Wednesday, March 27, 2024

This Is Some Bullsh*t

Calbee's checklist for this year's Series One went live yesterday and to say that I'm disappointed with it would be an understatement.  There are only 60 "regular" player cards (five per team) in the set again so the decrease in set size from last year is apparently permanent.  There are 18 "Title Holder" cards featuring award winners and league leaders from last year but only if the players were still in Japan - so no Yoshinobu Yamamoto (PL Wins, ERA, Strikeout leader plus MVP), Yuki Matsui (PL Save leader) or Shota Imanaga (CL Strikeout leader).  The weird thing is there are six checklist cards instead of the usual four which is the most ominous thing about the checklist.  Calbee "normally" has twelve checklists cards across all three Series each year - four per Series.  Each NPB team gets featured on a checklist card.  If Series One has six checklist cards, I think it's a clear indication that they're only planning on doing two Series this year instead of the "traditional" three.  I hope I'm wrong, but I suspect I'm not.

I have recently begun watching the show "Resident Alien" and I'm really enjoying it.  There's a phrase that the main character constantly uses that I feel is very appropriate for this situation:

via GIPHY

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Card Of The Week March 24

I finished watching the "Full Count" TV series on Hulu this past week.  "Full Count" was a 10-part Korean produced documentary on the 2022 KBO season.  It was an interesting show and I learned a lot about the teams and players in KBO.  

One thing that was both good and bad about the series is they didn't take any time to provide any context about anything.  For example, they showed a scene early in the series where someone says something to Lee Jung-hoo about his father but they never explained who his father was or why Lee's nickname was "Grandson Of The Wind".  So sometimes you're watching and you're like, "wait, should I know who this guy is?" or "what did that mean?"  It didn't interfere with me enjoying the show though.

I was amused about how the show ended.  The last couple minutes dealt with some of the post-season changes that happened within a week or so of SSG winning the 2022 Korean Series.  The final image was of introduction of the new manager of the Doosan Bears:

I'm pretty sure that Lee's name was never mentioned during the series so if you didn't know anything about Korean baseball, you might be scratching your head at why the show ended with him taking over Doosan.  Lee, of course, is probably the biggest name in KBO history.  He was a superstar with the Samsung Lions as well as an NBP start in his eight seasons with the Marines, Giants and Buffaloes.  Hit hit a combined 646 home runs between the two leagues and holds the single season KBO record for home runs with 56 in 2003.  It would be a little like having a TV series on the 1937 MLB season and finishing it up by announcing that Babe Ruth was going to coach for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1938.  Even though you might have never heard Ruth's name during the TV series, the assumption would be that you still knew who he was.

Here's a card of Lee from his time with the Chiba Lotte Marines.  It was given away with Sports Card Magazine #45 in May of 2004:

2004 SCM #37

Saturday, March 23, 2024

Japanese National Team Sets For Major Tournaments

I mentioned the other day that every one of the members of the 2023 WBC Samurai Japan squad had at least one baseball card in a WBC set.  I started wondering how often that had actually happened before.  I realized it had only happened once before - all the members of the 2009 team appeared in Konami's Baseball Heroes WBC set.  Realizing that the reason all the members of the 2023 team had cards was because there was a team set issued in Japan which was also why all the 2009 team members had cards made me get curious about Japanese issued cards for the other WBCs as well as Japanese issued cards for the other major international tournaments - the Olympics and the Premier 12.  I thought I would try to summarize all this information in this post although it's going to cover a lot of the same round as this post from four years ago.

The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics were the first Olympics to include baseball although it was a demonstration sport until the 1992 Barcelona games.  Unlike in the US, however, no baseball cards were ever issued for the amateurs who played for Japan in any of the Olympics.  The first Olympics that allowed professionals to play baseball were the 2000 Sydney Olympics.  These were also the first Olympics that there were Japanese baseball cards for so we'll start there.

Before we do though, I want to go over what I think is the history of the licensing for cards of the National Team in Japan.  This is basically based just on tracking who released which set when.  It looks like Upper Deck had the initial license in 2000, followed by Calbee in early 2001.  BBM took it over in 2002 (with their first set being the team set for the 2001 IBAF Baseball World Cup) and held it through 2008.  Konami took over in 2009 and had it until 2013/2014.  Calbee again had it from 2015 until 2020 or so.  Topps picked it up at some point after that although I'm not sure when.  Topps' first Japanese National Team products were the Topps Now Samurai Japan cards and team set for the Australian friendlies in November of 2022.  As of this writing, Topps is still the license holder - they have Topps Now Samurai Japan cards up for sale at this very moment for the team that played two games against Team Europe earlier this month.  (I will confess to being completely confused as to why BBM was able to include Samurai Japan cards in last fall's Infinity set.)

2000 Upper Deck Sydney Olympic Games Japanese Team Cards #221

2001 Calbee #J-01

Tournament: 2000 Sydney Olympics
Medal: None
Cards: 2000 Upper Deck Sydney Olympic Games Japanese National Team Cards, 2001 Calbee
Missing Players:  Shinnosuke Abe, Jun Hirose, Masanori Ishikawa, Akichika Yamada, Yuji Yoshimi
NotesThe Japanese baseball team for the Sydney games was a hybrid pro-am roster with eight professional players, eleven corporate league players and five collegiate players.  The 2000 Upper Deck Sydney Olympic Games Japanese National Team Cards set was a 264 card set that featured Japanese Olympic athletes from a number of different sports.  It included cards of 19 of the 24 players on the baseball team - only the collegiate players were excluded.  The following year, Calbee included an eight card subset showing all eight professional players in their National Team uniforms.  I think the Upper Deck cards were "officially" Olympic cards (they have the logo of the games on them) while the Calbee cards were not.

Tournament:  2004 Athens Olympics
Medal: Bronze
Cards: None
Missing Players: All of them
Notes:  It is somewhat baffling to me that there was no card set for the 2004 Olympic team.  It was the first time Japan sent an all-professional baseball team to the Olympics and the team they sent was absolutely stacked.  The pitching staff included Koji Uehara, Hiroki Kuroda, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Tsuyoshi Wada and Hisashi Iwakuma while the line up featured Michihiro Ogasawara, Norihiro Nakamura, Yoshinobu Takahashi, Kenji Johjima, Kosuke Fukudome and Kazuhiro Wada.  It is especially baffling considering that BBM did a team set for team from the 2003 Asian Baseball Championship that was a qualifier for the 2004 Games and included insert cards of that team in the 2004 1st Version set.  The team dominated all but one opponent at the Games and it was that one opponent that caused them to end up with the Bronze Medal.  The Australians were the only team to beat them in pool play and Chris Oxspring out-dueled Matsuzaka in the semi-final game.

Tournament: 2006 World Baseball Classic
Medal: Gold
Cards: None
Missing Players: All of them
Notes:  This is a little misleading in that while there were no Japanese cards issued for the 2006 WBC, there were many US based cards issued, including 56 cards that featured the manager (Sadaharu Oh) and sixteen players from the Japanese team.  

2008 BBM Japan National Team #JPN12

Tournament: 2008 Beijing Olympics
Medal: None
Cards: 2008 BBM Japan National Team Set
Missing Players: None
Notes:  I used to think that BBM hadn't done a set for the 2004 Olympic baseball team because their results were so disappointing.  If that was indeed the case, there's no way they'd have done a set for the 2008 team.  While the team was again pretty well stacked, they went a mediocre 4-3 in pool play, just barely qualifying for the medal round.  They then lost both the semi-final game against South Korea and the Bronze Medal game against the US to come away with no medal for the second time in three Olympics with professional baseball players.  I do not believe that the set was "officially" an Olympic set as there's no logo or acknowledgement of the team being from the Olympics on them.

2009 Konami Baseball Heroes WBC #W09R089

Tournament: 2009 World Baseball Classic
Medal: Gold
Cards: 2009 Konami Baseball Heroes WBC
Missing Players: None
Notes:  Konami produced the gold standard for a WBC set in 2009.  The Baseball Heroes WBC set contained 253 cards of 253 individual players representing all sixteen teams from the tournament.  All the players on the roster for the four teams that made the final round - Japan, South Korea, the US and Venezuela - are included in the set (ok, the roster was the roster for the final round so Brian Roberts is in the set but Dustin Pedroia is not since Roberts replaced Pedroia on the US roster for the final round).  Each of the other twelve teams have twelve cards in the set with the exception of Panama which only has eight.  There's two twelve card inserts sets - one has the All Tournament Team while the other has three extra cards for players from the four final round teams.  The set is an "official" WBC card set and features the tournament's logo.

2013 Konami Samurai Japan #B13SJ004

Tournament: 2013 World Baseball Classic
Medal: Bronze
Cards: 2013 Konami Samurai Japan
Missing Players: Many players
Notes:  The 2009 Konami WBC cards are somewhat difficult to come by but they can be found.  In contrast, the 2013 Konami Samurai Japan cards are incredibly scarce.  I didn't even discover they existed until 2022.  There's only 11 cards featuring a single player from each NPB team (the 2013 Japanese WBC team had no players from the Baystars).  I've only been able to get two of them so far.  The cards are not "official" WBC cards - there's no logo on the cards themselves and I think the sleeve patches have been removed from the photos.

2016 Calbee Samurai Japan #SJ-07

Tournament: 2015 Premier 12
Medal: Bronze
Cards: 2016 Calbee Samurai Japan
Missing Players: Kenta Maeda
Notes:  Calbee issued four Samurai Japan sets in the five years between 2016 and 2020.  Each set was issued in the fall, usually in November.  What was odd about the sets is that they covered the players who had played for Samurai Japan from July of the previous year until June of the year of issue.  So for example, the 2016 set featured players who had played for the team from July of 2015 through June of 2016.  Of course, in reality that meant the players who suited up for the team in any tournaments or friendlies being played in either November or March of each year.  Doing it like this produced two issues.  The first is that the players in the set are not necessarily the players on the roster for a tournament - which is probably one reason why Calbee never associated the sets with a particular tournament.  The second and probably bigger issue has to do with how (I think) Calbee's NPB license works - they can make baseball cards of any player on an NPB roster the same season they are issuing the cards.  So if a player like, say, Kenta Maeda, played in the Premier 12 in November of 2015 and then spent 2016 in MLB, Calbee would not be allowed to issue a card of him in a 2016 set.  The upshot of all this is that the 2016 Calbee Samurai Japan set is not specifically a set for the 2015 Premier 12 team as it also contains cards for players who played in friendly games against Taiwan in March of 2016 and does not include a card of Kenta Maeda.  The set is also not "official" as there's nothing to tie it to the Premier 12.

2017 Calbee Samurai Japan #SJ-29

Tournament: 2017 World Baseball Classic
Medal: Bronze
Cards: 2017 Calbee Samurai Japan
Missing Players: Norichika Aoki, Ginjiro Sumitani
NotesThe 2017 Calbee Samurai Japan set covered the players from the 2017 World Baseball Classic along with players from the friendly matches against Mexico and the Netherlands in November of 2016 (which allowed it to have Shohei Ohtani who did not play in the 2017 Classic).  Because he spent 2017 in MLB (and the set was not an "official" WBC set), Calbee was unable to include Norichika Aoki in the set.  I've been somewhat at a loss to understand why Ginjiro Sumitani, who was a late addition to the WBC squad to replace the injured Motohiro Shima, was not in the set though.

2020 Calbee Samurai Japan #SJ-27 (Seiya Suzuki)

Tournament: 2019 Premier 12
Medal: Gold
Cards: 2020 Calbee Samurai Japan
Missing Players: Shun Yamaguchi, Yoshihiro Maru
NotesThe 2020 Calbee Samurai Japan set was the only one of Calbee's Samurai Japan sets to only have players from one event and that was due to the pandemic.  While there were supposed to be friendly matches against some other country (I think it was Taiwan) in March of 2020, they were cancelled as COVID lockdowns began.  Despite this, the set was still not an "official" Premier 12 set.  Shun Yamaguchi spent the Coronavirus shortened season in MLB in 2020 and so was not able to be included in the card set.  Like Sumitani in 2017, Yoshihiro Maru was a late addition to the roster (he replaced the injured Shogo Akiyama) and was somewhat inexplicably left out of the set.

Tournament: 2020 Tokyo Olympics
Medal: Gold
Cards: None
Missing Players: All of them
Notes:  There have been four Olympic baseball tournaments using professional players.  Japan has medaled in two of them - the 2004 Athens Games and the 2020 Tokyo Games (which were played in Yokohama in 2021).  It blows my mind that there are cards for the two Olympic teams that did not medal (2000 and 2008) but not these two teams.  Especially since the 2020 team won the Gold Medal on their home soil.  Hell, even the incredibly disappointing South Korean team had baseball cards!

2023 Topps Samurai Japan #1

Tournament: 2023 World Baseball Classic
Medal: Gold
Cards: 2023 Topps Samurai Japan
Missing Players: None
Notes:  Having an actual license for the WBC allowed Topps to produce a set that included both NPB and MLB players.  

That's a total of eleven "major" tournaments since 2000 - five WBCs, four Olympics and two Premier 12s - and there have been Japanese-issued baseball cards for eight of them.  Three of those eight featured cards of all the players on the team.

Given that Topps Japan has done Topps Now singles and team sets for three different Samurai Japan "events" now (the 2023 Asian Professional Baseball Tournament and the 2022 and 2024 friendly matches against Australia and Team Europe respectively), I fully expect them to do the same for this fall's Premier 12 team.  I expect that they'll be the first cards for a team in that tournament to acknowledge it.

Friday, March 22, 2024

Topps Tigers Set

I wanted to do a quick post about a new on demand set that Topps Japan is selling to celebrate the Hanshin Tigers winning their first Nippon Series title in 38 years last year.  The set contains 16 cards and is available for 8000 yen (~$53) on Topps' Japanese website.  Unlike the Samurai Japan cards that Topps started selling earlier this week though, these sets are only available for purchase inside Japan.  Topps will not ship them overseas.  There's a relatively short fuse on them as well, as they are only on sale until next Friday, March 29th.

Thursday, March 21, 2024

2023 World Baseball Classic Card Wrap Up

I've been meaning for a while to do a post that summarizes all the baseball cards for the 2023 World Baseball Classic and it seemed appropriate to do it today, given that today is the one year anniversary of Samurai Japan winning the tournament.

There were eleven different World Baseball Classic "things" last year, where "things" can be a set, an insert set or a subset.  Ten of these were issued by Topps while the other was from BBM.  Two of them were exclusively issued in Japan while the others were US based.  Four of them ONLY featured members of Samurai Japan.

The "things" are:

Topps Global Stars (70 cards - 50 regular + 20 "Flags Of A Nation")
Topps 2 WBC Stars (60 card insert set)
Topps Finest "World's Finest" (25 card insert set)
Bowman Chrome "WBC Flag" (100 card serially numbered insert)
BBM Infinity (11 card "Samurai Japan subset")

You can nitpick my decision to include the "Flags Of A Nation" inserts from the Global Stars set but not the various inserts from the World Baseball Classic set but it feels right to me - I'm not convinced the "Flags" were any scarcer than the regular cards from that set.  You might also argue that the eleven Samurai Japan cards in the BBM Infinity set shouldn't count - feel free to ignore them if you want.  I'm also not including any memorabilia or autographed cards in the count.

The total number of cards is 521 which I believe is the second most ever (there were 583 cards for the 2009 Classic which were split between the 306 cards that Topps did  and the 277 cards - 253 base and 24 insert - in Konami's set).

142 of those cards were for Samurai Japan.  Here's a breakdown of all the Samurai Japan cards per player and set:

Name Topps Now Topps Now All Tournament Team Topps Now Samurai Japan Topps Samurai Japan Global Stars WBC Stars Finest Bowman Chrome BBM Infinity Topps Japan Edition WBC team Topps WBC
Darvish, Yu 15 10 3 35 10 44 15 74
Genda, Sosuke 6 8 8
Imanaga, Shota 12 29 20
Itoh, Hiromi 20 10
Kai, Takuya 14
Kondoh, Kensuke 3 4 25 53 2
Kuribayashi, Ryoji 6 18 21
Kuriyama, Hideki Mgr 13 3
Maki, Shugo 8 7 46 48 22 21
Makihara, Taisei 32 24
Matsui, Yuki 21 20
Miyagi, Hiroya 23 27 19
Murakami, Munetaka 66,69 5 30 10,F-3 60 50 25 5 84
Nakamura, Yuhei 22 15 9
Nakano, Takumu 18 11
Nootbaar, Lars 9 2 10 F-15 54 46 4 57
Ohshiro, Takumi 11
Ohtani, Shohei 8,26,53,
71,73
8,12 1 17 5,F-10 11 10 45 1,12 45
Okamoto, Kazuma 52,70 7 25 54 6
Ota, Taisei 2 17
Sasaki, Roki 19 9 16 3,F-8 34 49 28 13 21
Shuto, Ukyo 27 22
Takahashi, Hiroto 24 31 16
Takahashi, Keiji 9
Togo, Shosei 31 18
Udagawa, Yuki 15 24
Yamada, Tetsuto 26 52 17 7
Yamakawa, Hotaka 33 23
Yamamoto, Yoshinobu 27 11 19 27,F-18 56 51 23 14
Yamazaki, Soichiro 5
Yoshida, Masataka 14,65 3 4 28 43 33 47 3 91
Yuasa, Atsuki 12 25
Team Japan 20,67,72 1

Every member of Samurai Japan had at least one card.  Not surprisingly, Shohei Ohtani had the most cards - 17.  Munetaka Murakami was second with 11, followed by Roki Sasaki and Masataka Yoshida with 10 each.  Yoshinobu Yamamoto had nine and Yu Darvish and Lars Nootbaar each had eight.  On the opposite end of the spectrum,  Takaya Kai, Takumi Ohshiro, Keiji Takahashi and Soichiro Yamazaki each only had a single card.  The other two NPB imports to MLB besides Yamamoto - Shota Imanaga and Yuki Matsui - had just three and two cards respectively (and both of Matsui's were issued in Japan).

I thought I'd show a card from each of these sets although I don't have the Finest Ohtani card so I'll be showing an image I swiped off of Ebay.  I didn't complete the Topps Finest, Bowman Chrome or Topps WBC sets - I ultimately only got one Finest card, two Bowman Chrome cards and 15 of the WBC cards so I "only" have 289 of the 521 cards, although I have 128 of the 142 Samurai Japan cards.

2023 Topps Now World Baseball Classic #WBC-71

2023 Topps Now WBC All Tournament Team #WBCA-3

2023 Topps Now Samurai Japan #WBCJPN-6

2023 Topps Samurai Japan Team Set #29 (Shota Imanaga)

2023 Topps Global Stars #35

2023 Topps Global Stars "Flags Of A Nation" #F-10

2023 Topps 2 "WBC Stars" #WBC-60

2023 Topps Finest "World's Finest" #10

2023 Bowman Chrome "WBC Flag" #WBC-52

2023 BBM Infinity #20

2023 Topps Japan Edition "Samurai Japan" #WBC-14

2023 Topps World Baseball Classic #21

This post would not be complete without mentioning some cards that I didn't feel comfortable putting in the list above.  The WBC trophy toured the various NPB ballparks last year and in May it was at Chiba Marine Stadium.  The Marines gave away three cards at the games that the trophy was on display at that featured the only two members of the Marines to suit up for this iteration of Samurai Japan - manager Mastato Yoshii (who was the team's pitching coach) and Roki Sasaki:




Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Shota Ohno

Shoto Ohno, longtime catcher for the Fighters and Dragons, announced his retirement last September.  Ohno was a star as an amateur player.  He hit 29 home runs as a high schooler in Gifu and won a Tohto League MVP and multiple Best 9 awards during his collegiate days at Toyo University.  He also played on the Japanese Collegiate National Team in both 2007 and 2008 (his junior and senior years).

The Fighters took him in the first round of the 2008 draft and he made his NPB debut with the top team in April of the following year.  He basically shared catching duties with Shinya Tsuruoka for the first five years of his career although he was considered the backup catcher when Tsuruoka was healthy.  He became the number one catcher in 2014 after Tsuruoka departed for Fukuoka as a free agent and he made the All Star team for the only time in his career that season.  He also hit a career high six home runs although his batting average was a paltry .174.  He had an elbow injury to start the 2015 season and was the third string for a while behind Kensuke Kondoh(!) and Ryo Ishikawa but was back to being the top catcher again by the end of the season (and Kondoh only caught one more game at the ichi-gun level after that season).  He and Shohei Ohtani won the "Best Battery Award" that season despite the time he had missed.  Healthy again in 2016, he played in a career high 109 games, won a Golden Glove Award and, of course, contributed to the Fighters winning the Nippon Series.  He was selected for the Samurai Japan team for the 2017 World Baseball Classic but only played in the first round game against China.  Following an injury-marred 2017 season, he filed for free agency and left the Fighters for the Chunichi Dragons.

He never really got on track with the Dragons.  He'd had elbow surgery in the 2017-18 off season and his recovery dragged into his first year in Nagoya, limiting him to only 50 games.  He re-injured the elbow in 2019 and only played in 34 games (although one of them was Yudai Ohno's no-hitter, making it the "Ohon-Ohno No-No").  That was pretty much it for him as a top team catcher.  He spent the entire 2020 season with the farm team and only played in 8 games with the top team in each of the 2021 and 2022 seasons.  When the Dragons decided against promoting him last summer when starting catcher Takuya Kinoshita got injured, he saw the writing on the wall.  His only appearance with the top team in 2023 was his retirement game on October 3rd, the last day of the season.  He'll be the catching coach on the Dragons' farm team this season.

Ohno's first baseball cards were collegiate cards in both the US and Japan.  His inclusion on the 2007 Japanese Collegiate National Team was commemorated by memorabilia cards in the 2008 Upper Deck USA Baseball set and his 2008 squad was memorialized in a BBM box set.  His first NPB card was from BBM's 2009 Rookie Edition set (#012) and he had other rookie cards in the 1st Version (#102), Fighters (#F36), Rookie Edition Premium (#RP07) and Nippon Series (#S43) sets from BBM as well as Konami's Baseball Heroes White set (#B09W039).  His first Calbee card was #150 from the 2010 Series Two set.  Here's a bunch of his cards:

2008 Upper Deck USA Baseball #JN-15

2008 BBM Japan College Baseball National Team #CN10

2008 BBM Japan College Baseball National Team #CN32

2009 BBM Rookie Edition #012

2009 BBM 1st Version #102

2011 BBM Tohto 80th Memorial #66

2011 Fighters Victory Card #019

2012 BBM Nippon Series #S49

2014 Calbee #205

2016 BBM Opening #16

2017 Calbee Samurai Japan #SJ-21

2018 BBM 1st Version #281

2023 BBM Dragons #D32

More Topps Now Samurai Japan Cards

Two weeks ago, Samurai Japan played two friendlies against "Team Europe", a collection of players from several European countries.  I've been waiting to see if Topps Japan was going to issue Topps Now cards from the two game set like they've done in the past for the friendlies against Australia in November of 2022 and the Asian Professional Baseball Championship tournament in November of 2023.  

The wait was over yesterday as I discovered that Topps had indeed issued Topps Now cards for the games.  There are eight cards in all available on Topps Japan's website - four for each game.  The Game One cards are for Munetaka Murakami, Kotaro Kurebayashi, Kensuke Kondoh and Shunpeita Yamashita while the Game Two cards are for Yudai Yamamoto, Chusei Mannami, Sosuke Genda and a group shot of the six pitchers who combined to throw a perfect game.  The pitchers aren't named on the card (not enough room on the front and the backs are generic as always) which possibly allows Topps to get around any licensing issues with the two collegiate pitchers (although I don't know if there really is an issue).

Each card is listed at 1243 yen (around $8.25) but that's a little deceptive as that includes tax for Japanese consumers.  If you're buying the cards from outside of Japan, they're 1130 yen apiece or about $7.50.  Of course, you have to pay for them to ship outside of Japan and shipping even just a single card to the US will run 2000 yen (around $13.25).  

For the first time since Topps Japan started doing these, you can buy all the cards in one bundle at a substantial discount.  The eight card bundle sells for 5800 yen (about $38.50) for outside of Japan and 6380 yen ($42-ish) inside of Japan.  The total with shipping to the US for the bundle would be 7800 yen or right around $52.

The cards will be available until 1 AM EDT on April 18th.

I will be curious to see if Topps Japan issues a complete team set for this iteration of Samurai Japan like they've done for the other two that they've issued the Topps Now cards for.  It would be cool to get "pre-rookie" cards of the four collegiate players.

I think it's probably safe to assume now that Topps will be issuing Topps Now cards for the Premier 12 team this fall.