2021 Calbee Series Two

Calbee's Series Two set was released a couple weeks back.  As the name implies, this is Calbee's second of three expected sets this year.  Like Series One which came out back in March, the base set contains 88 cards - 72 "regular" cards for the players, 12 "Opening Pitcher" cards and four checklist cards.

The 72 player cards break down to six per team.  Since this is effectively only a third of the complete Calbee set, all the stars are not included in this set.  It does include a number of big names, however, including Munetaka Murakami, Yudai Ohno, Yuki Yanagita, Kodai Senga, Sho Nakata, Hiroya Miyagi, Masataka Yoshida, Takeya Nakamura, Yuki Matsui and Kazuma Okamoto.  There are three rookies in the set - Teruaki Sato, Shugo Maki and Takahisa Hayakawa (technically Miyagi's a rookie but I mean 2020 draft picks).  I was surprised to discover there were two players in the set that did not appear in either BBM's 1st Version or Epoch's NPB sets - Yuma Tongu of the Buffaloes and Kazuto Taguchi of the Swallows.

I have my usual gripes (as does Sean) about the photo selection of the player cards - too many shots of "batters batting, pitchers pitching and catchers catching" - although there are a few good variations on those themes.  There are five player cards that use a horizontal format which is five more than Series One had.  Here's some example cards:

#135

#108

#083

#123

#076

#127

The twelve "Opening Pitcher" cards feature the Opening Day starting pitchers for each of the 12 NPB teams.  This includes Tomoyuki Sugano, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Kona Takahashi, Hideaki Wakui and Daichi Ohsera along with Shintaro Fujinami:

#OP-08

The four checklist cards feature highlights from the early part of the 2021 season.  There's a card showing Kona Takahashi and Tomoya Mori of the Lions doing the post-game "hero interview" after Seibu's Opening Day win, Dayan Viceido of the Dragons hitting a two run home run in the Dragons' Opening Day victory, Takyuki Kishi of the Eagles waving to the crowd after pitching a shutout against the Marines on March 30th and Baystars manager Daisuke Miura celebrating after his first managerial win on April 4th.  Here's the card of Takahashi and Mori:

#C-05

As always you can see the complete set along with the "Star" insert cards and the limited "Run Leaders" box set available from Calbee's Amazon.co.jp store over at Jambalaya.

2021 Epoch NPB set

NPB, Epoch's annual "flagship" set, was released back on May 29th.  This is the fourth edition of the set and it's very similar to the earlier ones.

This set seems to always present problems for me and this year was no different.  I had to bid on six separate auctions for the set before I finally won one.  I got outbid by Ryan on one of the auctions although ultimately it worked out better for me - he paid more than 5000 yen for his set while the one I got was only 2500 yen!  

The base set for this year's set supposedly contains 444 cards - same as last year - but there's a bit of a caveat on that.  There's 432 cards of active players (which works out to 36 cards per team) and 12 cards of OB players (1 for each team).  The twist this year is that the OB player cards (which includes Ichiro) are short printed.  Given the prices they've been pulling on Yahoo! Japan Auctions, they are apparently pretty rare.  I saw bidding on one of the Ichiro cards at 2500 yen at one point.  The set I got (obviously) did not include these and it appears from what I can tell that the set is considered complete with just the 432 active player cards.

Those 36 cards per team include cards for the manager and for all the team's "rookies" - which in this case means all the players taken in the regular (non-ikusei) portion of last fall's draft.  Since this set is 33% larger than the 324 "regular" cards in BBM's 1st Version set, there's a large number of player who have cards in this set but not 1st Version - 121 to be exact.  This includes guys like Chihiro Kaneko, Akira Neo, Yuki Saitoh, Kenshi Sugiya and Daikan Yoh.  This also includes a bunch of foreign players like Brandon Laird, Joe Gunkel, Jefry Marte, Ernesto Mejia, Rubby De La Rosa and CC Mercedes although it does not include any of the players who were new to NPB that didn't make it to Japan until after mid-February (Brandon Dixon of the Eagles, Justin Smoak of the Giants, etc).  There were 13 players who appeared in 1st Version who aren't in this set including foreign players Ariel Martinez, Raidel Martinez, Robert Suarez, Kevin Cron and Drew Verhagen along with Yoshihisa Hirano, who returned to Japan from a couple years in MLB.

I like the look of these cards.  I'm a fan of borderless designs and this is the second year in a row that Epoch has used one for this set.  I have my usual gripe about the lack of variety in the photos - way too many "batters batting, pitchers pitching, catchers catching" poses - although it seems they're a little better in this edition than in previous ones.  There are a handful of cards with the player (or manager) standing in front of a white background which is kind of odd.  I'm guessing that for whatever reason they couldn't get a photo of the player on the field.  Here's some sample cards:

#365

#243

#280

#020

#315

#066

#163

#181

#431

The back of the cards looks pretty similar to the previous sets.  There's a headshot of the player that's cropped from the photo on the front of the card along with the player's stats from their last three years in NPB, even if those three years are 2011-13 as in the case with Masahiro Tanaka:

#115

If you'd like to see the rest of the cards from the set along with some of the parallels and inserts (but not the short printed OB cards), Jambalaya (as usual) has them all on-line here.

Card Of The Week July 11

I went to the Orioles-White Sox game Friday night in Baltimore, my first in-person MLB game since September of 2019.  The Orioles scored first on a solo home run from Ramon Urias in the second but the White Sox tied it in the third, went ahead in the fifth and then completely buried the O's.  The Sox scored four in the sixth, three in the seventh and three more in the ninth to make it a 12-1 drubbing of the Birds.  The Orioles brought in second baseman Pat Valaika to get the last out in the ninth - he may have been their most effective pitcher that evening.

The starting DH for the White Sox that evening was Gavin Sheets.  I didn't realize until they put something up on the scoreboard that he is the son of former Orioles player Larry Sheets.  Larry played in parts of six seasons for the O's from 1984 to 1989.  His best season was 1987 when he hit .316 with 31 home runs and 94 RBIs.  He still lives in the Baltimore area - he runs a youth sports facility in Westminster and is head baseball coach at the Gilman School in Roland Park - and was at the game Friday to see his son hit a solo home run.

Larry Sheets spent 1992 in Japan playing for the Yokohama Taiyo Whales.  He had a very good season, hitting .308 with 26 home runs and a Central League leading 100 RBIs.  He made both the All Star team and the Best 9 team.  He and the team could not come to an agreement for 1993 though and he return to the US to play a final season in the Milwaukee and Seattle organizations.

As far as I can tell, Sheets had five Japanese cards in 1992 - #278 in BBM's regular set, #A27 in their All Star set, #91 and #192 in Calbee's set and #26 in Takara's Whales set.  He's never appeared in any OB sets after 1992.  Despite leading the league in RBIs he does not appear in the "Leaders" subset in the 1993 BBM set - I need to a post on this sometime but it was kind of hit or miss about whether or not a player who was no longer in NPB would appear in BBM's "Leaders" subset.  For example, Sheets' former teammate on the Orioles Jim Traber led the Pacific League in RBIs in 1991 but didn't return to the Kintetsu Buffaloes for the 1992 season.  He appears in the "Leaders" subset of the 1992 BBM set though.  However, Boomer Wells led the PL in RBIs in 1992 in his final year in Japan but does not appear in the 1993 "Leaders" subset.

Here are Sheets' BBM cards from 1992.  The cards feature photos that look like they were taken around the same time:

1992 BBM #278

1992 BBM All Stars # A27

RIP Yasunori Ohshima

Sad news broke earlier this week - longtime Chunichi Dragons and Nippon-Ham Fighters player Yasunori Ohshima passed away on June 30th after a four year battle with colon cancer.  Oshima was the Dragons' third round pick in the 1968 draft out of Nakatsu Technical High School in his hometown of Nakatsu, Oita prefecture.  He was originally a pitcher but the Dragons converted him to a fielder during his first season with the team.  He made his ichi-gun debut in 1971 and was pretty much up to stay starting in the following season.  He spent most of the next few years in a backup and pinch hitter role - he set the record for most pinch hit home runs in a season with seven in 1976 - before finally establishing himself as the Dragons starting third baseman in 1977.  He had arguably his best season in 1979, hitting .317 with 36 home runs and 103 RBIs and leading the Central League with 159 hits in 130 games.  He hit 36 home runs again in 1983 which led the league that year.  He made the All Star team four times during his time with the Dragons - 1977, 1979, 1983 and 1984 - and played in two Nippon Series - 1974 and 1982.

He was traded to the Nippon-Ham Fighters after the 1987 season and was a regular with them for a few years before moving back into a backup and pinch hitter role.  He joined the Meikyukai in 1990 when he got his 2000th career hit.  He retired after the 1994 season and spent a few years as a baseball commentator on NHK before becoming manager of the Fighters for the 2000 season.  He lead the team to a third place finish that season but they dropped to last place for 2001 and only reached fifth in 2002.  He was let go after the 2002 season and replaced with Trey Hillman.  Ohshima's last stint in uniform was as the batting coach for the 2006 Japanese WBC team.

The earliest known cards of Ohshima are from the 1974-75 Calbee set and he appeared fairly consistently in Calbee sets after that throughout the rest of his career.  He also showed up often in Yamakatsu's sets from1976-80 and Takara sets starting in 1979.  He also had a card in each of BBM's first four flagship sets.  He's appeared fairly regularly in various OB sets from both BBM and Epoch over the last 15 years as well.  Here's a handful of his cards:

1977 Calbee "Grey Back" #170

1978 Yamakatsu JY6

1980 Calbee "Large" #14

1989 Lotte #26

1994 BBM #384

2001 Upper Deck #141

Card Of The Week July 4

70 years ago today the first All Star game in NPB history took place at Koshien Stadium in Nishinomiya.  The Central League defeated the Pacific League 2-1 in a game that took less than two hours to play.  The two teams played two additional games in Korakuen Stadium in Tokyo a few days later with the Central League winning Game Two 4-2 (in which Michio Nishizawa of the Dragons hit the first home run in NPB All Star history) and the Pacific League salvaging a 4-3 win in Game Three.

BBM commemorated the 50th Anniversary of the first All Star games with two cards in the 2001 edition of the All Star boxed set they published between 1991 and 2012.  The cards showed group photos for each team with #A73 showing the Central League team and #A74 showing the Pacific League team along with a list of all the players.

Here's each card and a translation of the player lists (bold indicates a Hall Of Fame member):

2001 BBM All Stars #A73

Front row from left to right - Shoji Arakawa (Robins), Noburo Aota (Giants), Nobuo Oshima (Robins), Hideo Fujimoto (Giants), Fumio Fujimura (Tigers), Shigeru Chiba (Giants), Michinori Tsubouchi (Dragons), Saburo Hirai (Giants), Takeo Fujimura (Tigers), Jiro Kanayama (Robins), Yoshiyuki Iwamoto (Robins), Tokumitsu (Tokuzo) Harada (Dragons)

Back row from left to right - Shigeru Sugishita (Dragons), Akira Noguchi (Dragons), Makoto Kozuru (Robins), Michio Nishizawa (Dragons), Manager Shunichi Amachi (Dragons), Coach Kenjiro Matsuki (Tigers), Coach Shigeru Mizuhara (Giants), Tetsuharu Kawakami (Giants), Hiroshi Nakao (Giants), Tsuneo Mitomi (Dragons),  Masaichi Kaneda (Swallows), Hiroshi Takano (Whales), Choei Shirasaka (Tigers), Ryohei Hasegawa (Carp), Takehiko Bessho (Giants), Shigeru Tokuami (Tigers)

2001 BBM All Stars #A74

Front row from left to right - Hirokuni Kataoka (Orions), Kazuo Kageyama (Hawks), Takeshi Nomura (Orions), Kazuto Yamamoto (Tsuruoka) (Hawks), Tokuji Kawasaki (Lions), Kaoru Bettoh (Orions), Keizo Tsutsui (Hawks), Shosei Go (Orions), Heishichi Sato (Orions), Takeshi Doigaki (Orions), Chusuke Kizuka (Hawks), Hiroshi Ohshita (Flyers),  Shitsusho Takesue (Lions)

Back row from left to right - Junzo Sekine (Pearls), Shoshichi Itoh (Orions), Giichi Hayashi (Stars), Haruyasu Etoh (Hawks), Coach Osamu Mihara (Lions), Manager Yoshio Yuasa (Orions), Coach Shinji Hamazaki (Braves), Yasuo Yonekawa (Flyers),  Atsushi Aramaki (Orions), Junji Nakatani (Braves), Tokuji Iida (Hawks), Shigeya Iijima (Stars), Yoshio Hamada, (Flyers), Katsuki Tokura (Braves), Susumu Yuki (Hawks)

Mail Day From Steve Plus One

I've been doing some somewhat convoluted trades with a collector named Steve for about a year now.  I say "convoluted" because generally he's not asking me for something I have in hand - he wants something he's seen in an auction in Japan and I ask Ryan to pick it up for me.  Unfortunately this means Steve has to wait for me to get my latest shipment of stuff from Ryan before I can forward his cards to him.  Fortunately for me, Steve has been generous enough to send me my stuff without waiting for the cards from Ryan.  I got a package from him the other day with my part of our latest trade.

2017 BBM 1st Version "Rookie Reprints" #R04

The key card for this trade was this card of Takeya Nakamura.  BBM did an 12 card insert set of "Rookie Reprints" with the 2017 1st Version set and this reprint of Nakamura's 2002 1st Version card was included.  Steve had seen that Nakamura was one of my favorite current players (and probably the one player I'd consider doing a PC for) and offered me the card.

1988 IFT JCM 19 (Kazuyoshi Tatsunami)

1990 Lotte #80

Steve also threw in these two cards - an IFT JCM 19 card of Kazuyoshi Tatsunami from 1988 and the 1990 Lotte card of Tatsunori Hara.  While I had some round menko cards that IFT did in 1988, I didn't have any of the rectangular ones so I was quite happy to get this.

He also sent me three KBO guidebooks from 2000, 2001 and 2003.  These turned out to be really interesting.  They're in English and were put together by Thomas St. John, a journalist who's been in Korea the better part of the last 30 years (I think - I'm not positive he's still overseas).  St. John's been involved with both the KBO and Korean baseball cards in the past so it was not a surprise that he was behind these guides as well.  The guides are kind of a combination of the NPB guidebooks the late Wayne Graczyk used to publish and the old Sporting News guidebooks for MLB.  They're all relatively thin - the 2000 edition has 40 pages, the 2001 edition has 48 and the 2003 edition has 64.  Each guide has a preview of each team for the season along the roster and portraits of the team's foreign players.  They also have the season's schedule, a guide to getting to all the ballparks, and a list of all KBO MVPs, Rookies Of The Year, Korea Series champions and foreign players.  The 2003 guide also has a couple articles - a profile of Shim Jong-soo of Hyundai and a review of the Samsung Lions' first championship in 2002.  Here are the covers of each book along with a couple pages from them:

The last page of each guide has a blurb about Thomas St. John.  Here's the one from the 2000 guide:

I find the idea of 300,000 Korean baseball cards intriguing.  St. John has told me in the past he's working on a Gary Engel-style checklist and price guide for Korean baseball cards but I have not heard anything about how it's going.

So thanks for the cards and the guidebooks, Steve!  I'll be sending you your stuff just as soon as Ryan ships me my next package!

Steve's package was not the only one I received that day.  I had picked up a lot of cards from the 2020 Calbee Samurai Japan set on Ebay because it included a couple of the signature parallels.  I had actually thought there were four signature parallels in the lot but it turned out there were only two - Hayato Sakamoto and Tsubasa Aizawa (I want to stress that this was a mistake on my part, not the seller.  I didn't pay close enough attention to realize the cards appeared in two separate photos):

#SJ-06 (Sakamoto)

#SJ-02 (Aizawa)

JWBL Players Move On

The Japan Women's Baseball League (JWBL) suspended operations after last season and I'm under the impression that their chances of resuming business as usual are pretty low.  This isn't a pandemic-related issue either - according to their Japanese Wikipedia page about half of the players in the league (36 out of 71) announced they wouldn't be returning at the end of the 2019 season.  They picked up eight new players and fielded their usual three teams in 2020 (with the players from Reia, the development team, also playing on the other three teams).   They were able to play a coronavirus-delayed season last year but at the end of it 26 of the 43 players quit on them, leaving them unable to continue this year.  I think the issue causing the players to leave had to do with how "professional" the league treated them (or rather didn't treat them) - they wanted to be paid during the offseason as well as during the season.  There also seems to be some issues with the players feeling that the league was trying to market them more as "Idols" rather than baseball players.  The league also appears to have been losing money ever since it first started in 2010.  But I may be wrong about this - I'm getting most of this from the Google translations of articles in the Asahi Shimbun and J-Cast.  But the key thing is that league lost most of its players since the end of the 2019 season.

Where have they gone?  It looks like many of the players who wanted to continue playing have gone to play for various club teams.  However, two NPB teams, the Saitama Seibu Lions and the Hanshin Tigers, have established/sponsored women's teams and both teams have a number of former JWBL players on their rosters. 

I want to stress that both teams are essentially run as club teams by the ball clubs and are not professional teams.  The teams play in women's club leagues in the Kanto (for the Lions) and Kansai (for the Tigers) regions.

The Lions established their team in 2020.  The team is managed by former Lions and Fighters pitcher Hiroshi Shintani and the coaching staff includes two other male former players - Masahiro Koda and Takeshi Nonogaki.  The third member of the coaching staff is former JWBL player Saho Taguchi.

2018 Epoch JWBL #29

As far as I can tell, four of the players on the Lions' roster played in the JWBL (or at least played in the JWBL in one of the years I have baseball cards from):

2015 AIAIO JWBL #A15-02-01

2018 Epoch JWBL #32

2015 AIAIO JWBL #D15-18-01

2018 Epoch JWBL #AG25

Additionally Ayako Rokkaku, who's been a staple on the Women's Samurai Japan team over the past ten years but who never played in the JWBL.  She did appear in one of BBM's "Shining Venus" sets, however, so I have a baseball card of her also:

2017 BBM Shining Venus #02

The Tigers team was not established until earlier this season but seems to have garnered more attention - I knew about them when they started but I didn't know about the Lions team until I saw a tweet Jason Coskey retweeted a few weeks ago,  The team is managed by former Tigers player Yuya Nohara and it doesn't appear to have a coaching staff.  Half of the team's 18 player roster are former JWBL players:

2018 Epoch JWBL #51

2016 Epoch JWBL #51

2015 AIAIO JWBL #A15-01-01

2018 Epoch JWBL #26

2018 BBM Shining Venus #01

2018 Epoch JWBL #53

2015 AIAIO JWBL #R15-48-01

2018 Epoch JWBL #71

2016 Epoch JWBL #12

"Nagisa" is Nagisa Handa.  Minami Takatsuka went by just "Minami" for a couple years in the JWBL but has returned to using her full name again.

I'm hoping to see baseball cards for these teams but I haven't found anything yet.

I'll be curious to see how many of these players end up on the Samurai Japan team for the 2021 Women's Baseball World Cup which is supposed to be played in Mexico this fall.  Besides Rokkaku, Ayaka Deguchi, Iori Miura, Ayami Sato and Asaka Tsuru all played on previous versions of the team.  Sato has won the MVP award for the World Cup in 2014, 2016 and 2018.