Frank Herrmann

The news broke last week that former Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles and Chiba Lotte Marines pitcher Frank Herrmann had taken a job with the Toronto Blue Jays' front office.  Herrmann joined the Eagles in 2017 after eleven seasons in the Indians, Pirates, Angels and Phillies organizations including stints in the majors with Cleveland and Philadelphia.  He put up pretty good numbers in three years in Sendai, including a 2018 season in which he posted a 1.99 ERA with 18 saves.  He moved south to Chiba for the 2020 season and put up good numbers in middle relief that year.  2021 didn't go as well though and he and the team parted ways after the season ended.  His record for his five years in Japan was 14-10 with a 3.02 ERA.  I believe he's the only Harvard graduate to play in NPB.

Here's a card from each year he played in Japan:

2017 BBM Eagles #E19

2018 BBM 1st Version #061

2019 Epoch NPB #189

2020 BBM 1st Version #088

2021 Epoch NPB #046

Tetsuya Kokubo

Another player who announced their retirement at the end of last season was long time Hiroshima Toyo Carp and short time Chiba Lotte Marine utility infielder Tetsuya Kokubo.  Kokubo attended high school at baseball powerhouse PL Gakuen and went on to attend college at Aoyama Gakuin University.  He was a star in college, winning four Tohto League Best 9 awards and leading the league in batting with a .373 average in the 2007 spring season.  He earned a spot on the Japanese collegiate national team that played in the USA-Japan Collegiate Baseball Championship in North Carolina that summer (and like Yuki Saitoh ended up with a card in Upper Deck's USA Baseball set the following year).

He was Hiroshima's third round pick in the college/industrial league portion of the 2007 draft and made his debut with the top team the following April.  To some degree I think Kokubo spent most of the early years of his career unsuccessfully trying to establish himself as a starter at one of the infield positions but almost always either losing out to another player (Eishin Soyogi, Takuro Ishii, Kenta Kurihara, Brian Barden, Shota Dohbayashi, Ryosuke Kikuchi), not playing well or getting injured.  His personal highs in both games played and plate appearances occurred in his first season (98 games, 316 plate appearances) and he spent a good deal of each season with the farm team.  He was versatile enough to play all four infield positions and the Carp kept him around for 13 seasons as a late inning defensive replacement/pinch hitter.

He and the Carp parted ways after the 2020 season and he started the 2021 season with the Hinokuni Salamanders of the independent Kyushu Asia League.  It was the inaugural season for both the team and the league.  Kokubo hit .421 in 18 games with the Salamanders, attracting the attention of the Chiba Lotte Marines who signed him to a contract just before the deadline for teams to add players who would be eligible for the playoffs (which was the end of August).  He started September on the Marines' ni-gun team and sizzled there, hitting .471 in five games.  He was promoted on September 9th and made a big splash in his first game with Lotte, hitting a solo home run against the Buffaloes.  Unfortunately that ended up being his only hit with the Marines.  He ultimately had 18 at bats over seven games and hit a lowly .056.  He announced his retirement at the end of October and will be a coach for the Carp this season.

His first BBM cards were #27 in the 2008 Rookie Edition set and #179 in the 2008 1st Version set.  His first Calbee card was #228 in the 2008 Series Three set.  He also appeared in a couple Konami sets in his rookie season.  Here's a bunch of his cards:

2008 Upper Deck USA Baseball #JN-6

2008 BBM Rookie Edition #27

2008 BBM 1st Version #179

2011 BBM Tohto 80th Memorial #83

2013 Front Runner Carp Season Summary #20

2015 Calbee #217

2017 BBM Carp Successful Achievement #22

2018 BBM Carp #C45

2020 Epoch NPB #346

2021 BBM Fusion #605

2022 Flagships And More

A bunch of new sets have been announced in the last few weeks, one of which I think is actually in stores already.  Here's a quick roundup, roughly in order of their release dates:

- The set that I think is already out is the Eagles 1st Version set, this year's edition of the set annually issued by the team (along with their 2nd Version set of course).  The base set contains 68 cards which includes all the players on the team's 70 man roster (and possibly the ikusei roster) as of December 3rd of last year so don't expect cards of new foreign players Chris Gittens and Jose Marmolejos or any of the 2021 draft picks.  Each player card has three facsimile signature parallels - silver, gold and red.  The gold ones are more rare than the silver but I don't know if either are numbered.  The red ones are 1-of-1.  There are three insert sets - "Rising Eagles" (12 cards), "Iconic Moment" (8 cards) and "Stars Of Tohoku" (8 cards).  There's a parallel version of the "Iconic Moment" cards and the "Stars Of Tohoku" cards are serially numbered to 40.  There's also memorabilia cards for Hiroaki Shimauchi available - jersey cards (serially numbered to 100), patch cards (serially numbered to 30) and letter cards (serially numbered to 9 - the number of letters in "Shimauchi").  There are also autograph cards available for 55 of the players - I think they are numbered between 30 and 60 depending on the player.  UPDATE - Jambalaya has a lot of the cards from the set online here.

- This year's edition of BBM's annual Icons set will be out in late March.  The theme this year is "Rough Diamond" and the players listed as being in the set - Yoshinobu Okagawa, Roki Sasaki, Teruaki Sato, Shugo Maki and Hiroya Miyagi - all kind of fit into that definition.  This is a box set that contains 37 cards - the 36 card base set plus one "special" card.  The base set contains three players from each of the 12 NPB teams and in addition to the players I already mentioned will include eight first round picks from the 2021 draft.  The "special" card will be either a foil print card (one of 12 possible with a parallel version also available), an "Extreme 2022" card (one of eight possible - all 2021 draft picks), a foil signature card (three possible - all members of the Giants) or an autograph card. 

- The first of Calbee's expected three sets that make up their flagship issue - Series One - is going to officially be released on March 28th but it usually can be found a couple of days before that.  That's about all I know about the set though - for the first time that I can remember, Calbee has not put the set's checklist up on line yet.  They say they'll have it up in mid-March.  This is the 50th year that Calbee has been doing baseball cards and I suspect they'll be doing something special for it - although I don't know that it will be anything more than the card reprints that they did for their 30th Anniversary in 2002 and their 40th Anniversary in 2012.

- Epoch One, Epoch's on-demand card set (a la Topps Now) will be back this year for its fifth season.  I would expect that the first cards will be offered for sale on March 28th as it will be the first business day after Opening Day (March 25th).  Epoch will offer these cards for the same nine teams as last year - the Marines, Dragons, Hawks, Tigers, Fighters, Lions, Eagles, Swallows and Giants.  I guess the biggest news about the cards is that from the promo image it appears that the English version of the player's name will not included on the card.

- BBM has announced their first three "comprehensive" team sets for 2022 - for the Swallows, Hawks and Buffaloes.  Each of these sets has a base set of 81 cards which has been the standard for BBM's team sets since 2015.  The Swallows base set has 67 cards for the manager and players along with three subsets - "Milestone" (2 cards), "New Phase" (5 cards) and "Check It Out" (7 cards).  The details are a little scarce on the Hawks base set but it will have 66 cards for the manager and players and three subsets - a four card one featuring starting pitchers, a four card one featuring relief pitchers and a five card one featuring batters.  The Buffaloes base set consists on 64 cards for the manager and players plus four subsets - "Memorial Scene" (4 cards), "Yoshinubo Yamamoto Special" (4 cards), "Golden Age" (6 cards) and "Orix Junior" (3 cards).  Each set also includes 18 non-premium insert cards split among four different types - none of the web pages are terribly descriptive about these sets.  Each set also has two or three premium insert sets - I believe that these are all serially numbered but I don't know what they're numbered to.  All three have 15 "Esparanza" cards each.  BBM has replaced the "Phantom" cards of the past few years with "Treasure" cards this year - the Swallows set has 13, the Hawks set has 15 and the Buffaloes set has 19.  Additionally the Buffaloes set has a premium insert set called "Antique" that the other two do not - there are 24 of these "inserts with special wood grain processing".  All three sets have a variety of associated autograph cards.  The Hawks set also has Yuki Yanagita jersey cards available while the Buffaloes set has three types of memorabilia cards - Masataka Yoshida jersey cards, Yutaro Sugimoto jersey cards and combo jersey cards with both Yoshida and Sugimoto.  The Swallows and Hawks sets will be out in early April and the Buffaloes set will be out in mid-April.

- Mid-April is also when BBM will be publishing the first of their 2022 flagship sets.  The 1st Version set appears to be following the same pattern it has for the past eight years, at least in terms of the break down of the base set.  There's the usual 324 player/manager cards (27 for each team), the 12 team checklist cards and the 36 "Cross Something" cards that will be continued in the 2nd Version set later in the year - this year the Something is "Grotto".  That makes a total of 372 cards in the base set.  Nine cards for each team have several different facsimile autograph parallels.  There are also parallel versions for 77 of the rookie cards (not sure if that's all the rookie cards or not).  For the first time there are three varieties of the short printed photo variants - each team has a card with a rare "secret" version, a card with a rarer "ultra secret" version and a card with an even rarer "super ultra secret" version (and they could all possibly be variants for the same player).  There are also parallel versions of the "Cross Grotto" cards available.  There are two non-premium insert sets - "Promising Youth" (12 cards - one per team) and "Japonism" (12 cards - one per team) - and three serially numbered premium insert sets - "Amazing" (24 cards - two per team - each numbered to 50), "Cross Foil Signing" (6 cards - all members of the Giants - each numbered to 15) and "3D Cross Grotto" (12 cards - one per team as you probably guessed - each numbered to 25).  Some of the insert sets will probably have parallel versions but I don't see anything about them yet.  There are memorabilia cards available for Hiromi Itoh and Shugo Maki and a wide variety of autographed cards including buybacks.   

- I want to wrap up this post with a quick word not about an announcement but about a disappearance.  I mentioned in the post I did about Topps' 2021 NPB set that I thought it was odd that Topps' Japanese website no longer mentioned their NPB products and I wondered if it meant there wouldn't be any more of them.  Since I did that post a little over a month ago, Topps' Japanese site appears to have vanished - attempting to go to jp.topps.com gets you redirected to the regular Topps website.  I obviously don't know for sure but I kind of take that as sign to not expect any NPB product (or even an MLB Japan Edition) from them this year.  UPDATE - I've been informed by @lovelovemarines that Topps' Japanese website is still up but apparently you can only get there if you're in Japan.

Card Of The Week February 20

After eleven seasons Wladimir Balentien is leaving NPB and Japan.  The Saraperos de Saltillo of the Mexican League announced that they had signed him last week.  Balentien led the Central League in home runs his first three years in Japan, culminating in his record setting 60 home run season in 2013.  He also led the CL in RBIs in 2018.  He won the CL MVP award in 2013, won Best 9 awards in 2012 and 2013 and made the All Star team six times (2011-14, 2016 & 2018).  After spending his first nine years in Japan with the Swallows he signed with the Hawks as a free agent and spent the past two years mostly on the Hawks' farm team in Chikugo.  It was a little surprising that he didn't sign with another Japanese team after he and Hawks parted ways as he's been in Japan long enough that he no longer counts as a foreign player.

Here's a 2014 Calbee card (#C-1 from the Series One set) celebrating his 60th home run of the 2013 season - this was on October 4th, about two and a half weeks after he hit home run number 56 to pass Sadaharu Oh as the single season leader:

Minoru Iwata

Hanshin Tigers pitcher Minoru Iwata retired at the end of last season.  Iwata attended baseball powerhouse Osaka Toin for high school and was a teammate of Takeya Nakamura and Tsuyoshi Nishioka there.  He was named the ace pitcher of his team by his junior year but missed opportunities to pitch much due to a back injury and the discovery that he suffered from Type 1 diabetes.  He had hoped to go into professional baseball after graduating from high school but went undrafted in the fall 2001 NPB draft.  He went to Kansai University and went 6-10 with a 2.11 ERA and 143 strikeouts in 23 games over four injury-plagued seasons.  Former Hankyu Braves pitcher Takashi Yamaguchi who was a scout for the Tigers and an alum of Kansai University recommended that Hanshin draft him.  The team actually acquired him via the "desired enrollment frame" part of the 2005 draft which basically allowed them to sign him to a deal without other teams getting a shot at drafting him - the process cost the Tigers their first and second round picks in the college/industrial league portion of the draft.

Iwata spent most of his first two seasons with the Tigers on their farm team, making only one appearance with the top team in 2006 and four in 2007.  He made the ichi-gun starting rotation in 2008 and went 10-10 with a 3.28 ERA in 27 starts and finished third in Rookie Of The Year voting behind Tetsuya Yamaguchi and Hayato Sakamoto.  He was a late addition to the 2009 Japanese World Baseball Classic team, replacing Hiroki Kuroda.  He only made two appearances in the tournament, both against Korea, but hurt his shoulder and missed a couple months of the season.  An elbow injury sidelined him for all of 2010 but he returned to the Tigers starting rotation in 2011 and remained there for the next five seasons, starting at least 20 games each season except for 2013 where ineffectiveness limited him to only nine games with the top team.  He started Game Four of the 2014 Nippon Series and held the Hawks to just two runs in seven innings in a game ultimately won by Softbank on a three run walk off home run by Akira Nakamura in the bottom of the tenth.  His playing time on the top team dropped off quite a bit after 2015, apparently due to poor performance.  He announced his retirement after the team had let him know that he wasn't in their plans for 2022.  He's now working for the team as a "community ambassador".

Iwata's first baseball cards were in the 2006 Rookie Edition (#55) and 1st Version (#248) sets from BBM.  His first Calbee card was #116 in the 2008 Series Two set.  He's also appeared in various sets from Konami, Bandai and Epoch.  Here's some of his cards:

2006 BBM Rookie Edition #55

2006 BBM 1st Version #248

2008 BBM Touch The Game #073

2009 Konami Baseball Heroes WBC #W09R090

2012 Calbee #058

2013 BBM 2nd Version #521

2015 Tigers Original Player Card #04

2019 BBM 2nd Version #371

2021 BBM Tigers #T10

Rhee Dae-eun

KT Wiz pitcher Rhee Dae-eun announced his retirement last month.  Rhee has had an interesting career, playing in North America, Japan and South Korea during his 14 year career.

Rhee originally signed with the Chicago Cubs after graduating from Shinil High School in Seoul, South Korea.  He pitched well in his first season in the US in 2008, going 4-1 with a 1.80 ERA in 10 starts with Peoria of the Midwest League but missed most of 2009 after having Tommy John surgery.  He bounced around the Cubs organization for five more years, getting as high as Triple-A Iowa in 2014, before becoming a free agent.  He moved back to the Far East, signing with the Chiba Lotte Marines for the 2015 season.

He pitched OK for Lotte his first season, going 9-9 with a 3.84 ERA in 37 games split between the starting rotation and middle relief.  He ended the year pitching for the Korean National Team in the 2015 Premier 12, beating Venezuela during the Group Stage and starting the semi-final game against Japan in which  Korea had their stunning ninth inning comeback.  His second season with the Marines did not go as well.  He spent most of 2016 with the farm team, going 10-8 with a 3.86 ERA.  His 10 wins led the Eastern League but he only made three appearances with the ichi-gun squad and posted a 7.20 ERA in them.  The Marines let him go after the season.

He returned to Korea but had to serve his two year military stint before he could join a KBO team.  He served his required time playing for the Korean Police Baseball Team which at the time played in the Futures League, the farm league for the KBO.  He was named to the Korean team for the 2017 World Baseball Classic but did not appear in any games in the tournament (Korea was knocked out in the first round).

Despite his 10 years playing professionally outside of Korea he was subject to the KBO draft once his military service was over and KT took him with their first pick of the "second nomination" of the 2019 draft (held in September of 2018).  He started the 2019 season in the Wiz's starting rotation but switched to the closer role mid-season and had 17 saves.  He missed a significant amount of time during the last two seasons due to injury and did not pitch in last year's Korea Series that KT won.

Rhee's Japanese and Korean cards are a bit sparse.  Most of his Japanese cards are BBM issues - 1st Version (2015-16), 2nd Version (2015), Genesis (2015), tbe Marines team set (2015-16) and The Ballpark Stories (2016) - although he did have a Bandai Owners League card in 2015 and a card in Epoch's Pacific League Premier Edition set in 2016.  In Korea, he's in the SCC KBO Collection 2, Premium Collection and Premium Collection 2 sets in 2019 and the SCC Battle Baseball Card Game Vol. 1, Premium Collection and Golden Premium Collection sets in 2020.  He is not in either of the 2021 KBO sets.  Here's a couple of his cards from both Japan and Korea:

2015 BBM 1st Version #090

2016 BBM Marines #M19

2019 SCC KBO Collection 2 #SCCR2-19/161 All Star

2020 SCC Premium Collection #SCCP1-20/W01

Card Of The Week February 13

Thought it'd be appropriate to have a football-related post this week.  Former Yokohama DeNA Baystars infielder Takehiro Ishikawa retired from baseball last year but that didn't mean he was going to stop being a professional athlete - he's now a football player!  And by "football", I don't mean soccer, I mean American football.  Last spring Ishikawa joined the Nojima Sagamihara Rise, a team in the X-League, Japan's top level American football league (not to be confused with the XFL).  He signed on as a wide receiver.  I don't know anything about how well he played though - about all I know is he caught a pass in the team's first game of the season against the Fujitsu Frontiers.  I have no idea how much he played - I looked through the game reports on their website and his name only comes up with the reception in that first game.  His bio on their website can be seen here.

I found a video that I think the Baystars produced that shows his preseason with the Rise as well as the catch he made against the Frontiers (fun fact - the stadium the game was played in is Kawasaki Stadium, the former home of the Taiyo Whales from 1955-77 and the Lotte Orions from 1978-91.  It was rebuilt as a football stadium in the early 00's):

And just to show that Japanese football is taking a page from Japanese baseball, you can buy a t-shirt commemorating Ishikawa's catch on the team's on-line store.  

Here's a card of Ishikawa from his Baystars days (doesn't look like the Rise have any trading cards):

2012 BBM 1st Version "Cross Blaze" #CB101