Seung-Hwan Oh of the St Louis Cardinals

Last week the Cardinals signed former Samsung Lions and Hanshin Tigers closer Seung-Hwan Oh to a one year contract.  Oh spent nine years in Korea with Samsung before moving to NPB and the Tigers in 2014.  He had 277 saves in Korea and another 80 in his two years in Japan.

There aren't many known cards of him from Korea.  The only card I know of for him is from the 2010 "KBO game" set:

2010 KBO #AS-004

While he pitched in both the 2006 and 2009 World Baseball Classics, the only card commemorating his stint with the Korean National Team was from the 2009 Konami WBC Heroes set.

2009 Konami WBC Heroes #W09R118

He's had a number of cards in Japan, however.  He appears in both the 1st and 2nd Version sets from BBM for both 2014 and 2015 as well as the Tigers team sets (both the pack based sets and some of the assorted box sets).  He's also in the 2015 Genesis set and the last two "Historic Collection" sets ("Memories of Uniform" and "The Ballpark Stories").  He also has a card in each of the 2014 and 2015 Calbee sets.  As usual this is not a comprehensive list but just some of the highlights.  Here's a handful of his Japanese cards:

2014 BBM 1st Version #392

2014 Calbee #137

2015 BBM 1st Version #195

2016 BBM The Ballpark Stories #020

Card Of The Week January 17

The Meikyukai held a baseball game at Fukuoka Dome* on January 1st.  NPB Reddit tweeted out a link to a video of the ceremonial first pitch of the game - Sadaharu Oh pitching to Shigeo Nagashima (with Atsuya Furuta catching):



*Yeah I know the Dome has a corporate name but I haven't gotten a check yet from the company that owns the naming rights so I see no reason I should call it by that name.

Nagashima suffered a stroke back in 2004 and has pretty much lost use of much of his right side - I don't think I've seen a video or picture of him in the last 12 years where his right hand isn't tucked inside his pocket.  But even one handed he still manages to make contact with a pitch.

Here's a card showing Oh and Nagashima when they faced each other as rival managers in the 2000 Nippon Series:

2002 BBM Giants #G114

New Stuff

Some new sets that have either just been released or are coming out soon.

Let's start with BBM.  They have two sets coming out in the next few weeks.  On January 29th they will be releasing the annual box set for players who retired at the end of the previous season - I end up calling this the "Farewell" set but it's real name translates as something like "Regret At Parting Ball People".  This year's edition contains 40 cards - 39 cards in the base set plus one "special" card that could be an authentic autograph or it could be a facsimile autograph parallel of one of the base set cards.  In early February BBM will release a 25 card box set dedicated to Yoshinobu Takahashi who retired at the end of last season to take the Giants managerial job.  The box will be called "24 Karat" and will contain a 24 card base set (Takahashi's uniform number was 24) and one "special" card which will be a memorabilia card or a parallel card.

On February 16, Sports Graphic Number will release their latest set dedicated to a single player.  This time it's Hiroki Kuroda.  This will be a pack based set with a 45 card base set, an 18 card insert ("rare") set and all sorts of possible special cards - autograph, memorabilia, photograph, die cut parallels, etc.

I was quite surprised to find that Calbee snuck a set out this past weekend.  Typically Calbee's first set each year comes out in March.  But this year they've issued a small (36 card - 3 per team) set entitled "2015 All Stars".  The name is a bit of a misnomer as the players included in the set are not necessarily players who made the All Star teams last summer.  All the cards look like the "Star" cards that are inserts for the standard Calbee sets - there's even a "gold signature" parallel version of the cards.  As usual, Jambalaya has all the cards on line.

I actually got a heads up and some photos from this set from a reader named Michael who's currently on a business trip up in Hokkaido.  He said that the cards are being issued in the traditional manner with chips but only one to a pack rather than the two that Calbee's been doing the past 10 years or so.  Here's the pictures he passed along to me:

Chip bag

Pack of cards on the chip bag

#AS-25

Back of #AS-25

#AS-19 (Gold Signature Parallel)

Back of #AS-19

Thanks to Michael for the pictures and information!

2016 BBM Dragons 80th Anniversary

The Chunichi Dragons are celebrating their 80th Anniversary in 2016 and like the Giants in 2014 and the Tigers last year, BBM has issued a baseball card set to commemorate the milestone.  BBM had previously issued sets for the Dragons 70th Anniversary in 2006 and 75th in 2011 so I didn't really expect anything new from this set when it was announced.

And I wasn't particularly surprised at what I saw once the set came out.  BBM appears to have exerted the least amount of effort in releasing this set.  The base set contains 81 cards - all of either current or former Dragons players.  There are no subsets.  Most of the Dragons stars from the past 50 years or so are included such as Morimichi Takagi, Hiroshi Gondoh, Kenichi Yazawa, Yasushi Tao, Masaru Uno, Kazuyoshi Tatsunami, Takeshi Yamazaki and Hirokazu Ibata.  Notable foreign players include Gene Martin, Ken Macha, Tyrone Woods and Leo Gomez.  There are around 18 or so cards of players who played for the Dragons in 2015 including Masa Yamamoto, Motonobu Takahashi, Kazuhiro Wada, Michihiro Ogasawara, Masahiro Araki and Masahiko Morino.  The bulk of the players in the set debuted with the Dragons in the 1960's or later - only six players represent the years between 1936 and 1959 - Michio Nishizawa, Shigeru Sugishita, Toshio Naka, Toru Mori, Yasuhiko Kawamura and Shinichi Etoh - and only two of those players (Nishizawa and Sugishita) were members of the 1954 Nippon Series Championship team (one of only two in Dragons history).

As you'd expect, there's a great deal of redundancy between this set and the previous two Dragons Anniversary sets.  There are only six retired players (well, retired prior to 2015) who appear in the set who did not appear in the other sets.  The most significant of these players is Senichi Hoshino who was the biggest name left out of the prior sets.  The others were Hiroshi Shintaku, Toshio Tanakura, Tadashi Sugimoto, Kazuyuki Oda and Eddie Gaillard.

The biggest names I see missing are  Hiromitsu Ochiai and Wally Yonamine.  Ochiai is no surprise as he has not appeared on a baseball card in over four years now.  Yonamine managed the Dragons to a pennant in 1974 (their first in 20 years) and was included in both the previous sets but is a no-show here.  Most of the other notable omissions are all pre-1960 players such as Makoto Kozuru, Eiji Bando and Shunichi Amachi (manager of the 1954 Champs).  There's a couple guys (like Ogasawara) that I question why they were included in the set as they played only a short period of time with the Dragons.

Here are some sample cards:

#01

#06

#14

#24

#45

#78

The set also has a 15 card insert set associated with it called "Dragons Heroes" that features a number of Dragons greats - Sugishita, Takagi, Hoshino, Yasunori Ohshima, Yazawa, Takamasa Suzuki, Tao, Uno, Tatsuo Komatsu, Genji Kaku, Yamamoto, Yamasaki, Tatsunami, Kenshin Kawakami, and Tanishige.  I normally wouldn't have gotten these but I was having difficulty locating a set on Yahoo! Japan Auctions and I ended up way overpaying for a set that included this insert set.

#DH07

As a Dragon fan, I really wanted to like this set but I really can't recommend it.  The two previous Dragons Anniversary sets are much better.

All the cards can be seen at Jambalaya (as usual).

2016 BBM The Ballpark Stories

The 2016 edition of BBM's annual "Historic Collection" set was released back at the end of November.  This year's theme is "The Ballpark Stories" and it appears that each card commemorates an event that happened at a ballpark which sounds kind of obvious but bear with me for a minute.  As usual for the "Historic Collection" set the base set contains 144 cards - 72 OB players and 72 active players.  The cards are split evenly by franchise - six OB players and six active players per team (except that the Eagles only have the six active players - their OB players are from Kintetsu).

As I said before, each card commemorates an event that happened at a ballpark.  The particular ballpark in question is listed on the front of the card in the lower left corner.  For the OB players, the ballparks are old ballparks that have been abandoned by NPB teams - Korakuen, Kawasaki and Komazawa Stadiums in Kanto; Osaka, Fujidera and Nishinomiya Stadiums in Kansai; Heiwadai Stadium in Fukuoka and Hiroshima and Nagoya Stadiums.  It looks like the back of each card describes some event that occurred at the ballpark (including the date in most cases) and as far as I can tell, the photo on the front is from that event.  Some of the events included are Shigeo Nagashima's retirement, Sadaharu Oh's 756th home run, Isao Harimoto's 3000th hit, Sachio Kinugasa passing Lou Gehrig's consecutive game streak, no-hitters by Tsuneo Horiuchi, Shinichi Kondoh, Yoshinori Satoh and Naoki Takahashi, several Nippon Series clinchers, Keishi Suzuki's 300th win and many other milestones.  For a change, all the OB players in the set are actually retired - there are no MLB players in the set at all (which makes sense since the only park that was still around when most of the current Japanese MLB players was Hiroshima - although Ichiro played in Fujidera Stadium).

For the active players, the ballparks are all alternate parks to the home parks for the NPB teams such as the ballparks in Matsuyama, Kobe, Niigata and Kobe.  There are 25 of these ballparks represented in all.  Each card shows the player in a game from the 2015 season at one of these alternate parks.  The back of the card appears to describe how the player did in the game (and mentions the date of the game).  Some of games are represented by more than one player - for example there was a game played on April 11 in Kagoshima between the Fighters and Hawks that's covered by three different cards - Tadashi Settsu and Akira Nakamura of the Hawks and Takuya Nakashima of the Fighters.  None of the "events" on these cards are particularly earth shattering as far as I can tell - no records being set or milestones being reached.  The active players in the set include Kenta Maeda, Shohei Ohtani, Takuya Nakamura, Shogo Akiyama, Tetsuto Yamada, Yuki Yanagita and Kazuo Matsui.

I created a spreadsheet of all the cards showing which ballparks and events are in the set (or at least the ones I could figure out).  The alternate ballparks are identified by the name listed on the box score for the game on NPB's website.



Here's some example cards:

#054 Koji Yamamoto in the Carp's Central League clinching game at Korakuen Stadium 10/15/75

#062 Hiromu Matsuoka in the Swallows' Nippon Series clincher at Korakuen Stadium on 10/22/78

#078 Yoshinori Satoh's no-hitter at Fujidera Stadium on 8/26/95

#019 Atsushi Nohmi at Toyama on 6/24/15

#107 Sho Nakata at Asahikawa on 6/24/15

#131 Ernesto Mejia at Kobe on 6/20/15

For the most part I like this set.  My only gripes (and you knew I had to have some) is that since they were not going include the current NPB ballparks, they couldn't include the two oldest ballparks in Japan - Koshien and Jingu.  I also wish they could have somehow included an ariel shot of the ballpark being featured as well - for the most part the pictures don't really convey any sense of the ballpark.

You can see all the cards here at Jambalaya.

The set has two 12 card insert sets associated with it - "Legend Heroes" and "Active Heroes".  The seller I bought the cards from on Yahoo! Japan Auctions included three of the "Active Heroes" cards with my set.  Each of these cards shows the player in action at an alternate ballpark although not necessarily the one he was depicted in on his base set card.  For example this card of Yoshio Itoi shows him at Yamagata (I think) while his base set card shows him in Kyoto:

#AH07

Back of #AH07

Card Of The Week January 10

I saw an Ebay auction a couple weeks back offering a couple 1977 NST cards of "Cleon Jones".  I hadn't remembered that Cleon Jones had played in Japan but I been surprised before to discover someone had played in Japan briefly so I jumped at the auction - doing a "Buy-It-Now" on it and a couple other NST cards of gaijin players.  Once I paid, I did a quick look up and realized that I had remembered correctly - Cleon Jones had never played in Japan.  The cards were for Clarence Jones who had spent eight years in Japan - four with Nankai from 1970-73 and four with Kintetsu from 1974-77.  I have several cards of Jones from recent BBM OB sets (Hawks 70th and 75th Anniversary sets, Kintetsu Memorial, Legendary Foreigners) but I didn't have any from when he was actually playing in Japan, so I didn't mind the mistake that much.

Here are the two cards, showing pictures that I suspect were taken in the same at bat.

1977 NST #223

1977 NST #248

2015 BBM Team Sets

I did something last year that I've never done before - I decided to get all of the pack based team sets that BBM issues for the 12 NPB teams.  I felt that the flagship BBM sets were simply leaving too many players out and I wanted to get cards of as many players as possible.  I also wanted to see how easily and how cheaply it could be done.

BBM streamlined the team sets to some extent in 2015.  In previous years, each team set's base set could have between 81 and 126 cards and the size of the set could vary by team.  For example, in 2014 the Marines set had only 81 cards but the Giants set had 117.  But in 2015, all 12 sets had a base set size of 81 cards.

Each set contained cards of pretty much every player on the team's 70 man roster along with the team's manager.  Most sets also contained at least one card for the team's mascot(s).  Several sets had a team card/checklist as well.  All sets also contained at least two subsets.  Here's a breakdown of the cards in each team set:

Team	Player/Manager Cards	Mascot Cards	Checklist	Subsets
Chiba Lotte Marines	67	4	1	Ageless Wonder (3), Real Steal (3), Foreign Impact (3)
Chunichi Dragons	67	3	1	Award Winner (1), Puzzle (6), Combination (3)
Fukuoka Softbank Hawks	69	0	0	Puzzle (3), Road To Record (3), Award Winner (4), Next Decade (1), 2014 Champs (1)
Hanshin Tigers	68	1	0	Reliable Pitching Staff (5), Dynamite Row (7)
Hiroshima Toyo Carp	69	1	0	Big Comeback (2), Shining Order (9)
Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters	68	3	1	Make History (3), Award Winner (3), Veteran's Comeback (3)
Orix Buffaloes	69	2	0	Dominators (4), High Standard (3), Big Boost (3)
Saitama Seibu Lions	68	1	1	Combination (3), Puzzle (6), Award Winner (2)
Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles	68	3	1	Puzzle (3), Calendar (6)
Tokyo Yakult Swallows	68	3	1	Puzzle (6), Combination (3)
Yokohama DeNA Baystars	65	3	1	Pitch, Hit & Run? (3), Puzzle (6), Combination (3)
Yomiuri Giants	70	1	0	Master Skill (3), Star-To-Be (7)

There's a number of significant players whose only BBM cards this year were in the team sets rather than the flagship sets - Nobuhiko Matsunaka, Kenshin Kawakami, Kei Igawa, Fumiya Nishiguchi and Takashi Saitoh all come to mind.  Here's an example card from each set showing a player who did not make the 1st Version set this year (and I think Mima is the only one to make the 2nd Version set):

2015 BBM Marines #M51

2015 BBM Dragons #D02

2015 BBM Hawks #H46

@015 BBM Tigers #T67

2015 BBM Carp #C03

2015 BBM Fighters #F08

2015 BBM Buffaloes #Bs15

2015 BBM Lions #L57

2015 BBM Eagles #E14

2015 BBM Swallows #S68

2015 BBM Baystars #DB37

2015 BBM Giants #G56

  As you can see, each team set had its own card design.  Some of them are a little busier than I like in a card design but I don't think any of them are out and out ugly.

The sets were released over a five month period between March and July.  An odd thing happened due to the schedule of the team set released - in June, the Fighters and Giants made a trade with Kenji Yano and Hideki Sunaga going to the Fighters for Toshiyuki Yanuki and Atsushi Kita.  Because the Fighters set had already been released but the Giants set was released at least a month later, Yano and Sunaga don't appear in either set but Yanuki and Kita appear in both.

2015 BBM Fighters #F62 and Giants #G69

2015 BBM Fighters #F18 and Giants #G21

I was hoping to be able to pick up the sets without spending a lot of money but that presented some obstacles.  I was planning on being able to buy multiple teams from the same sellers on Yahoo! Japan Auctions and try to minimize the proxy bidding fees from kuboTEN or JAUCE but I didn't see many opportunities for that.  I ended up only getting the Carp and Eagles sets using a proxy bidder.  Ryan was gracious enough (as always) to pick up sets for me both in stores and off YJA and he was able to find the remaining 10 sets.  I hoped to keep the expenses down to roughly 1000 yen per set.  Ryan found some great deals for me that made it almost seem possible but the last two sets (the Baystars and Giants) pretty much blew the budget - the Baystars set was around 1500 yen and the Giants set was 2000 yen.  Total cost of all 12 sets is difficult to calculate as isolating the costs from the other sets Ryan found for me is close to impossible but I figure including the shipping to the US, the total amount I spent on the 12 sets was around $200.

Would I recommend doing this?  If you want cards of almost everyone on a 70 man roster in Japan, this is the best (only) way to do it - unless you live near a card shop where you can pick up just the singles for the players who weren't in the flagship sets.  For most people, I would probably recommend only buying the team set for their favorite team(s).

Will I do this again?  Not sure yet.  I think it will depend on how cheaply I can do it and how willing Ryan is to continue to find stuff for me.  So far I have not exhausted Ryan's patience (and I am not viewing that as a challenge) so I will likely do this again.