Card Of The Week July 17

Takeya Nakamura of the Saitama Seibu Lions had a pretty good weekend.

Yesterday he came up in the bottom of the ninth in a scoreless game against the Fighters with Sosuke Genda (who had gotten on with an infield hit and been sacrificed to second by Shohei Suzuki).  He hit a shot over the head of Nippon-Ham center fielder Daiki Asama that went all the way to the wall, bring Genda in with the winning run.  Here's video of the key parts of the inning:

Okawari-kun was back for another helping against the Fighters today.  His two run home run in the fifth accounted for all the runs in the Lions' 2-0 victory behind a complete game shutout by Kona Takahashi.  Here's the home run:

Nakamura drove in all three runs that the Lions scored this weekend (with Genda being two of the three runs).  With the holiday this weekend (Marine day is Monday) and the All Star break coming up this week, the series between the two teams is going Saturday to Monday rather than Friday to Sunday so we'll see what he does in tomorrow's game.  His sayonara hit yesterday made him the oldest Lion ever to get one and his two run home run today broke the Fighters' seven game streak of losing by one run, although obviously not in the manner that Nippon-Ham would have liked.

Here's Nakamura's 2008 BBM 1st Version card (#385):

2007 BBM Weekly Baseball Opening Game Promos

I've been saying for a while now that one of the great unknowns of Japanese baseball cards are the cards that were issued with magazines.  While I think I've got a good handle on the ones issued with Sports Card Magazine, I'm constantly finding other cards that I'd never seen before.

Recently I discovered that there were 12 BBM 1st Version promo cards that were issued with Weekly (Shukan) Baseball magazine in conjunction with Opening Day in 2007.  Each card features one player from each team with a different photo than in the regular set.  Essentially they are each photo variants.  The fronts of the Weekly Baseball cards use a different color in their format and have the words "2007 Opening Game Weekly Baseball" on them but otherwise the design is exactly the same.  The backs are almost identical and have the same card number as the original card.  Here's all 12 cards along with the original 1st Version card (original on the left, Weekly Baseball version on the right):

#25

#51

#96

#126

#167

#187

#219

#281

#315

#332

#364

#418

I said that the backs were "almost identical" - at first glance they look exactly the same but a closer look reveals that the text on the bottom is subtly different.  Here's Norichika Aoki's cards as an example - again the original is on the left and the Weekly Baseball on is on the right:

The Weekly Baseball card has the text "昨年" which means "last season" prepended to the text on the bottom of the card - there's another character there as well but I'm not sure what it is.  Looking at all 12 cards - nine of them have those two characters prepended to the text while three do not - Hichori Morimoto, Hirotoshi Kitagawa and Shuichi Murata.

I don't know if BBM did this sort of thing any other year but I'll have to continue to keep my eyes open for it.  UPDATE - looks like they did 24 cards for 2006.  The first twelve were each team's first round draft pick.

ZenMarket Order

I've had a busy couple of days lately.  We had some family in town and I've been running around doing local touristy things.  Today I did a tour of the Herr's Potato Chip factory which was a lot of fun but I was disappointed that they didn't give away baseball cards with their Phillies Ripples unlike some potato chip companies I'm familiar with.  

In the middle of all this I received my latest package of Japanese cards from ZenMarket which was a little frustrating because I didn't have time until this evening to really deal with anything in the box.  I got the latest Topps and Epoch sets and I'll be doing posts for them shortly but I thought I'd start out by posting about some other odds and ends that I picked up.  Usually I'll ask Ryan to pick these kind of items up for me but between finding a couple of things with short fuses and some promotions they were running with both Mercari and Rakuten, it made sense to get these through ZenMarket instead.

I think the first three cards I'm going to show were the coolest of the batch.  These were giveaways by the Marines at three games in mid-May where the WBC trophy was on display at Chiba Marine Stadium and feature the only two members of the Marines to suit up for Samurai Japan for the WBC - Roki Sasaki and manager Masato Yoshii who was the team's pitching coach.  I'm a sucker for national team cards so I really love these:

I've been kind doing kind of slow build of the "Rising Stars" short printed subset from the 2000 Upper Deck Ovation set for a while.  To be completely honest I'd considered giving up a couple of times, especially when Twycchang told me that the Tomohiro Nioka card was kind of rare and would likely run me more than $10.  I came across it for only 600 yen ($4.49) however so I jumped on it:

2000 Upper Deck Ovation #5

Since then Ryan has picked up all but one of the other cards I needed for this subset so I guess it'd be a little silly to give up on it now.

I picked up what appear to be "sample" "Lions Winning Game" cards, one from 2011 and the other from 2012.  Both cards list the Lions first game for each season but not the outcome.  I don't know if these were promo cards or something similar.  I do know that the Nakamura card from 2012 has a holo finish that doesn't necessarily scan well:

Sports Card Magazine #79, published in January of 2010, included ten "bonus" cards for that year's Rookie Edition set.  Each card featured a player who had been drafted for each of the ten previous years (including 2009 which meant the last "bonus" card was for a player who was in the Rookie Edition set - Yusei Kikuchi).  The cards all used the 2010 Rookie Edition design.  I found the Toshiya Sugiuchi card on Rakuten and picked it up.  This is only the fourth of these that I have in hand although Ryan has picked up four more of them for me:

2010 SCM #135/BBM Rookie Edition #116

Card Of The Week July 9

Hall Of Fame pitcher and former Fukuoka Softbank Hawks manager Kimiyasu Kudoh was recently named to be the new manager for Samurai Japan, replacing the recently retired Hideki Kuriyama.  (Actually it's not clear from the linked article that he was named the new manager or named "a candidate" for the managerial job.)  I'm assuming that he'll be the manager for the next World Baseball Classic which is scheduled for the spring of 2026 and also the Premier 12 which is rumored to be happening in November of 2024.  He won five Nippon Series championships in his seven seasons managing the Hawks so hopefully he can continue that success.  Here's a card of him from his pitching days with the Giants - his 2005 BBM Giants card (#G020):

Cartoon Menko From 1962

I've been meaning for a while to do a post about a menko set that I really like - the 1962 Marukami "Cartoon Menko" set (JCM 139).  The twenty cards in this set all featured "player drawings with cartoon-like colors" according to Engel.  The big names in the set are Sadaharu Oh and Shigeo Nagashima but somewhat surprisingly the set doesn't include any of the other big names that you'd expect to find in a set from 1962 like Katsuya Nomura, Masaichi Kaneda or Isao Harimoto.  There's one player - Yukio Ozaki of the Flyers - who has two cards in the set for some reason.  The cards are a little smaller than the typical "tobacco menko" of the era - 1 3/16 inches by 2 7/16 inches as opposed to 1 13/16 inches by 3 inches.

Here are the five cards that I have from this set:

Seiji Shibuya

Motohiro Andoh

Yukio Ozaki

Yukio Ozaki

Kunio Jonouchi

The backs of the cards don't have any biographical information about the player and in fact each card can have any back so the backs with the menko numbers don't uniquely identify the card.  Here's the back of Jonouchi's card:

I looked at the backs using Google Translate and I think they all have trivia questions on them - not baseball trivia but general knowledge.  I think the question on the back of Jonouchi's card is asking where the world's largest telescope is with the answer (as of 1962) being Palomar Mountain Observatory in the United States.

Players Missing Regular Calbee Cards

For years now I've been noticing an odd phenomenon in Calbee's annual baseball card sets - there will be several players each year who appear in one of the subsets but don't have a "regular" player card.  I decided to sit down and figure out how often this happens.  I've got every complete Calbee set since 2012 so it was pretty trivial to figure this out for every set from then to last year - obviously this year's set isn't completely out yet so I can't make any conclusions about it yet.

Some notes on my methodology - there were a couple subsets I didn't take into consideration.  I ignored any subset that didn't primarily include active players (obviously) so I didn't count the "Memorial" subset Calbee did in 2012 featuring reprinted Calbee cards (although about a third of this subset did have active players in it).  For similar reasons I didn't include the "Managers" subsets from the 2015 and 2018 sets (or the two managers who appeared in the 2016 "First Win" subset).  I also didn't consider any of the players in the subsets featuring the previous years' first round draft picks from the 2013, 2017 and 2018 sets (with two exceptions) since typically these players don't have "regular" cards - although a couple of them did in 2018.  (The exceptions are Shohei Ohtani in 2013 since he also appeared in the "All Star" subset and Kotaro Kiyomiya in 2018 because he also appeared in the "Exciting Scene" subset.)  I'm also not including the "Star" insert cards or the checklist cards.  Bear in mind that if I had included any of these subsets, the following counts would have been worse.

What I found was that there were 89 instances of a player appearing in one or more subsets and not having a "regular" card in Calbee's set between 2012 and 2022 which is an average of a little over eight a year.  Here's the full list:

Year	Player	Team	Subsets
2012	Alfredo Figaro	Buffaloes	Opening Day Pitcher
2012	DJ Houlton	Giants	Title Holder
2012	Kenta Maeda	Carp	Title Holder, Opening Day Pitcher, All Star
2012	Norihiro Nakamura	Baystars	All Star
2012	Masahiro Tanaka	Eagles	Title Holder, Opening Day Pitcher
2012	Hideaki Wakui	Lions	Opening Day Pitcher
2012	Kazuki Yoshimi	Dragons	Title Holder, Opening Day Pitcher
2013	Tony Barnette	Swallows	Title Holder
2013	Jun Hirose	Carp	All Star
2013	Hirotoshi Masui	Fighters	Title Holder, All Star
2013	Shohei Ohtani	Fighters	All Star
2014	Ryota Arai	Tigers	Clutch Hitter
2014	John Bowker	Eagles	Clutch Hitter
2014	Itaru Hashimoto	Giants	Clutch Hitter
2014	Anderson Hernandez	Dragons	Clutch Hitter
2014	Kenshin Kawakami	Dragons	Opening Day Pitcher
2014	Mitsuo Yoshikawa	Fighters	Opening Day Pitcher
2015	Tony Barnette	Swallows	Exciting Scene
2015	Ikuhiro Kiyota	Marines	Exciting Scene
2015	Hiroki Kuroda	Carp	Exciting Scene
2015	Tomoya Mori	Lions	Exciting Scene
2015	Masahiro Nishino	Buffaloes	Exciting Scene
2015	Rainel Rosario	Carp	Exciting Scene
2015	Takahiro Suzuki	Giants	Exciting Scene
2015	Hayato Takagi	Giants	Exciting Scene
2015	Masahiro Yamamoto	Dragons	Exciting Scene
2015	Yasuaski Yamasaki	Baystars	Exciting Scene
2016	Kohei Arihara	Fighters	Title Holder, First Win
2016	Miles Mikolas	Giants	Title Holder
2016	Yasuhisa Naruse	Swallows	First Win
2017	Takahiro Arai	Carp	Title Holder
2017	Ayumu Ishikawa	Marines	Title Holder
2017	Kris Johnson	Carp	Title Holder
2017	Katsuya Kakunaka	Marines	Title Holder
2017	Ryosuke Kikuchi	Carp	Title Holder
2017	Brandon Laird	Fighters	Title Holder
2017	Scott Mathieson	Giants	Title Holder
2017	Naoki Miyanishi	Fighters	Title Holder
2017	Takahiro Norimoto	Eagles	Title Holder
2017	Shohei Ohtani	Fighters	Title Holder
2017	Hayato Sakamoto	Giants	Title Holder
2017	Dennis Sarfate	Hawks	Title Holder
2017	Hirokazu Sawamura	Giants	Title Holder
2017	Tomoyuki Sugano	Giants	Title Holder
2017	Hirotoshi Takanashi	Fighters	Title Holder
2017	Shun Takayama	Tigers	Title Holder
2017	Yoshitomo Tsutsugo	Baystars	Title Holder
2017	Tetsuto Yamada	Swallows	Title Holder
2017	Yuki Yanagita	Hawks	Title Holder
2018	Norichika Aoki	Swallows	Exciting Scene
2018	Yudai Fujioka	Marines	Exciting Scene
2018	Kotaro Kiyomiya	Fighters	Exciting Scene
2018	Daisuke Matsuzaka	Dragons	Exciting Scene
2018	Tomoyuki Sugano	Giants	Exciting Scene
2019	Katsuki Azuma	Baystars	Title Holder
2019	Shota Imanaga	Baystars	Starting Pitcher
2019	Shotaro Kasahara	Dragons	Starting Pitcher
2019	Takayuki Kishi	Eagles	Title Holder, Starting Pitcher
2019	Randy Messenger	Tigers	Starting Pitcher
2019	Naoki Miyanishi	Fighters	Title Holder, Exciting Scene
2019	Yasuhiro Ogawa	Swallows	Starting Pitcher
2019	Yudai Ohno	Dragons	Exciting Scene
2019	Daichi Ohsera	Carp	Title Holder, Starting Pitcher
2019	Tomoyuki Sugano	Giants	Title Holder, Starting Pitcher
2019	Shinasuro Tawata	Lions	Title Holder, Starting Pitcher
2019	Naoyuki Uwasawa	Fighters	Starting Pitcher
2019	Tsuyoshi Wada	Hawks	Exciting Scene
2019	Hotaka Yamakawa	Lions	Title Holder, Exciting Scene
2020	Naomichi Donoue	Dragons	First Win
2020	Kensuke Kondoh	Fighters	AVG Leader
2020	Ryoya Kurihara	Hawks	First Win
2020	Tomoya Mori	Lions	AVG Leader
2020	Hayato Sakamoto	Giants	AVG Leader
2020	Seiya Suzuki	Carp	AVG Leader
2020	Yoshinobu Yamamoto	Buffaloes	First Win
2021	Shintaro Fujinami	Tigers	Exciting Scene, Opening Pitcher, Interleague Play
2021	Kosuke Fukudome	Dragons	Interleague Play
2021	Shuta Ishikawa	Hawks	Opening Pitcher
2021	Ryosuke Kikuchi	Carp	Exciting Scene, Interleague Play
2021	Roki Sasaki	Marines	Interleague Play
2021	Hideaki Wakui	Eagles	Exciting Scene, Opening Pitcher, Interleague Play
2021	Wang Po-Jung	Fighters	Interleague Play
2021	Yoshinobu Yamamoto	Buffaloes	Exciting Scene, Opening Pitcher, Interleague Play
2022	Koyo Aoyagi	Tigers	Title Holder
2022	Mizuki Hori	Fighters	Title Holder
2022	Munetaka Murakami	Swallows	Title Holder, OBP Leader
2022	Takashi Ogino	Marines	Title Holder
2022	Kazuma Okamoto	Giants	Title Holder, OBP Leader
2022	Masataka Yoshida	Buffaloes	Title Holder, OBP Leader

The year with the most subset-only players was 2017 with a whopping 19(!).  This is a little artificial, however, as Calbee only issued two series that year due to a potato shortage (remember that Calbee is distributed with potato chips) so it's likely that a number of those players would have had "regular" cards in Series Three if there had been one.  The most in a year when Calbee issued all three Series was 2019 with 14 followed by 2015 with ten.  On the other end of the spectrum, 2016 only had three and 2013 only had four.  

There's a couple things that really stand out to me with this list.  The first is that Tomoyuki Sugano appears on it THREE times, the most of any player.  Sugano did not have a "regular" card in the 2017, 2018 or 2019 sets.  There are eight other players who appear on this list more than once - Tony Barnette, Ryosuke Kikuchi, Naoki Miyanishi, Tomoya Mori, Shohei Ohtani, Hayato Sakamoto, Hideaki Wakui and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.

The second thing is that there's a handful of times when a player appeared in three subsets in a single year.  Now keep in mind that typically Calbee's sets have three subsets - one with each Series (although I'm oversimplifying a bit).  When you realize that Calbee typically does not include multiple cards of a player in the same Series - so if the player appears in that Series' subset he won't have a "regular" card - you might expect this to be more common occurrence but it's some what rare.  It only happened four times in the time period I looked at.  The first was in 2012 with Kenta Maeda appearing in the "Title Holder", "Opening Day Pitcher" and "All Star" subsets.  What's kind of odd is it didn't happen again until 2021 when it happened three times - Shintaro Fujinami, Hideaki Wakui and Yoshinobu Yamamoto were each in the "Exciting Scene", "Opening Pitcher" and "Interleague Play" subsets.

I'm not sure there's an actual problem with Calbee doing this, it's just an odd side effect of the way they do their sets.  And we're likely to see a repeat of 2017 this year if Calbee really does only issue two Series.  But it is kind of interesting to see how it's worked out over the years.

Card Of The Week July 2

All eyes were on Osaka last Tuesday when the Marines took on the Buffaloes with Roki Sasaki facing off against his friend and Samurai Japan teammate Hiroya Miyagi.  Both pitchers did well.  Sasaki went seven innings, giving up one unearned run on five hits and a walk with ten strikeouts.  Miyagi outdueled him, going eight innings and giving up no runs on three hits and a walk with eight strikeouts.  Neither pitcher factored in the decision, however, as the Marines scratched out a run against Yoshihisa Hirano in the top of the ninth to tie the game up before Tomoya Mori led off the bottom of the ninth to untie it and send everyone home:

Here are cards of Miyagi, Sasaki and Mori:

2020 Epoch Buffaloes Rookies & Stars #01

2021 Calbee #IL-02

2023 BBM 1st Version #014