBM 1st Version card because while it has photos of him pitching and hitting, they're not on the same side of the card.
These are pretty much all the Japanese cards I could find that show him both as a pitcher and as a batter. I expect that he has a plethora of MLB cards like that but I don't have any of them, other than this one:
Koji Chikamoto of the Hanshin Tigers got his 1000th career hit yesterday. I was thinking to myself that that was pretty impressive as Chikamoto hadn't been in the league wrong but then I realized that this is his seventh season already and he's 30 years old. It turns out, though, that he was the eighth fastest player in NPB history to reach that milestone, so he still did it pretty fast. (H/T NPB Reddit)
Here's his card from the 2021 BBM Tigers set (#T59):
I have to be honest here - I'd been kind of hoping that I'd never write this post. I know I was fighting against actuarial probabilities, especially given that he'd had a stroke 21 years ago, but I was really hoping he'd beat the odds and live well into his 90's and I'd have stopped writing before I had to write this.
Most Americans assume that Sadaharu Oh is the most famous Japanese baseball player from the pre-Nomo and Ichiro days. And on a world wide stage, that's probably true. But the most famous baseball player in Japan was Shigeo Nagashima. He passed away from pneumonia earlier this week at age 89.
Nagashima was born in what is now Sakura-city in Chiba-prefecture. Surprisingly, he was a Tigers fan growing up and his favorite player was Fumio Fujimura. He started playing baseball in elementary school and continued through high school at what I think was then called Chiba Sakura Daiichi High School. He drew some attention from a corporate league team after graduating but his father wanted him to get an education so he instead enrolled at Rikkio University in Tokyo.
Tragedy struck as his father passed away during his freshman year at Rikkio but he remained there (despite briefly considering dropping out to join the Chunichi Dragons who apparently rebuffed his offer). By his sophomore year, he was the starting third baseman for the team. He and teammates Tadashi Sugiura and Kingo Motoyashiki were referred to as the "Rikkio Three Crows". He won led the Tokyo Big Six in batting in both the Spring 1956 season and the Fall 1957 season, his final one in college. He won five straight Best 9 awards from Fall 1955 to Fall 1957. He hit eight home runs during his college career which was the record at the time. He helped the team win back-to-back championships in the Spring and Fall seasons in 1957.
1974/75 Calbee #499 (w/Tadashi Sugiura)
He very nearly signed with the Nankai Hawks (where Sugiura went) after graduation but his mother begged him to sign with a team in Tokyo so he instead signed with the Yomiuri Giants. He hit seven home runs in his first training camp with the team in 1958, raising expectations. He struck out four times against Masaichi Kaneda and the Swallows on Opening Day, though. He recovered after that, however, and ended his rookie season with a .305 average and league leading totals in home runs (28) and RBIs (92). He won the Central League Rookie Of The Year award (with Sugiura winning the Pacific League award) and he appeared on the cover of the first ever issue of Shukan Baseball with Tatsuro Hirooka in April.
1998 BBM #556
1959 would be significant for two reasons. The first is that the Giants signed a kid pitcher out of Waseda Jitsugyo High School. It would take a couple seasons for Sadaharu Oh to become the feared slugger that we're familiar with but this was his rookie season. He and Nagashima would be teammates for the remainder of Nagashima's career and would be dubbed the "ON Cannon" with Oh batting third in the lineup and Nagashima batting cleanup.
1992 BBM #478
The pair would hit home runs in the same game a record 106 times. The first time they did it was in the other significant event of 1959 - the Emperor's Game. Emperor Hirohito attended the game between the Giants and Tigers at Korakuen Stadium in Tokyo on June 25th, the first time an Emperor had attended a professional baseball game. Oh had a game-tying two run home run in the bottom of the seventh which set the stage for Nagashima to hit a sayonara home run in the bottom of the ninth.
2000 Calbee ON-07
I'm not going to go year-by-year through the rest of Nagashima's career because that'll make this post way to long. Suffice to say he was very good. He won the Central League batting crown six times (1959-61, 1963, 1966 and 1971) and led the league in home runs twice (1958 and 1961) and RBIs five times (1958, 1963 and 1968-70). He won five Central League MVP awards (1961, 1963, 1966, 1968 and 1971). He won the Best 9 award for third base in every season of his 17 year career. The Diamond Glove award (now called the Golden Glove) didn't start until 1972 but he won the first two of those awards for third basemen. He was selected to the All Star team every year of his career although he did not participate in the 1964 games due to injury.
He played in 13 Nippon Series, losing in the first two in 1958 and 1959 (to Sugiura's Hawks) but winning in 1961, 1963 and the V9 years of 1965-1973. He won a record four Nippon Series MVP awards (1963, 1965, 1969 and 1970). His 25 home runs in Nippon Series play is second only to Oh's 29. He hit four home runs in a Series twice (1969 and 1970), a feat that has only been matched by Kenji Johjima (2000 and 2003). He homered in three consecutive at bats in the 1970 Series which I think has never been done by anyone else.
2014 Epoch Shigeo Nagashima National Treasures #06
Nagashima's popularity was such that his marriage in 1965 was telecast nationwide. When he decided to retire at the end of the 1974 season, his retirement ceremony on October 14th before a packed Korakuen Stadium was rated one of the top events of 1974 (and later the top baseball event of the 1970's, topping Oh passing Henry Aaron). The Giants would sweep the Dragons in a doubleheader with Oh and Nagashima both homering in the first game for the 106th and final time. Nagashima gave a speech after the game that's been compared to Lou Gehrig's "Luckiest Man" speech, thanking the fans for supporting him throughout his career. The image of him standing alone on the pitcher's mound with the Korakuen Stadium scoreboard behind him is iconic. (UPDATE - Nippon Baseball Retro has an English translation of his speech)
2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 #S-03
I'm not sure exactly when they did it but the Giants retired Nagashima's uniform number 3. I've always felt it's kind of neat bit of trivia that there have been three Hall Of Famers to wear the number 3 with the Giants - Haruyasu Nakajima, Shigeru Chiba and Nagashima with Nagashima, obviously, being the last one.
2001 BBM #530
He took over as manager of the Giants from Tetsuharu Kawakami and it didn't go well at first. The Giants finished last in 1975, the only time in their history this had happened. They rebounded in 1976, however, winning their first Central League pennant in three years although they lost to the Hankyu Braves in the Nippon Series. 1977 was a repeat of 1976 with the Giants again winning the Central League and again falling to the Braves in the Series. They narrowly lost the 1978 pennant to the Swallows but dropped to fifth in 1979. They rebounded to finish in third in 1980 but it wasn't enough to save his job and he was let go by the team at the end of the year.
1977 Calbee #145 (w/Masaichi Kaneda)
He spent the 1980's as a "ronin" (according to his Japanese Wikipedia page), traveling around to watch baseball. He did some TV commentary and was approached by several teams about becoming their manager but declined all of them in hopes that he'd be rehired by the Giants. In the meantime he was elected to the Hall Of Fame in 1988 and got to see his son Kazushige make his debut with the Yakult Swallows that same year.
He was rehired as Giants manager in late 1992, replacing Motoshi Fujita (who had replaced Nagashima 12 years earlier). His first act as manager was to beat out Chunichi, Daiei and Hanshin for the rights to Hideki Matsui in that fall's draft. The team would make a deal with the Swallows to acquire Kazushige Nagashima so that he could manage his son.
1993 BBM #475
The Giants finished third that year but the following year they narrowly beat out the Dragons for the CL pennant and beat the Lions in the Nippon Series for Nagashima's first championship as a manager.
1999 BBM Mr. Giants #G85
The Giants would win another pennant in 1996 but would lose in the Series to Ichiro and the Orix BlueWave. They'd drop to fourth in 1997 and improved a spot in the standings in each of the following years, finishing third in 1998, second in 1999 and first in 2000. With the Hawks, led by Sadaharu Oh, winning the PL pennant in 2000, the 2000 Nippon Series was dubbed the "ON Series".
2002 BBM Giants #G114
Nagashima's Giants defeated Oh's Hawks in six games for Nagashima's second championship as a manager. It was the fifteenth and final championship of his career. After a second place finish in 2001, he retired as Giants manager.
2001 Upper Deck #76
He didn't stay retired for long, however, as towards the end of 2002, he was named the manager of the Japanese National Baseball Team for the 2004 Olympics. He was the first former professional manager to lead the National Team as the previous teams had all been helmed by coaches from either colleges or corporate league teams.
The first hurdle for the team was to qualify for the 2004 Olympics and the team put together for the 2003 Asian Games was a juggernaut. They outscored their opponents 24-1 while sweeping China, Taiwan and South Korea to clinch a spot in the Athens games.
2003 BBM Japan National Team #01
Unfortunately, Nagashima would be unable to manage the team in Athens, as he suffered a stroke in March of 2004 which left his right side partially paralyzed. Head coach Kiyoshi Nakahata ended up taking over the team from him, leading them to a disappointing Bronze Medal finish.
2005 BBM Giants #G001
He was named "lifetime honorary director" of the Giants in the 00's and was awarded the "National Honor Award" with Hideki Matsui in a ceremony at Tokyo Dome on May 5th, 2013. He and Matsui also participated in a first pitch ceremony with Matsui pitching to Nagashima.
2013 BBM 2nd Version #690
2013 BBM 2nd Version #684
While he didn't get to manage the national team for the 2004 Olympics, he was a torch bearer for the 2020 (2021) Tokyo Olympics. He briefly held the torch with help from Matsui before passing the flame on to Oh:
I'm not positive, but I think his last public appearance was last May 5th for "Shigeo Nagashima Day" at Tokyo Dome which was part of the Giants' 90th Anniversary celebrations. There's an Epoch One card for the event that I don't have yet but I swiped the image from their website:
That's Hideki Matsui and Shinnosuke Abe behind him.
Speaking of baseball cards of Nagashima, he has a lot of them. I've included some above but I thought I'd share some more of my favorites:
1958 Yamakatsu JCM33a
1962 Doyusha JCM55
1962 JBR 64
1964 Marukami JCM 14g
1973 Calbee #1
1973/74 Calbee #148
1975 NST #56
2005 BBM Nostalgic Baseball #099
2014 Epoch Shigeo Nagashima National Treasures #19
2020 BBM Giants History 1934-2020 #15
Some comments about these cards:
Nagashima had a lot of cards issued for him in 1958 - TCDB lists 25 but doesn't have the one I show here. It's impossible to say which one was the first one issued so you have lots of good choices if you want a rookie card of him
Two of hot rookies this year in the Pacific League are Rui Muneyama of the Eagles and Seiya Watanabe of the Lions. Muneyama has gotten more hype than Watanabe - five teams took him in the first round of last fall's draft with Rakuten winning the lottery for his rights over Hiroshima, Nippon-Ham, Seibu and Softbank while Watanabe was taken in the second round by the Lions. So far, however, Watanabe's been putting up better numbers - he's hitting .331 with four home runs in 34 games while Muneyama's hitting .251 with two home runs in 46 games.
Since I'm not getting any new cards, of course, I'm not able to get any cards of either of them on their NPB teams. But I actually do have cards of them - they both played on the Collegiate Samurai Japan team in 2023 and so had autographed and memorabilia cards in last year's USA Baseball Stars & Stripes set from Panini. The autographed cards have been going for more than I'm willing to pay but I've picked up the non-autographed memorabilia cards for both players off of Ebay (which haven't been cheap either):
#JPN-RM
#JPN-SW
There's a pretty good chance one of these two players will be this year's Pacific League Rookie Of The Year which means there will have been two players from 2023 squad (and the 2024 Panini set) to have won that award:
#JPN-NT
I'll mention that Muneyama also appears in the 2024 Topps Now Samurai Japan team set for the "Global Games" - two games against a European All Star team in March of last year. I don't have that card in my hands yet but it will be in the next shipment of cards that I get from Ryan.
Some time ago, I had picked up what I thought was a complete 2000 BBM O-N set off of Ebay but instead I got something that was a bit of a mystery. The 2000 BBM O-N set was a high end box set dedicated to Shigeo Nagashima and Sadaharu Oh and contained 54 cards including film cards for each player and a pair of memorabilia cards for each player (a jersey card and a windbreaker card). Let me be clear - the set didn't have the possibility of getting one of those four memorabilia cards - all four were included in the box.
You can read all the gory details about it here but what I had bought was an odd mess of cards that didn't make any sense until I realized that BBM had issued two different versions of the set - a "Basic" set (which was numbered to 3000) and a "Limited" set (which was numbered to 2000). What I had bought was a mix of cards from both sets that only included the Nagashima memorabilia cards from the "Limited" version of the set. There had been another auction from the same seller (a consignment store that didn't really know anything about the cards) that looked like it had the rest of the cards - including the Oh memorabilia cards from the "Limited" set and all four memorabilia cards from the "Basic" set. Once I realized what was going on, I attempted to buy the other lot but I was not successful.
What I had ended up with was a mish-mash of cards from the two sets. I had 31 cards from the "Limited" set and 24 cards from the "Basic" set. There were four cards that I had both the "Limited" and "Basic" versions for so I couldn't quite build a complete composite "franken-set" out of what I had - I was short three cards. Two of those cards were the Sadaharu Oh memorabilia cards so the chances were pretty good that I was never going to get a complete "franken-set" either as I'm generally not willing to spend a lot of money on single cards and Oh jersey cards weren't going to be cheap. As the years went by, I picked up the other regular card that I needed but I never really expected to get the Oh cards for something I was willing to pay.
Recently, however, I kept seeing a Japanese seller on Ebay offering the four memorabilia cards from the "Basic" set. I think it's been the same seller every time, but the price kept changing every time they listed it. I don't remember for sure but I think it would vary between $125 and $145. I put it in my watchlist a couple times to see if they'd offer it to me a lower price but they never did.
Or at least, never did until about two weeks ago. I think they were asking $136-ish for it and they offered it to me for $130-ish. I countered with $100, expecting them to just say "no" and not negotiate any further. To my surprise, they countered with something a little lower and we went back and forth a couple times before they offered the cards to me for $114. I thought long and hard about it since, as I said before, I don't tend to spend a lot of money on single cards. I ultimately decided to pull the trigger, thinking that it was a good price on two Sadaharu Oh memorabilia cards and maybe I could sell the two Nagashima memorabilia cards I already had to recoup some of the money I'd spent. Shipping was free but with sales tax, the final price was around $120. I paid up and was a bit surprised at how fast I got the cards - they showed up at my house last Tuesday, just about ten days after I paid for them. There was just one minor problem with the cards.
They weren't memorabilia cards.
To be clear, it wasn't obvious that they weren't memorabilia cards from the photos of the auction. The cards had been packed in the original box in plastic covers so if you weren't looking really closely or never took the cards out of the cases, you might not have realized that the cards weren't actually memorabilia cards. And the cards themselves are identical to the real memorabilia cards from the "Limited" version of the set. See if you can tell in these photos which one is the memorabilia card and which is not:
You may have guessed from the fact that they're in screw-down cases that the memorabilia cards are the ones on the left. You can see, though, that there's nothing on the non-memorabilia card that differentiates it from the memorabilia version - other than the lack of memorabilia, of course.
I want to be clear here that I don't think the cards are fake. I think that the "Basic" version of the set contained cards that looked like the memorabilia cards but weren't. The cards are serially numbered to 3000. I think this is an important fact that anyone looking at buying one of these sets (or a card like this one for sale on COMC) should be aware of. Here's the front and back of all four cards:
I messaged the seller to say that I was disappointed with the cards since they weren't actually memorabilia cards and wanted to return them. They offered to refund half of the price and let me keep the cards. I again thought long and hard about it and decided that avoiding the hassle and price of sending the cards back to Japan was probably worth just taking the refund. I ultimately ended up paying $60-ish for the four cards which breaks down to $15 per card. I'm not going to say I'm happy with this outcome (if I'd known they weren't memorabilia cards ahead of time, I wouldn't have paid $60 for them) but I'm content with it. And at least I now have a complete set - essentially a somewhat enhanced "Basic" set.
I'm probably giving the seller too much of a pass here - I suspect they actually knew that the listing was misleading. But I do need to wonder what the hell BBM was thinking with these cards. Why is there nothing obvious on the cards to indicate they aren't really memorabilia cards?
This isn't the first time that I'd seen something like this happen. In the early 00's, it wasn't uncommon for BBM to issue a boxed set that could possibly contain a memorabilia card. The boxes that DIDN'T include the memorabilia card would contain a similar looking card that took the memorabilia card's place in the set. I had been thinking that the cards actually would say "non-memorabilia" on them but it turns out that I was misremembering this. Here's a handful of these cards:
2003 BBM Japan National Team #NJ
2002 BBM All Stars #A65
2003 BBM PL Champion Hawks #SJ
I think some of these are more obviously not really memorabilia cards than others.
There are cards that BBM marked as "non memorabilia" or "non jersey" though but it looks like they only did it on promo cards like the ones issued with Shukan Baseball or Sports Card Magazine:
But BBM actually wasn't consistent with always labeling the promo cards that way:
The back of this particular card does mention that it's a "non-jersey" card.
I actually have both the memorabilia card for Norichika Aoki from the 2007 1st Version set AND the promo version of the card that was issued in Sports Card Magazine. Can you tell which is which in this photo?:
The back of the promo version says "promo" on it and isn't serially numbered. The actual memorabilia card (the one on the right) is serially numbered to 300.
I guess the moral of the story is to be extremely careful when buying BBM memorabilia cards from the 00's.
