2023 Epoch NPB set

The sixth edition of Epoch's flagship card set - called "NPB" - was released about a month ago.  It contains a base set of 444 cards - 432 "regular" player cards and 12 "Legendary Player" ones.  I find this set to be a somewhat of a mixed bag but overall I think it's an improvement on some of their earlier iterations of this set.  Let's dive in.

We'll start with the 432 "regular" player cards.  As has been the case with every edition of this set, the cards are split up evenly between the 12 teams with each one having 36 cards in the set.  These 36 cards include the team's manager as well as the entire 2023 rookie class (which is all the non-ikusei players drafted last fall).  The set includes all the big names that you'd expect - Munetaka Murakami, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Roki Sasaki, Tetsuto Yamada, Kazuma Okamoto and Masahiro Tanaka.  Since the set is 108 cards larger than BBM's 1st Version set, I always find it interesting to see who's in this set who was not in that set.  This year there are 122 players in this set who did not appear in 1st Version.  Three of the players are ones that I called out in my 1st Version post as possibly being left out due the WBC - Ariel Martinez, Raidel Martinez and Wu Nienting.  Other names of interest are Kenta Bright, Yuito Mori, Fumihito Haraguchi, Shota Dohbayashi, T-Okada, Tyler Austin and Hiroyuki Nakajima.  Going the other way, there's 14 guys in 1st Version who aren't in this set and they're nearly all foreign players - Luis Castillo, Adam Walker, Dillon Peters and Brian Keller among others.  What I find very odd is neither set has cards for Hirokazu Sawamura, Marwin Gonzalez or Frank Schwindel.  While I understood them not being in 1st Version as it had the earlier press date, I don't understand why they're not in this set which came out two months later - especially when all three are in their respective BBM team sets that came out earlier than this set.

The previous versions of this set had card designs that were kind of similar to each other in a way (as this post showing the repetitive poses of the cards of Masataka Yoshida shows).  This year they used a completely dissimilar design and I find myself liking it, despite it having two borders around the photo while I usually prefer a borderless design.  

I've beaten up on Epoch for their photo selection over the year probably a little more than I've beaten up on Calbee for the same thing.  I think this year's set shows an improvement although there are still WAY too many "pitchers pitching, batters batting, catchers catching" photos.  Here's one good photo from each team - some teams have many more good photos than others:

#097

#133

#042

#276

#235

#030

#297

#199

#381

#424

#343

#170

But there are still some things that strike me as odd with this set.  First of all, there's a relatively large number of studio photos of players in front of a blank background.  A large number of them are rookies which I could almost excuse (even though BBM had "real" photos of all of the rookies in 1st Version two months ago) but there's a handful of veterans which pretty much doesn't make any sense to me.  Here's three examples:

#279, #189, #389

OK, in fairness, Tyler Austin missed the beginning of the season and the Baystars changed their uniforms this off season so this was the only way they'd have a photo of him in this year's uniform.  

Epoch also repeated what they did last year with having several Swallows players obviously posing on the field of their farm team's ballpark in Toda although instead of it being all rookies like it was last year, it's three rookies and an established, albeit injured, pitcher:

#223, #251, #250, #249

The card backs are pretty much the same as always.  They show the stat lines for the player's last three season in NPB along with their career stats.  There's a cropped version of the photo on the front of the card as opposed to the mug shots that BBM and Calbee typically have on their card backs.  Here's Yoshinobu Yamamoto's card as an example:

#005

This is the fourth time that Epoch has included a 12 card "Legendary Player" subset with this set.  The last two years these cards have been short printed and not considered part of the base set.  However this year they're part of the base set again.  As you can probably guess, 12 cards means there's one OB player per team included.  I'm kind of "meh" about the subset - it's basically an excuse to include some OB players in the autographed cards available with the set.  Three of the players - Seiichi Uchikawa, Hatsuhiko Tsuji and Shinji Sasaoka - were in last year's set (although Tsuji and Sasaoka were managers) and none of them are particularly big names with maybe the exception of Takashi Toritani.  Here's Uchikawa's card:

#440

As I said, the set's kind of mixed bag but I think on the whole, the pros outweigh the cons.  And while it might not be as good a set as 1st Version, it beats the hell out of Topps and probably whatever Calbee eventually produces this year.  You can decide for yourself by checking out all the cards over at Jambalaya.

Card Of The Week July 23

The All Star break was last week and Chusei Mannami of the Fighters stole the show.  He homered in the first All Star at bat of his career in Game One on Wednesday - the first player to do so since Seiji Kobayashi did it in 2017 and the 18th player overall to do so.  He also homered in Game Two on Thursday, becoming the first player ever to hit home runs in their first two All Star games.  He won the "Brave Player" Award for Game One and was named MVP of Game Two.  Here's a card of him from the 2022 BBM Fighters set (#F75) that I thought was appropriate for his performance:

Graded Unopened Kabaya-Leaf Packs Available

About a year and a half ago I came across someone selling wrappers for 1967 Kabaya-Leaf packs on Ebay.  I contacted the seller and got permission to use his photos for a post.  This same gentleman reached out to me recently to let me know he was auctioning off a group of four graded, unopened Kabaya-Leaf packs over at Heritage Auctions.

As you can see from the above image, the four packs are each a different color.  They're a little on the transparent side so if you look closely at them, you can see the wrappers of the sticks of gum inside the packs.  If you could see the back sides, you'd be able to tell what the rearmost of the two cards in the pack is.  The blue pack has Sadaharu Oh, the yellow one has Hideki Watanabe, the red one has Tetsuharu Kawakami and the green one has Shigeo Nagashima.  Not a bad selection, especially considering that Watanabe is one of the extremely rare cards from the set (R4 according to Engel) and Kawakami is one of the rare cards (R3).

The starting price on this auction is way out of my price range - $10,000 - but I thought it might be of interest to show what unopened Kabaya-Leaf packs looked like.

Thanks to Jim for contacting me about this!

Tigers Women Vs Giants Women

I wanted to do a quick post mentioning that this Saturday at 1800 JST the Hanshin Tigers' women's team will take on the Yomiuri Giants' women's team at Koshien Stadium.  The game will be telecast on Toratele (which can be subscribed to from outside Japan) and Sun TV (don't know the availability outside Japan).

I bring this up because there was a tweet yesterday from the official Koshien Twitter account that they would be selling bento boxes featuring some sort of beef entree at the game which will include baseball cards for the Tigers' women's team.  These would be the first baseball cards I'm aware of for the team.

Since I don't think I'll be making it out to Koshien in time, I will be looking for these on the secondary market.

RIP Shintaro Yokota

Tragic news out of Kobe yesterday - former Tigers outfielder Shintaro Yokota has passed away from a brain tumor at age 28.  Yokota was Hanshin's second pick in the fall 2013 draft and he spent his entire six year professional career in their organization.  

Yokota spent his first two seasons with the farm team before getting into 38 games with the ichi-gun team in 2016, hitting .191.  He performed well in the Asian Winter League that offseason though and was working out at first base the following spring in hopes of improving his chances of making the top team when he began to suffer unexplained headaches.  He was diagnosed with a brain tumor and missed the season due to treatment which successfully put the tumor into remission.  The Tigers released him after the 2017 season and re-signed him as a development player (ikusei).  He spent two more years with the Tigers farm team trying to recover but issues with his eyesight ultimately prevented him from playing in any games other than his retirement game at the end of the 2019 season. 

After retiring from baseball at age 24 he wrote a book about his battle with the brain tumor called "Miracle Back Home" which was made into a documentary.  He was diagnosed with a spinal tumor in 2020 and underwent successful treatment for it.  In March of 2022 the brain tumor returned and ultimately cost him his eyesight in both eyes.  He was recuperating from treatment earlier this year when he passed away in a hospital in Kobe.

Yokota didn't have a lot of baseball cards.  TCDB lists 43 total but when you eliminate the parallel, insert, autograph and memorabilia cards, there's only about 14 base set cards.  I have nine of these:

2014 BBM Rookie Edition #058

2014 BBM 1st Version #212

2015 BBM Tigers #T60

2016 BBM 2nd Version #363

2016 BBM Tigers #T60

2016 BBM Tigers #T71

2016 BBM Classic #054

2017 BBM Tigers #T61

2020 BBM Farewell #36

I also want to mention that Yokota's father Masashi had an 11 year NPB career with Lotte, Chunichi and Seibu between 1985 and 1995.

1991 BBM #162

US Cards Of (Limited) Interest

I've learned about a couple US card releases that may be of some interest to Japanese card collectors.  Then again, maybe not...

- Topps released the 2023 edition of their high end shiny card set called "Finest" about a week and a half ago.  The set includes a 25 card insert set called "2000 Topps Finest World’s Finest" which includes 25 players in their World Baseball Classic uniforms.  All 25 players are on MLB teams and there's only one player from either Samurai Japan or South Korea - Shohei Ohtani (seen in the above image that was swiped from Ebay).  I think there's only one player in the set who wasn't in either the Global Stars or the Topps 2 WBC Stars inserts (or both) - Cedric Mullins.  Given that I generally find these cards to be pretty ugly and they're also very expensive - the auction for the Ohtani card I swiped the image from has a BIN of $90 - this is a hard "nope" from me.  I've already spent WAY too much money this year on WBC cards (although I did pick up the Mullins card for $4).

- Kenny (aka Zippy Zappy) told me the other day that Panini has an autographed card of Tomoyuki Sugano of the Yomiuri Giants in their "1990 Donruss" set.  Or to be more accurate, there's a redemption card for an autographed Sugano card available.  There's also a dual autograph card of Sugano and Masataka Yoshida in the Panini Three and Two set - this is also a redemption card.  Not sure how this has come about other than Panini trying to figure out how to fill sets now that they don't have an MLBPA license (and I'm not sure how they are able to have Yoshida).  Sugano's kind of an odd choice as he's 33 and has probably already missed any chance of playing in MLB (he made an attempt during the 2020-21 offseason but didn't get any offers he liked).  You'd have thought they'd have tried to get Munetaka Murakami, Roki Sasaki or Yoshinobu Yamamoto instead - younger players who are likely to be coming to MLB in the next few years.  However it's possible that since they were all on the WBC team that Topps has them locked up to some sort of exclusive deal for the North American market.  Kenny pointed out one interesting aspect of Sugano having a certified autograph - Yomiuri prohibits their active players from having certified autograph cards.  I had never noticed this before but a little looking around confirmed it - for example there are no autograph cards available with BBM's annual Giants team sets.  Curiosity has gotten the best of me and I picked up one of the Donruss redemption cards off Ebay for $15 ($20-ish with shipping).  I've heard some horror stories about Panini redemptions but I'll hope for the best.

2023 Topps NPB Set

Topps' third "flagship" NPB set was released about two months ago and I received my set last week in my latest shipment from ZenMarket.  I vented my spleen about the set when it came out and seeing the cards first hand doesn't really change my opinion about it,  

All the things I complained about in my earlier post are still true.  To review the lowlights - the photos were all taken last year, no players who changed teams over the winter like Kensuke Kondoh or Tomoya Mori are in the set and the backs are horrible - again.  But given that not everyone will hate the set because of that, I'll attempt to hit some of the more positive aspects of it.

Let's go through some details first.  For the third time, the base set contains 216 cards split evenly between the 12 NPB teams (18 cards per team).  The manager for each team is included along with three "rookies" (i.e. 2022 draft picks) - I assume that these are the top three draft picks from last fall but I didn't actually confirm this.  The player selection is a bit odd - despite this set being only two thirds the size of BBM's 1st Version set, Topps included 21 players who weren't in that set including T-Okada, Shota Dohbayashi, Raidel Martinez, Daiki Asama, Hiroyuki Nakajima and Yariel Rodriguez who defected from Cuba (and the Chunichi Dragons) in March.  

The photo selection isn't terrible.  I don't like the processing that Topps does to their photos but they have a more interesting range of poses than either Epoch or Calbee.  They also use the horizontal format a decent amount which I always find positive.  Here's a couple example cards:

#163

#67

#197

#168

#50

As I said before, the photos were all taken last year.  Nao Higashihama and Yoshinobu Yamamoto's cards both show them celebrating their respective no-hitters (although I'm only showing Higashihama's card):

#90

It seems like 90 percent of Kenya Wakatsuki's cards show him in full catching gear while the other 10 percent show him batting so I'm impressed Topps found a unique photo of him:

#215

There are a couple cards in the set that don't actually show the player's face which I find kind of weird:

#141

None of the rookie cards show the player actually playing baseball.  They're either superimposed on a background (Marines, Hawks, Fighters, Buffaloes, Lions and Eagles):

#152

Posed in front of a solid background (white for the Dragons and Giants, blue for the Tigers and grey for the Swallows):

#36

Or at the team's press conference to introduce the 2022 draft class (Carp and Baystars).  The Baystars cards all include the disembodied arm of (presumably) manager Daisuke Miura:

#87

I mentioned earlier that I like horizontally oriented cards.  I do have to question the editorial decision to use a horizontal format for this one though:

#28

That above covers the fronts of the cards.  The backs continue show the barest level of effort from Topps:

#163 (Chusei Mannami)

I keep thinking Topps is going to get better with their NPB products and I keep getting disappointed.  The binder that I keep my Topps NPB cards in is pretty much full now after this set and I will have to think long and hard about whether I will want to devote a second binder to any additional product from them.

To see all the cards in the set (including parallels and inserts), take a look over at Jambalaya.