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.

Is It Or Isn't It?

My wife's great nephew was visiting us last week and, as he surveyed my office full of Japanese baseball cards, was impressed that I had an autographed Shohei Ohtani baseball card.  He said something like "Dude, you know that's worth, like, $2000!"  I had to explain to him that it probably wasn't worth that much, since it wasn't an "authentic" autograph but something my friend Dani had gotten signed for me in Peoria, Arizona, when the Fighters were training there in 2017.  I mean, I trust that Dani actually got him to sign it but anyone I sold it to would be trusting that I was telling the truth about it and that Dani was telling the truth about it and anyone they sold it too would be....well, you get the idea.  And given recent events, it's probably getting harder to know who to trust out there.  So, no, it's unlikely that I could get $2000 for it (not that I'm looking to move it anyway).

With all that in mind, I want to talk about something I just picked up off of Ebay.  It's a card of Shigeo Nagashima (#G78) from the 2001 BBM Giants set and it looks like it might be autographed:

I'm pretty sure this isn't a "facsimile signature" parallel version from BBM as I think it would have been unlikely that they would have obscured their logo and it really looks like it was signed with Sharpie.  The question is - did Nagashima sign it?

The answer is, unfortunately, I don't know.  If he did sign it, it was before his stroke in 2004 as he lost use of his right hand and was signing with his left hand which made for a very distinctive autograph.  The seller on Ebay was selling a couple of what appeared to be signed cards, all from before 2004 so it's plausible that he got Nagashima to sign them in the early 00's.  Or he got them from someone who got them signed.  I guess I'm placing some trust in the seller.  

I didn't pay much for this card - with shipping, it was $22-ish - so it's a relatively cheap fantasy that I now have a Shigeo Nagashima autograph.  Which is probably why I've resisted asking the seller for more details.  

Latest From "When Topps Had Balls"

I reached out to Gio of the "When Topps Had Balls" blog a few weeks ago to see if he'd cooked up any new cards of NPB players using old Topps designs.  As it turned out, he had just recently printed up a set called "1980's Career Cappers" for players who finished their careers between 1979 and 1988 who didn't have "career capper" cards in the following year's Topps set.  It's a 21 card set featuring 20 MLB players like Carl Yastrzemski, Lou Brock, Willie McCovey, Wille Stargell, Johnny Bench and Reggie Jackson and one NPB player - Sadaharu Oh.  Oh retired at the end of the 1980 season so Gio has featured him on a card with the 1981 Topps design.

I didn't buy the complete set - just the Oh, Brock and McCovey cards (Brock and McCovey were two of my favorite players when I was a kid).  Gio only charged me $5 for the three cards (including shipping) and they arrived the other day.  Here's the front and back of the Oh card:

I'm drooling over a couple other cards he's done that he hasn't printed up - a 1969 Minoru Murayama, a 1964 Masaichi Kaneda and a 1976 Oh.  Hopefully, those will soon become real cards.

Thanks for the cards, Gio!

Japanese Baseball Cards Checklist and Price Guide Vintage Edition 4.0

The fourth edition of Gary Engel's "Japanese Baseball Cards Checklist and Price Guide Vintage Edition" was just released last week.  Like the previous editions, it covers cards issued between 1929 and 1990.  The new version contains updated checklist and prices and (I assume) includes previously uncataloged sets.

It's available only as a pdf file and costs $35.  You can buy it here.

Card Of The Week July 20

Last Thursday night the Hawks were hosting the Marines at Kitakyushu Municipal Stadium.  This was one of NPB's "countryside" games where teams will play at ballparks other than their normal homes to promote baseball in areas that don't necessarily have easy access to it.  Kitakyushu is about 40 miles northeast of the Hawks' home in Fukuoka.  

The game was tied 2-2 going into the top of the sixth inning.  With nobody out and a runner on first, Marines first baseman Kyuto Ueda untied it with his first career home run:

Or it would have been his first career home run had nature not intervened.  There was a lot of rain in western Japan that day.  The Tigers and Buffaloes (who were playing in Kobe instead of Osaka Dome) were both rained out and the Baystars-Carp game in Hiroshima was called after six innings as a 1-1 tie.  In Kitakyushu, the rain started falling harder as the Marines extended their lead to 6-2 in the top of the sixth.  The umpires eventually halted play and ultimately determined that it was going to be impossible to complete the game.  Which meant that the score needed to revert to the last completed inning, erasing the Marines' four run lead as well as Ueda's home run (which is now being referred to as a "phantom" home run). 

Here's Ueda's 2024 BBM 1st Version rookie card (#212):

A Brief History Of NPB Collectible Card Games - Part 1 - Takara

I've been meaning to sit down and do a post about the history of collectible game cards for NPB for over a year now and I've realized that a comprehensive history is much bigger than I really want to do.  There are game card sets featuring pro baseball players going back to the late 1940's.  The third edition of Gary Engel's Vintage "Japanese Baseball Cards Checklist And Price Guide" has 30-ish pages of listings of game card sets, including ten pages for Karuta card sets.  

I'm going to tackle a slightly less ambitious goal - listing the major Collectible Card Games for NPB for the past 40-50 years.  There's basically been five different manufacturers - Takara, Konami, Future Bee, Bandai and Bushiroad.  Konami actually did cards over two separate time periods.

I've been working on this subject for a while now and I was originally intending to do it all in one post.  I realized, however, that the amount of cards I want to show will make it way too big of a post so I'm going to break it up into three posts - one for Takara, one for Konami and one for the other three companies.

I do need to be up front that I'm not really a big fan of most of these cards.  I generally find the cards to be ugly with the fronts of the cards getting cluttered with the game features.  The checklists of a lot of the sets (especially the Konami ones) are very confusing as well.  I've also never learned to play any of these games.  So these probably won't be as informative posts than than they could have been.  But let's get started...

From 1978 to 1998, Takara produced 30 card team sets in boxes that also included a team logo card, a pair of dice and a paper playing field to be used as a game board.  They only produced sets for the six Central League teams for their first three years but they expanded to do all twelve teams starting in 1981.  The photos on the cards were pretty much all portraits (or "mug shots" as I usually call them) up until 1991 when they started adding a variety of photos (probably in response to BBM starting up).  

I should point out that the 30 cards were of 30 distinct players which meant that many more players were represented in the Takara sets than any other baseball card set in Japan in the pre-BBM years.  This means that there's a number of reasonably big players like Hideki Irabu, Motonobu Tanishige, Satoshi Nakajima and Hideo Nomo whose first baseball cards were in Takara sets.  Actually since Calbee didn't have any cards of Lotte players until 1985, the 1981 Lotte Orions set contains the very first card of Hiromitsu Ochiai.  Takara sets from the 1980's also contain the only contemporary cards of a number of American players including Don Money, Rich Duran, Steve Shirley and Danny Goodwin (only player ever taken as the overall number one pick twice).

The sets in 1997 and 1998 also included the team's managers so there were 31 cards in those sets.

One interesting thing about the cards is that from 1979 to 1987, they displayed the Showa Era year rather than the Western year.  It's kind of odd that they started displaying the Western year in 1988, the final year of the Showa Era (although they didn't know that then).  The birthdates of the players on the front of the cards give the year in the Showa Era, even on the cards from 1988 and later.  (And in case you're wondering, the 1978 cards didn't display a year at all.)

Engel's listings for these sets group all the sets for a year as a single set with a one "Set Value" for the full group of all 12 (or 6) teams.  My gut feeling is that nobody thinks of Takara as a 360 card set but rather 12 30 card sets and a "Set Value" for each team set would probably be more useful.

Takara also issued smaller, 20 card boxed sets in 1984 that featured a simpler version of the game, apparently aimed at children.  The sets are referred to as the "Takara Kids" sets and the cards are smaller then the regular Takara cards and were printed on a thicker card stock, making them resemble menko cards in some ways.

I did a post a LONG time ago (before I learned how to lay out photos properly) about these cards that included a post from the old Yahoo Japanese Baseball group from 2001 describing how to play the game.  I would refer you to that post if you want more information on game play but basically you rolled the dice for each at bat for the player and you looked up the result of the dice roll on the back of the player's card to see what the outcome was.

I don't have cards from every year that Takara did sets but here's a card from every year that I have at least one (plus a Takara Kids card):

1978 Takara Tigers #31 Masayuki Kakefu

1979 Takara Giants #24 Kiyoshi Nakahata

1981 Takara Orions #29 Choji Murata

1982 Takara Lions #27 Tsutomu Itoh

1984 Takara Carp #3 Sachio Kinugasa

1984 Takara Kids Giants #7 Reggie Smith

1986 Takara Hawks #60 Hiromitsu Kadota

1987 Takara Tigers #44 Randy Bass

1988 Takara Dragons #6 Hiromitsu Ochiai

1989 Takara Whales #1 Motonobu Tanishige

1990 Takara Buffaloes #11 Hideo Nomo

1991 Takara Swallows #27 Atsuya Furuta

1992 Takara Carp #33 Akira Etoh

1993 Takara BlueWave #51 Ichiro Suzuki

1994 Takara Marines #18 Hideki Irabu

1996 Takara Lions #32 Kazuo Matsui

1997 Takara Giants #55 Hideki Matsui

You've probably noticed that the front design on a lot of these cards look similar to each other.  Takara used roughly the same design from 1984 to 1995 with the exception of 1988.  The 1981 to 1983 sets also used a similar design, as did the 1997 and 1998 sets.

Card Of The Week July 13

Yudai Ohno of the Dragons pitched a complete game against the Carp yesterday, throwing 108 pitches while giving up four hits and only one run.  Of course, with this being Chunichi we're talking about, it's not a silly question to ask if the Dragons won the game.  They did, by a score of 7-1.  Here's Ohno's card from the 2021 BBM 1st Version set (#220):

Sorry for the lack of posts lately.  We've got some family visiting this week and I've been doing a bunch of work around the house to get it ready for them.  I've also been working on a post off and on for the last month or so that I hope to finally publish in the next few days.  And hopefully I'll be getting my latest shipment from Ryan in the next few weeks.  So things will probably pick up soon.