Japanese Players Playing In Winter Leagues Abroad

The 2025-26 Caribbean Winter Leagues are already underway and the Australian Baseball League will be starting their season later this week.  This means that it's time for my annual post about which Japanese players have been dispatched by their NPB teams to get some overseas experience over the winter.  Well, I say "over the winter" but typically the players only play in these leagues for a month or so, usually returning to Japan in time for Christmas or New Years.  As usual, I'm relying on the WinterLeagueJP website for much of this information.

The Australian Baseball League is going to look a little different this year.  They lost two teams over the off-season, with the Melbourne Aces departing the league for the KBO Fall League and the Canberra Cavalry just flat out disbanding.  That leaves the league with just four teams - the Brisbane Bandits, Sydney Blue Sox, Adelaide Giants and Perth Heat - which is half of what the league had six years ago.

Adelaide will welcome four Giants of the Yomiuri variety - Yu Aramaki, Yusei Ishuzaka, Yamato Shiroki and Tomoki Tamura:

2025 BBM 1st Version #025

2025 Epoch NPB #016

2023 BBM 2nd Version #541

2023 Bowman NPB #BP-10

Brisbane is getting Kyosuke Mashiko and Hayate Nakagawa from the Yokohama DeNA Baystars:

2021 BBM Baystars #DB37

2024 BBM Baystars #DB74

Moving over to the Western hemisphere, four NPB teams are sending players to three teams in the Puerto Rican Winter League.  Most of these players are on the young side with only a few years of professional experience with one exception - the Swallows are sending 30 year old and 12 year veteran Kazuto Taguchi to the Leones de Ponce:

2023 BBM 1st Version #170

The Gigantes de Carolina are getting four players from two teams - Ryuta Hirose and Kazuo Ohno of the Hawks and Ren Mukunoki and Kaisei Tohmatsu of the Buffaloes:

2024 BBM Hawks #H49

2023 Epoch Hawks Premier Edition #15

2022 Epoch NPB #246

2024 Topps Stadium Club NPB #45

Lastly, the Lions are sending three players to the Senadores de San Juan - Minato Aoyama, Shinya Hasegawa and Taishi Mameda:

2024 Epoch NPB #288

2022 BBM Fusion #620

2024 BBM Lions Collection #LC11

There is another winter league that is starting up this winter that has some Japanese players - Baseball United.  Most of those players are not under contract to an NPB team anymore, however.  I will discuss them in a post that I hope to get to later this week.

NOTE - any 2025 cards in this post are images swiped from Jambalaya.

Ending 2025 On A (Mostly) High (End) Note

It's been a bit since my last round up of the upcoming card releases so I thought I should get caught up.  I suspect that these are the last of the 2025 releases but it wouldn't be the first time I thought the card manufacturers were finished for a year and then found out I was wrong.  All but one of these releases are on the high end of the price scale.

- We'll start with the release that's not super expensive.  BBM is releasing a box set for the Fighters called "Great Voyage" in mid-December.  Each box contains the entire 36 card base set plus one "special insert card".  The base set contains 24 cards of "young" Fighters players including Hiromi Itoh, Kotaro Kiyomiya, Koki Kitayama and Yuya Gunji plus all six of the 2024 draftees/2025 rookie class.  The base set also contains 12 "combination" cards and I'm guessing that all 24 of the players appear on one of those cards but I don't know that for sure.  The "special insert card" could possibly be a foil signed card or (I think) a memorabilia card.  Again, I'm not sure but I think the memorabilia cards are only for the 2024 draftees - one of them is combination card featuring all six players.  I don't think there are any actual autograph cards available.  Unopened boxes will retail for 5500 yen or roughly $36.

- Moving on to the more expensive stuff, BBM will release their "ultra high-end" "Glory" set on November 28th.  Boxes will contain just six cards and retail for 26,400 yen or about $172.  There are 36 cards (three active players from each NPB team) in the base set, each of which has a parallel.  I think the base cards are /2000 but I don't know what the parallels are.  There are two possible inserts - "MIYABI" (six cards, each /50 with an even more limited parallel) and "Glorius 3D" (12 cards, each /25).  The big attraction is, of course, the memorabilia and autographed cards.  The memorabilia cards include "super patch" cards as well as combo and triple ones.

- BBM's "ultra high-end" multi-sport set "Crown" will be released at the end of December.  Like "Glory", this set will be sold in six card boxes that will retail for 26,400 yen.  All the cards in the set are serially numbered but I don't know what any of them are numbered to.  The base set has 48 cards, 18 of which will feature baseball players - 9 OB and 9 active.  There are four insert sets although two of them - "Velvet" and "Jet" - could be considered parallels of the base cards as there are 48 cards in each of those sets.  The "Velvet" cards are "made of brushed material" while the "Jet" cards are "made from jet black special paper".  The other two insert sets are "Foil Autumn" (24 cards on "hologram paper") and "Sparkling" (12 3D cards).  And, of course, there are tons of autographed cards although no memorabilia cards.  Each box is guaranteed to include at least one autographed card.

- Epoch has announced two more of their "ultra high-end" combination active/OB player team sets.  The "Hawks Stars & Legends" set will be released on November 29th and the "Tigers Stars & Legends" set will be out on December 6th.  Both sets will be sold in boxes of four cards (well, two "mini-boxes" of two cards) for 18,700 yen or about $122.  The Hawks base set will contain 64 cards (41 active players and 23 OB players) while the Tigers set base set will contain 45 cards (25 active player and 20 OB players).  I think all the base cards are serially numbered but, again, I don't know what the counts are.  Both sets have what seems to be the standard "Stars & Legend" set inserts - three flavors of the six "Decomori Signature" insert cards - gold (/25), green (/5) and "hologram" (1-of-1) - along with six "Gem" premium insert cards which have a "Black Gem" parallel that are /5.  The Hawks set will have four different types of autographed cards - "Authentic" (64 cards), "Star" (two cards), "Rookie" (six cards) and "Legendary" (20 cards).  The Tigers set also has four different types of autographed cards but they're slightly different - "Authentic" (45 cards), "Star" (21 cards), "Legendary" (18 cards) and "Baseball" (six cards).  The "Baseball" ones are on pieces of actual baseballs.

 - Topps has announced that their fourth NPB set for 2025 will be "Finest".  Boxes containing 15 packs of four cards will retail for 9900 yen (~$65) and will be released on November 14th.  The base set contains 216 cards (as usual) which breaks down to 18 cards per team (as usual).  Those 18 cards will contain cards for the team's manager and top three 2024 draft picks (also as usual).  There are four 24 card insert sets - "The Man", "Finest Fortune", "Creators" and "1993 Baseball's Finest".  According to the checklist for the set, there are a ton of autographed cards available.  Looks like ten players for each team along with a bunch of NPB Legends.  The Legends include a number of current MLB players like Shohei Ohtani, Masataka Yoshida, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Yu Darvish and Shota Imanga along with Ichiro, Norichika Aoki, Sadaharu Oh, Hideo Nomo and Cecil Fielder.  The only memorabilia cards available are all for Ichiro - a "relic", a "Topps Sterling Jumbo Letter Patch Card" and a "Topps Dynasty Autograph Patch Card".

Card Of The Week November 9

I noticed the other day that Robert Suarez of the San Diego Padres had led the National League in saves this past season.  Suarez had spent six years in Japan playing for the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks (2016-19) and Hanshin Tigers (2020-21) and is, I think, the fourth guy to lead either the American or National League in saves and play in NPB.  The others are Rick Gossage (led the AL in 1975, 1978 and 1980; played for the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks in 1990), Bobby Thigpen (led the AL in 1990; played for the Hawks in 1994-95) and Roberto Osuna (led the NL in 2019; played for the Chiba Lotte Marines in 2022 and the Hawks in 2023-present).  And, yeah, it's kind of weird that all four of these guys played for the Hawks.

Suarez differs from the other three in two ways.  The first is that he's the first guy to lead an MLB league in saves AFTER he played in Japan.  The other is he's the only one of the four who also led one of the NPB leagues in saves - he led the Central League in both 2020 and 2021.  Here's his "Title Holder" cards from BBM's Fusion sets from both years:

2020 BBM Fusion #TH20

2021 BBM Fusion #TH20

Series MVP And Winning Manager

A year ago, I went down a rabbit hole based on something that NPB on Reddit had posted about how Daisuke Miura was the 25th player to win a Nippon Series as both a player and a manager.  This year, NPB on Reddit has provided a new rabbit hole to go down by reporting that Hiroki Kokubo of the Hawks was the the sixth person to win the Nippon Series MVP award as a player and the Nippon Series as a manager.  I, of course, had to go research this and figure out who the other five were.  Here they are, in order of when they achieved the feat (i.e. when they won their first Nippon Series as manager) along with a card of them as a player and as a manager.  Like last year's post, I tried to get cards from the years they won the MVP or managed the champions but it wasn't possible in a couple cases:

Tetsuharu Kawakami: Series MVP - 1953; Series Winning Manager - 1961, 1963, 1965-73

1958 "Who Am I?" JCM 54

1997 BBM Giants #89

Masahiko/Masaaki Mori: Series MVP - 1967; Series Winning Manager - 1986-88, 1990-92

1999 BBM Mr Giants #G21

1991 BBM Nippon Series #S1

Shigeo Nagashima: Series MVP - 1963, 1965, 1969, 1970;  Series Winning Manager 1994, 2000

1964 Marukami JCM 14g

1994 BBM Nippon Series #S1

Koji Akiyama: Series MVP - 1991, 1999; Series Winning Manager - 2011, 2014

1999 BBM Nippon Series #S64

2014 BBM 1st Version #082

Kimiyasu Kudoh: Series MVP - 1986, 1987; Series Winning Manager - 2015, 2017-20

1987 Calbee #130

2020 Epoch NPB #037

Hiroki Kokubo: Series MVP - 2011; Series Winning Manager - 2025

2011 BBM Nippon Series #S58

2024 BBM Hawks #H01

Kokubo, of course, has become the 26th player to win a Nippon Series as both a player and a manager.

I was a little surprised to discover that Sadaharu Oh never won a Nippon Series MVP award.

I got curious to see if anyone had ever done the equivalent in MLB - win a World Series MVP award as a player and the World Series as a manager.  Nope, it's never been done.  In fact, I could only find six World Series MVP winners who went onto manage in MLB at all - Frank Robinson, Pete Rose, Bucky Dent, Alan Trammell, Ray Knight and Paul Molitor.  And I could only come up with two league MVP award winners who had ever managed a World Series champion - Mickey Cochrane and Joe Torre - while the list of NPB MVPs who managed Nippon Series champions is quite long (not that I've made a list.  Yet).  The reason for this, of course, is that a star player in MUCH more likely to become a manager in NPB than MLB.

I was a little surprised to discover that the Nippon Series MVP Award predates the World Series MVP award.  The Nippon Series MVP has been award for every Nippon Series which started in 1950.  The World Series MVP award was first awarded in 1955, which means there's 50-ish World Series that do not have an MVP.

Card Of The Week November 2

It was a busy week last week, with the three top professional baseball leagues in the world completing their championships.  On Thursday, the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks defeated the Hanshin Tigers 3-2 in 11 innings in Game Five of the Nippon Series to win the Series four games to one.  This was the Hawks first championship in five years.

BBM used to issue a box set for the Nippon Series from 1991 until 2012 that included all the players who appeared in the Series as well as cards for the the Series MVP, the "Fighting Spirit" award winner (kind of a "MVP for the losing team" award) and the three "Outstanding Player" award winners.  Since BBM no longer publishes this set, I've been featuring those award winners in the first "Card Of The Week" post following the end of the Series since 2014 (since I didn't know they weren't going to do a set in 2013):

Series MVP Hotaka Yamakawa (2024 Calbee Series Two #102)

"Fighting Spirit" Teruaki Sato (2024 Topps NPB Stadium Club #13)

"Outstanding Player" Koya Fujii (2023 Calbee Series One #010)

"Outstanding Player" Kazuki Sugiyama (2020 Epoch Hawks Rookies & Stars #11)

"Outstanding Player" Yuki Yanagita (2017 BBM Hawks #H59)

On Friday, the LG Twins knocked off the Hanwha Eagles 4-1, which was both the score in Game Five of the Korean Series and the outcome of the Series (LG defeated Hanwha four games to one).  The Series was actually a little closer than it seemed.  LG had won the first two games of the Series at home in Seoul but the Eagles took Game Three at their ballpark in Daejon and were leading 4-1 going into the ninth inning of Game Four when disaster struck.  A two run home run from Park Dong-won put the Twins within one and later in the inning, Kim Hyun-soo came through with a two out, two RBI hit that put the Twins ahead for good.  LG would ultimately score six runs in the inning to win the game 7-4.  The Eagles had been one out away from tying the Series but instead were down three games to one and Game Four seemed somewhat anti-climactic.  Kim was named MVP of the Series:

2018 SCC KBO Collection #SCCR-01/141

And finally, last night (or early this morning), the Los Angeles Dodgers defeated the Toronto Blue Jays 5-4 in Game Seven of the World Series to win the MLB championship four games to three.  Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto was named MVP of the Series, becoming just the second Japanese player to win the award (following Hideki Matsui in 2009).  Yamamoto was not the MVP of the Nippon Series the year his Buffaloes won (2022) so Matsui is still the only player to win both a Nippon Series MVP and a World Series MVP.  Here's a card of Yamamoto from his NPB days with the Orix Buffaloes:

2023 Persol Pacific League 12 Greatest

1994-95 BBM All Star MVP Inserts

BBM issued an annual All Star set in conjunction with NPB's All Star series each year from 1991 to 2012.  When I was first learning about Japanese baseball, these box sets were a pretty good way to get some idea who the better players were in NPB (with the usual caveats about All Star game rosters) although as I learned more, the sets got less useful.  

One of the standard parts of the sets when I started getting them (in 2001) were cards that commemorated the previous year's All Star MVPs.  I discovered, though, that the first couple All Star sets BBM put out did not have these cards.  It wasn't until the fourth edition, in 1994, that BBM added these cards.  What was kind of odd about the 1994 set was that BBM decided to play catchup.  Not only would the set have the MVPs for the 1993 All Star games, it would also have the MVPs for the 1991 and 1992 games.

Actually, I'm not being entirely accurate.  Unlike later editions of the set, the 1994 BBM All Star game base set itself did not include these MVP cards.  Instead, each box set contained the entire 62 card base set plus two of six possible MVP cards.  There were seven All Star games in 1991-93 - two in 1991, three in 1992 and two in 1993 - but one player - Atsuya Furuta - was MVP of two of the games.

I'm not entirely sure what possessed me to do this but I decided a few years back that I wanted to get all six of these cards.  I had the two that I had gotten close to 25 years ago when I had originally bought my set and I think I got another one of them from Ryan somewhere along the line.  I got two more of them from COMC and then I found the last one (Katsumi Hirosawa) on Ebay a few months back when someone had broken up their box set.  So here's all six cards:

1994 BBM All Stars #E1

1994 BBM All Stars #E2

1994 BBM All Stars #E3

1994 BBM All Stars #E4

1994 BBM All Stars #E5

1994 BBM All Stars #E6

One kind of interesting thing to note is that neither Hirosawa nor Komada are in the base set as neither one made the 1994 All Star teams.  Additionally, by 1994 Komada was not longer a member of the Giants - he'd joined the Baystars as a free agent that year.

BBM repeated this treatment of All Star game MVPs the following year.  The 1995 All Star box set contained 63 cards - the 62 card base set and one of two insert cards for the 1994 All Star game MVPs.  I had gotten the Koji Akiyama card with the set I had bought way back when but I decided to pick up the other one - Glenn Braggs - a few months ago once I had completed the 1994 cards.  I was able to find it on Yahoo! Japan Auctions and bought it via ZenMarket.  I paid way to much for shipping for it and a couple other things though, and that was before shipping from Japan became prohibitively expensive.  But be that as it may, here are the two 1995 insert cards:

1995 BBM All Stars #E1

1995 BBM All Stars #E2

The 1995 set was the last time BBM put insert cards in their All Star sets for the previous year's MVP winners.  They would be part of the base set until 2010.  In 2010, BBM changed the release date of the set from July to August which allowed the set to reflect that year's All Star games.  So starting in 2010, the All Star set included the MVPs of that year's games (which means that the 2009 All Star game MVPs never got commemorated).  The change wasn't enough to save the sets, though, as BBM stopped doing them after 2012, along with their other annual box set - the Nippon Series set.  I don't miss the All Star game sets much but I do miss the Nippon Series sets.

Discord Server

I was contacted a few weeks ago by someone who had just gotten into collecting Japanese baseball cards and wanted to know if there was any sort of on-line community.  When I said that I really didn't know of one, he decided that he'd go off and try to set one up.  What he's done is set up a Discord server called "Japanese Baseball Cards" and if you're interested in joining it, you can use this link.  UPDATE - this link is expired so if you want to join, send me an email at npbcardguy@gmail.com and I'll send you a link.

When I started this blog back in 2007, I had two goals.  The first was to inform folks about what cards were out there and I think I've succeeded at that.  The second was to provide a place for collectors to connect with each other and I don't think I've really done that at all.  I tried doing some swapmeet posts way back when but I don't think anyone every really got anything out of them and I stopped doing them.  So maybe this Discord server can do a better job than I did.