Card Of The Week January 25

Former Hawk, White Sox, Padres and Phillie Tadahito Iguchi is returning to Japan to play for the Marines. I read that they've given him uniform #6, which was Hiromitsu Ochiai's old number. No pressure or anything.

Here's his card from the 2003 JPBPA set:


The 2003 JPBPA set was a 60 card set produced by the Japanese Professional Baseball Players Association (the Japanese player's union). Each card featured a drawing of the player. It doesn't look the set was licensed by NPB, so there are no team logos or even names (there are some card issues in the US that are licensed by the player's association, but not MLB, so the team logos on the uniforms are airbrushed off). Instead of a pack, the cards came in a little box that included a little player pin. It was an odd little set that was only issued the one time.

Career Home Run Leaders #12 - Shigeo Nagashima

Number 12 on the list, but number one in the hearts of many fans is Mr. Giants, Shigeo Nagashima. I will leave a description of Nagashima's place in Japanese baseball for others but think of the way baby boomers think of Mickey Mantle, only more so. (In fact I would bet that a really interesting sociological thesis comparing Mantle's and Nagashima's roles in the post-World War II culture in both countries could be written.)

Anyway, Nagashima had 444 career home runs, all while playing for the Yomiuri Giants from 1958 until 1974. Here's a smattering of his cards:

BBM put out a whole set dedicated to him in 1999. This card (#G27) shows him in his Rikkyo University uniform, sometime in the mid-1950's:


A Doyusha "4-in-1" bromide from 1960. Nagashima is on the lower right (obviously). (That's Kazuhisa Inao in the upper left and Tetsuya Yoneda in the lower left):


2006 BBM Nostalgic Baseball #099. If "History Of Uniform" is to be believed, this picture is from 1960:


1964 Marukami Menko:


2002 BBM All Time Heroes #005. Don't know when the picture was taken, but it's a great shot:


1974/75 Calbee #426. This card shows his retirement ceremony on October 12, 1974. (I think that might be Sadaharu Oh bringing him the flowers):


1975/76 Calbee #604, as Giants manager. Nagashima managed the Giants from 1975-80, then again from 1993-2001. He also managed the Japanese National Team for the 2003 Asian Championship. He was expected to manage the 2004 Olympic team, but he suffered a stroke and had to step down:


Rob Fitts has a gallery of cards here.

(The card at the top of the post is 2002 BBM 2nd Version #834)

2008 BBM Nippon Series Set

BBM brings an end to their 2008 cards with the annual Nippon Series box set. This 62 card set features cards of every member of the Giants and Lions who appeared in this past fall's Nippon Series, plus cards of both managers. In addition, there are cards for the Series MVP (Takayuki Kishi), the Fighting Spirit award winner (Alex Ramirez) and the Outstanding Player award winners (Hiroshi Hirao, Hiroyuki Nakajima, and Takahiro Suzuki) as well as a "Lions Champion" card (#S62, shown above).

One thing I've always liked about the Nippon Series sets is that the pictures on the cards are from the actual series. In the past this has lead to cool cards like those for Tuffy Rhodes in 2001 and Koji Akiyama in 1991, as well as some cards showing the fog during the Game 1 in 2005. This year, there's no real memorable cards in the set. (Not surprisingly, this event didn't get any coverage in the cards.) I mean, the photos are nice and all, but there's no real sense that they are from the Series rather than just any other game.

Here are the cards of Hiroyuki Nakajima of the Lions (#S17) and Takuya Kimura of the Giants (#S45):



Nice photos, but they could have been taken anytime.

I did like the photo on Takahiro Suzuki's Outstanding Player award card (#S61):

2008 Hiroshima Memorial set

Another one of the sets that I received last week was the 2008 BBM Hiroshima Memorial set. This set commemorates the closing of Hiroshima Municipal Stadium last September. It's a boxed set containing 45 cards plus a parallel/photo/autographed/memorabilia card (as usual, I got an opened set, so I didn't get the extra card).

The set features a three card "History" subset which has cards for the first and last games at the ballpark and a card highlighting all the All Star games played there; a six card "Victory" subset with one card each for the six Central League pennants the Carp have won while playing at the park; an 18 card subset featuring OB players; and an 18 card subset featuring 2008 Carp players, all of whom are wearing turn-back-the-clock uniforms.

The OB players subset is a little different than the usual OB player subsets in the recent Anniversary sets. Each of the 18 cards features an event that occurred at the ballpark and a player associated with it. Some of the events include Yoshiro Sotokoba's perfect game in 1968, Sachio Kinugasa passing Lou Gehrig's record for consecutive games played in 1987, Shinji Sasaoka's nohitter in 1999 and Kenjiro Nomura's 2000th hit in 2005.

Here's some sample cards:





That's the "History" card commemorating the opening of the ballpark (#01), the "Victory" card for the Carp's Central League pennant in 1975 (#04), Akira Etoh's OB card commemorating his record 16 home runs in August of 1994 (#23) and the 2008 Carp subset card of Soichiro Amaya (#44).

Card Of The Week January 18

I had mentioned the other day that the new BBM Lotte 40th Anniversary set did not include a card of Masahide Kaneda, their manager during much of the 1970's (and the only 400 game winner in NBP history). Here's a card from the 1975 NST Mr. Baseball set:


At least, I think this card is from the NST set. It's a blank backed card, so there's no number or anything on it. The "cards" in the NST set were actually stickers that could be pasted into a book. There was a parallel issue that were blank backed cards. I've been assuming that the card is one of these parallel cards, but I could be wrong.

2008 BBM Lotte 40th Anniversary set

Back in November, BBM released a 99 card set to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Lotte buying the Orions (now Marines) in 1969. This was one of the sets I got in the mail last week.

As I said in my earlier post when the set got announced, the set looks quite a bit like the other three anniversary sets BBM put out last year (the Lions, the Hawks and the Baystars). There are a six card "history" subset, showing pictures from various significant events in Lotte's tenure and the year-by-year results for the team on the back. There are 74 cards for OB players and 19 cards for the current (2008) team. (These counts are different from the original listing on the website.)

As was the case with the other sets, the OB players include a combination of retired players (Michio Arito, Isao Harimoto, Leron Lee, Leon Lee, Tomohiro Kuroki, Koji Yamamoto (the other one), Shinichi Etoh, Julio Franco, Hiromitsu Ochiai), managers (Kazuhisa Inao, Kazuhiro Yamauchi) and ex-Lotte players playing elsewhere both in NPB (Seung-Yeop Lee) and MLB (Masahide Kobayashi, Yasuhiko Yabuta). I don't know Lotte's history real well, so the only people that are obviously missing to me are Masaichi Kaneda, who managed them in the mid-1970's (including the 1974 Nippon Series Champions) and (as was the case with the Hawks and Lions) Katsuya Nomura. Nomura only played with the Orions for a single season (1978), but there are players who do appear in the set that only played for Lotte for two years (Harimoto and Franco).

For the most part, I think it's a pretty nice set. My only real complaint is that there are more black-and-white photos in the set than I would expect, given that all the pictures are since 1969. I do like the fact that most of the 2008 players are shown wearing "Turn-Back-The-Clock" Orions uniforms.

Here's some sample cards. That's one of the "History" subset cards (#02, showing the 1974 Nippon Series Champs); the OB cards of Keisuke Senda (#20), Kiyoshi Hatsushiba (#59) and a somewhat svelte Hideki Irabu (#55); and the cards of 2008 Marines Daisuke Hayakawa (#99) and Yasutomo Kubo (#84).

Kenshin Kawakami of the Atlanta Braves

Chunichi Dragons pitcher Kenshin Kawakami signed with the Braves this week. Kawakami has rookie cards in both the 1998 BBM (#385) and Calbee (#091) sets as well as the 1998 Takara Dragons set. He appears in BBM All Star sets from 1998, 1999, 2002, 2004-06 and 2008 and the Nippon Series sets from 1999, 2004, 2006 and 2007. He's also in the 2008 BBM National (Olympic) Team set. He surprisingly is not in any of the Upper Deck sets from 2000 and 2001. (OK, actually that's not quite true. He appears in the "Rising Stars" insert set for the 2000 Ovation set.) (This is not meant to be a comprehensive list, just some of the highlights.)

Here's some cards:





From top to bottom, that's his 1998 BBM rookie card (# 385), 1999 The Television Sports, 2003 Calbee (#102) and 2008 BBM National Team (#JPN05).