First Zippy Zappy-ing Of The New Year

Kenny - aka Zippy Zappy - had given me a heads up a few weeks back that there was a new envelope on its way across the Pacific to me and it showed up at my house today.  It contained two cards, neither of which I already had.  Kenny's always had a pretty good knack for sending me cards that I don't already own which is pretty impressive considering I have a LOT of Japanese cards.  In fairness, however, it's gotten a little easier over the last year since I stopped buying new cards.

Case in point this first card of Koki Kitayama from the Calbee "Pro Yakyu Spirits A" set that was just released about a month ago:

2025 Calbee Pro Yakyu Spirits A #PS-20

It was a little more of a gamble that I didn't have this Bushiroad DreamOrder card of Orlando Calixte from 2024.  But I didn't.

2024 Bushiroad DreamOrder Central League Booster Pack Vol. 4 #CBP04-D05

Thanks again for the cards, Kenny!

Card Of The Week January 4

Kona Takahashi's posting window closes this afternoon but apparently the Lions right-handed pitcher has been unhappy with the offers he's received from MLB teams as it's already been announced that he'll be returning to Seibu for the 2026 season.  I feel bad for him but, as a Lions fan, I am happy that the team won't be losing two members of their 2025 rotation with Tatsuya Imai having signed with the Astros last week.

Both Imai and Takahashi grew their hair out over the past few years and the Lions have sold merchandise for the two of them under the label "Team Long Hair".  There was a card in the 2024 BBM Lions set dedicated to it - the back explains that Takahashi is the president of the team with Imai being the vice-president:

2024 BBM Lions #L67

Here are two more cards of Takahashi - a rookie card showing his original haircut and one more recent one showing his long hair:

2015 Lions Fan Club #17

2024 Topps NPB #120

SABR Zoom Talk With Tatsuo Shinke On January 28

The SABR Asian Baseball and Baseball Card Research Committees are hosting a Zoom meeting with Tatsuo Shinke, the CEO of Mint, on January 28, 2026 at 8:30 PM EST.  Details are here.  

Shinke used to work for both Baseball Magazine (BBM) and Upper Deck and has been with Mint since 2010.  He was profiled/interviewed in Rob Fitts' recent book "In The Japanese Ballpark" - in fact, the photo of him at the above link is the same one that appears in the book.

Munetaka Murakami Samurai Japan Cards

I had mentioned when I did my "New Import" post for Munetaka Murakami that I had a lot of Epoch One and Samurai Japan cards for him.  I did a post on the Epoch One cards last week and I thought I'd do the Samurai Japan one now before I get caught up in the Tatsuya Imai and (potentially) Kazuma Okamoto posts in the next few days (neither of whom I have as many Epoch One or Samurai Japan cards for).

As far as I know, there are 17* cards of Murakami as a member of Samurai Japan, of which I have 16.  Just about half of them (eight) are US issued cards for the 2023 World Baseball Classic while the others are all Japanese issues for that tournament and assorted friendly matches.  I'm going to run through the cards in roughly chronological order.

* Not including parallels, autographed or memorabilia cards

Murakami's first appearance with a Samurai Japan team was the one that played a couple friendlies with Mexico in March of 2019.  His first Samurai Japan baseball card was from the Calbee set that was released that fall:

2019 Calbee Samurai Japan #SJ-33

His next appearance with Samurai Japan and the first major international tournament that he played in for them was the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (which was played in 2021 and the baseball competition was played in Yokohama).  Unfortunately there were no baseball cards issued for that edition of the team.

Murakami's next played for Samurai Japan in the friendlies against Australia in November of 2022 (along with warm up games against the Giants and Fighters).  Topps issued 16 Topps Now singles for the team which included two cards for Murakami.  They also issued a full team set via Topps Now:

2022 Topps Now Samurai Japan #003

2022 Topps Now Samurai Japan #007

2022 Topps Now Samurai Japan Team Set #SJ-22

Murakami's best known tenure with Samurai Japan was from the 2023 World Baseball Classic.  Murakami had ten cards across the ten sets/subsets that Topps did for the tournament - two of which (the Samurai Japan team set and the Japan Edition "Samurai Japan" insert set) were ony available in Japan.  I have nine of these - I'm missing his Bowman Chrome card:

2023 Topps Now WBC #WBC-66

2023 Topps Now WBC #WBC-69

2023 Topps Now Samurai Japan Team Set #WBCJPN-5

2023 Topps Global Stars #10

2023 Topps Global Stars #F-3

2023 Topps Samurai Japan Team Set #30

2023 Topps 2 WBC Stars #WBC-60

2023 Topps Japan Edition Samurai Japan #WBC-5

2023 Topps World Baseball Classic #84

In addition, BBM had a Samurai Japan subset in their 2023 Infinity set which wasn't "officially" for the WBC but might as well have been:

2023 BBM Infinity #25

Murakami's final appearance to date with Samurai Japan was the friendly matches they played in March of 2024 against "Team Euro", a team of players from European Union nations.  Topps again did Topps Now singles for this series (dubbed the "Global Games") although there were just eight of them this time, one of which was Murakami.  They also again did a full Topps Now team set:

2024 Topps Now Samurai Japan #1

2024 Topps Now Global Games Samurai Japan Team Set #24

Murakami is not the player that I have the most Samurai Japan/Japanese National Team cards for - he's tied with Ichiro for fifth.  I have a whopping 27 cards of Daisuke Matsuzaka with three other players - Yu Darvish, Shohei Ohtani and Tetsuto Yamada - tied for second with 17 cards each.  All but three of the Ohtani's cards I have are from the 2023 WBC (he had 17 in all but I "only" have 14 of them).

In Memoriam 2025

 

2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 #T-06

I've seen a couple posts on Bluesky and other places, giving a list of the baseball players who passed away in 2025 and I noticed that generally, they don't include any NPB players.  At least, no NPB players who didn't play in MLB.  I thought I'd try to do a quick post that listed some of the major NPB stars who left us this past year.  This isn't a comprehensive list and it's not even a full list of folks that I did Memorial posts for.  I just wanted to recognize that four Japanese Hall Of Famers died in 2025 along with some other fairly big names.  I'm not going to write anything about each player but I will link to the Memorial post I did for each of them.

February 5 - Hall Of Famer Yoshio Yoshida

2015 BBM Tigers 80th Anniversary #08

Feburary 16 - Swallows mascot Tsubakuro (obviously this was the actor who portrayed him since 1994 but I don't know his name.  And apparently Tsubakuro will return to Swallows games next season)

2013 Calbee Series Two #C-8

April 4 - Tony Blanco

2013 BBM Baystars 20th Anniversary #75

April 18 - Hall Of Famer Masaaki Koyama

2005 BBM Glorious Stars #024

June 3 - Hall Of Famer Shigeo Nagashima

2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 #185

September 22 - Yukihiro Machida

2003 BBM Sluggers #018

November 2 - Hall Of Famer Yoshinori Hirose

2009 Epoch All Japan Baseball Foundation 15th Anniversary #46

November 24 - George Altman

1975 NST #134

In addition, I also did Memorial posts this year for Hidetoshi Hakamada, Yutaka Ohhashi, Jack Bloomfield, Jitsuo Mizutani, Davey Johnson, Jim Marshall & Brian Dayett, Yoshihiro Itoh, Hiroaki Inoue, Nobuhiro Takashiro and Mike Campbell.  There were other NPB players who passed away this year that I did not do posts for - mostly because I had few if any cards of them.  I mean no disrespect to anyone I neglected to do a post for or the players I didn't highlight in this post.

2025 In Review - Everything Else (Including Korea)

I'm finishing up my review of 2025's card releases in Japan (and Korea) with everything that wasn't done by BBM, Epoch, Calbee or Topps.

Bushiroad returned this past year with updates to their DreamOrder collectible card game that was initially released in 2024.  They released a booster pack set for each of the 12 NPB teams which were released in pairs throughout the year with the Giants and Tigers sets coming out in March; the Buffaloes, Lions, Carp and Dragons getting released in April; the Hawks, Eagles, Baystars, and Swallows hitting stores in May and the Fighters and Marines getting published in June.  They also released two other sets in September - a Samurai Japan set that appears to be team set for the 2024 Premier 12 team (which furthers my confusion about the Samurai Japan license holder) and a "Heroes Of 2025" set that features some of the top players from each team.

Bandai returned with a second edition of their "Pro Baseball Deforme Card Collection", their collaboration with Namco that was distributed with packets a snack called "kaki no tane".  Like their 2024 set, this was a 36 card set featuring caricatures of players.

Epoch and the Eagles collaborated on a "comprehensive" team set for the second year in a row.  I was a bit surprised when I realized that there was only one of these sets released in 2025 since the Eagles have done two - labeled "1st Version" and "2nd Version" - almost every year since at least 2018.  As far as I could tell, this was the only collaboration between a team and card company this year - the Lions and BBM did not issue an "L Collection" set for the first time in several years.  I am sure that, once again, various teams issued card sets either through their fan clubs or with meals at the ballpark (or both) but I don't know anything about them.

TIC (or "Hits" or "Produce 216") only did a single one of their "mini colored paper" or "mini shikishi" team sets this year and it was for the Hawks.  They did, however, issue a new product called "mini folding screens".  Each "mini folding screen" is a panel about 24 centimeters (9 1/2 inches) by 13.5 centimeters (around 5 1/3 inches) which is split into three parts.  They issued three sets of eight sheets (four "base set" sheets with four "foil signature" parallels) for three teams - the Giants, Hawks and Dragons.

I think my total count of 2025 NPB sets comes out to about 77 which is a little lower than last year's total of 79 (I had listed the total number of 2024 sets as 60 in my review last year but I was counting all the DreamOrder cards as being one set rather than twenty individual sets).  This would be a count of all the "nationally" released sets (so I'm including the Epoch/Eagles team set but no other team issued sets) but not any of the on-line, on-demand Epoch One or Topps Now cards.

There were three KBO sets released in South Korea in 2025 - all by SCC.  KBO Collection was released in May, KBO Collection+ came out in August and KBO Sensation was released in September.

2025 In Review - Epoch

There weren't many surprises with Epoch's card sets in 2025.  They issued 18 sets, one fewer than they had in 2024 - although two of these sets had "2024" cover dates and there's at least one 2025 set that won't be published until next month (and I suspect there'll be another "2025" set after that too).

2025 was the eighth year of Epoch attempting to compete with BBM to be the premier card company in Japan (Calbee and Topps are non-contenders) and I feel their efforts are continuing to fall flat.  Their flagship "NPB" set dropped in size again.  What had been a 432 or 444 card set up until 2024 had dropped in size to 348 last year and to 240 this year.  The "NPB Luxury" set - a high end set using a similar design but a different checklist and photos (and with all the base set cards being serially numbered) - also dropped in size from 108 in 2024 to 36 cards.

Epoch also released their "Pacific League Rookies" box set for the eighth consecutive year but there weren't any major changes to that set - it still contained all the 2024 non-ikusei draft picks for the six Pacific League teams.

Epoch once again issued "reasonably priced" team sets called "Premier Edition" for eight of the NPB teams.  Each set had between 37 and 54 cards and sometimes contained cards for OB players as well as active ones.  The teams Epoch did sets for were the Baystars, Buffaloes, Carp, Dragons, Fighters, Lions, Swallows and Tigers which were exactly the same teams they did in 2024.

Similarly, Epoch issued their ultra high-end active/OB "Stars & Legends" team sets for the same four teams that they had in 2024 - the Giants, Hawks, Marines and Tigers.  Another one of their ultra high-end sets - "Pacific League Premier Edition" - was back for the tenth straight year - it predates Epoch's initial serious challenge to BBM in 2018 by two years.

The two sets that slipped from 2024 until March of 2025 were both collaborations with the OB Club.  One was the annual ultra high-end "Holographica" set while the second was one of Epoch's few surprises in 2025 - a reasonably priced box set called "Japan National Baseball Team Career Achievements" which featured retired players who had been members of the National team over the past quarter century or so.  The announcement of the set was the first clue that Epoch had taken over the Samurai Japan license, at least temporarily.

Epoch has already announced that the 2025 edition of "Career Achievement", one of Epoch's other annual collaborations with the OB Club, won't be released until the end of January.  There hasn't been an announcement yet about the 2025 edition of "Holographica" which makes me suspect that it again won't be released until March.

Epoch's on-line, on-demand Epoch One cards were back again for their eighth season.  There were ultimately 1321 cards done in 2025 for ten of the twelve NPB teams - everyone except the Carp and Buffaloes.  Additionally, as part of Epoch's tenure as the Samurai Japan license holder, they issued Epoch One cards for the Samurai Japan teams that took on the Netherlands in March and Korea in November.  There were 34 cards issued in all - 17 for each set of games.  As it turns out, Topps also issued six Topps Now cards for the friendlies against Korea so maybe the Samurai Japan license isn't as exclusive as I thought.