I mentioned yesterday that I had received my latest package of baseball cards from Ryan this past weekend.  As usual the box contained over 1000 cards that Ryan had picked up for me since the last time he'd sent me a package (which was about 16 months ago).  I always have a difficult time trying to figure out where to start with these packages so I decided to start with some cards that I was not expecting - six cards of professional woman baseball players.

The first card comes from the 2011 BBM GPBL set.  GPBL stands for Girl's Professional Baseball League which was the Japan Women's Baseball League's name from their founding in 2009 until 2012.  UPDATE - just discovered as I was putting this card away that it doesn't come from the same set as my other 2011 BBM GPBL cards.  I'll need to do some more investigation.

#K22

In addition to this card, Ryan also sent a couple empty envelopes that the cards had been packed in.  Each envelope originally contained two cards.  I assume these were given away at games but I don't know that for sure.  There's an envelope for each of the two teams at the time - the Hyogo Swing Smileys and the Kyoto Asto Dreams - and the back of the envelope has a checklist of the cards for the team.

The other five cards were all from 2017 and were issued by AIAIO.  I've never quite understood how these cards were distributed - as you can tell there's three different card designs here:

Miura and Maeda went on to play for the Tiger's women's team after the JWBL folded although I don't know if either one is still playing for them.  I believe that's a real autograph on Yamazaki's card.

 P-Town Tom of Waiting 'Til Next Year used to run an annual contest for bloggers to pick their favorite cards for the year.  I participated in the 2017 and 2018 contests and picked a card for 2019 even though Tom wasn't doing the contest anymore.  I hadn't really thought too much about it the past couple years but yesterday I received a large box of cards from Ryan which included a whole bunch of Epoch One cards from last year.  In that batch I came across a card that I had forgotten that I'd asked him to pick up for me but instantly became my favorite card from last year:

2022 Epoch One #667

This card show Munetaka Murakami hitting his 41st home run of last season against the Baystars.  It was also his 100th RBI of the season.  I really like the way this photo looks with the Jingu Stadium stands behind him and what looks like a sunset in the background.

I've revamped my page for the Epoch One checklists.  Instead of having a separate table for each year, I've simply linked to my Google sheets document that I've used to build the checklists.  Well, built the 2018-20 checklists - the 2021 and 2022 checklists were actually done by Jason for TCDB.  I just did a little massaging to them (and my massaging of the 2022 one is still a work in progress).  One thing I've been able to do is to determine the player who had the most cards in each year's Epoch One set - Murakami had 50(!) last year.

I'll be doing a bunch of posts on the cards that Ryan sent me over the next couple weeks.

There's been a bit of flood of new sets getting announced in the three weeks since the last time I did a round up of new releases so let's get to it...

- One of these sets is already out.  The Eagles released their 1st Version set on February 11th - this is essentially the first half of their annual team issued set.  The base set will have 67 cards which I think will based on the team's 70 man roster as of December 9th.  Each base set card has three facsimile signature parallels - a silver one, a rarer gold one and a 1-of-1 crimson one.  There are four insert sets - nine cards celebrating Satoshi Miyamoto's 22 game scoreless appearance streak, twelve cards celebrating Takayuki Kishi getting victories against all 12 NPB team (which includes cards showing him with the Lions), eleven "retro-menko" cards showing the manager and coaches (with a "rock-paper-scissors" symbol on the back!) and four "Stars Of Tohoku" cards.  There are jersey and patch cards for Yuki Matsui and autograph cards for 62 players.  You can see all the cards over at Jambalaya.

- It's not quite the end of February and BBM has already announced the first four of their annual "comprehensive" team sets.  I decided that instead of my usual attempts to write something different about each of these sets when they're very repetitive, I'd just list them in a table.  Each set has a base set of 81 cards, most of which are "regular" cards featuring the manager and the players on the 70 man roster plus a couple subsets (which may not be fully defined yet) to fill out the set.  Each set also has 18 non-premium insert cards split into a variety of sets which again may not be fully defined yet.  The Treasure, Esperanza and Antique inserts are all serially numbered.  (If it's not obvious, the "Regular Cards", "Treasure", "Esperanza" and "Antique" columns are the total number of those type of cards in each set)

- BBM also announced this year's edition of their annual Icons box set.  The theme this year is Samurai and the focus is on players who have represented Japan along with young players who could do so in the future.  The box contains 37 cards - a 36 card base set and one special card which could be a parallel card, a foil signed card (facsimile, not real autograph) or an "EXTREME" insert card.  The base set is (naturally) broken up into three cards per team and includes Samurai Japan members Munetaka Murakami, Roki Sasaki and Yoshinobu Yamamoto along with eight rookies.  The set will hit the shelves in late March.

- Also hitting the shelves in late March (March 27th officially) is Calbee's Series One set.  That's all I know about it right now because for the second year in a row, Calbee has decided not to release the Series One checklist until about a week before the set comes out.  I would expect that it will pretty much be like every other Calbee set for the last ten years or so - the base set will contain 72 "regular" player cards (six per team), either a 20-ish card "Title Holder" subset or a 12 card subset with some theme that ends up working out to one card per team, and four checklist cards along with a 24 card "Star" insert set.  But I could be wrong.

- I mentioned a while back that it was interesting that Epoch and the OB Club didn't do any collaborations last year.  What I hadn't realized at the time was that last year really wasn't over yet, at least when it came to card releases from Epoch (which may explain why they are STILL issuing "2022" Epoch One cards).  Epoch released the "2022 JRFPA set" earlier this month and next month they are issuing TWO of their ultra high end sets in conjunction with the OB Club, both of which are labeled as 2022 products.  The sets are Holografica and Career Achievements.  Both sets will be released on March 18th and each set's boxes will contain six cards (including two autograph cards) and retail for 16,500 yen (~$122).  The base set for Holografica has 53 cards while Career Achievements has 55.  Each base set card has a serially numbered "hologram" parallel card and both sets have a wide variety of autograph cards available,

I only have examples from three of these sets - the 2006 "Veteran", the 2020 "Slugger" and the 2022 "Clutch Hitter" sets:

In addition to these box sets that were issued in conjunction with the regular sets, Calbee also issued one of them with their 2019 Samurai Japan set.  This was an eight card set featuring highlights of several of the games that Samurai Japan had played between November, 2017 and November, 2018 - with the exception of their games against the MLB All Stars in November 2018.  I don't know for sure if this set was available from Calbee's Amazon store or if it was a "Lucky" card redemption but I suspect it was from Amazon.  Calbee no longer lists this set with the 2019 Samurai Japan checklist so I can't check what it says (and it's not archived at the Wayback Machine).  I did a post about this set when I got it in December of 2019 but here's one card from it as an example - this is Kodai Senga:

Last Friday I got an email from FedEx tracking a shipment coming to me from Topps Digital.  Since I hadn't ordered anything from Topps since I got the Topps Now Samurai Japan team set, I didn't know what this was.  I figured, however, that it was probably parallel cards from the team set similar to the ones they had sent me for 13 of the 16 Topps Now Samurai Japan cards they had done back in November.  After two impatient days of waiting, the package showed up at my house this afternoon and I was able to confirm that, yes, it contained parallels for the Samurai Japan team set.  There were only two this time but they were both the red bordered ones which are limited to 10 and one of them was Roki Sasaki (the other was Yuhei Nakamura).  Here they are:

#SJ-1

#SJ-16

So, thanks again, Topps, for the parallels!

Well, she looks like she was enjoying her time at the ballpark she just condemned this past week:

2017 BBM 2nd Version #FP02

For more on this, check out Jim Allen's Kyodo News article from a few weeks back.

I did a series of posts a few years ago on the Japanese Olympic Baseball teams from the 1984 to 2008 Olympiads.  I knew at the time that baseball had included as a "demonstration sport" in the 1964 Tokyo games but I pretty much ignored it because it wasn't an actual tournament of between several nations.  Instead I had read that it was a single game between a US team made up of college players (managed by legendary USC coach Rod Dedeaux who would also manage the 1984 US Olympic baseball team) against what was described as "a Japanese amateur all-star team".  The game was played at Meiji Jingu Stadium on October 11th, 1964 in front of 50,000 fans and was won by the US team by a score of 6-2.  The US team included eight future MLB players - Mike Epstein, Gary Sutherland, Chuck Dobson, Alan Closter, Dick Joyce, Jim Hibbs, Ken Suarez and Shaun Fitzmaurice.  Fitzmaurice hit a home run on the first pitch of the game.

Or so the English Wikipedia article said.  However, when I decided to try to find out who was on that "Japanese amateur all-star team" by checking the Japanese version of that Wikipedia article, I discovered something interesting.

That story's not true.

To be fair, a lot of the story is true.  There was baseball played at Meiji Jingu Stadium on October 11th and the US collegiate All Star team was involved.  But Team USA actually played TWO games that day - one against a team of Japanese collegiate players and one against a team of Japanese corporate league players.  I don't think either Japanese team should really be considered an "All Star" team.  The collegiate team was essentiallythe  Komazawa University team (which had just won the All Japan University Baseball Championship four months earlier) which was fortified with seven players from other colleges in Tokyo.  Similarly the corporate league team was the Nippon Express team (which had won the Intercity Baseball Tournament two and a half months earlier) that was bolstered by seven players from other teams.

The first game was between Team USA and the collegiate team which ended in a 2-2 tie.  I haven't seen any play-by-play for this game but I have seen a line score which shows that Team USA scored a run in the top of the first so the account of Fitzmaurice homering on the first pitch of the game may very well be true.  Team USA shut out the corporate league team 3-0 in the second game of the day.

I'm also not sure about the claim of 50,000 fans in attendance.  If I'm correctly reading the Google translation of  "Japan National Team Uniform Catalog", a mook published by BBM a couple years ago that was one of the sources for the Japanese Wikipedia article, attendance was somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 with the outfield lawn seats completely full.  (Tbis mook is the source of the photos used in this post.)  Jingu Stadium currently only seats around 31,000 but it used to have a capacity of 58,000 (according to the ballpark's Japanese Wikipedia page) so it is physically possible that they really did have 50,000.

I'm curious about how the story of this event got garbled.  It kind of looks like the two scores got mashed together - the two Japanese teams combined to score two runs but Team USA had five total runs, not six.  I think the primary source for the English language Wikipedia article is this monograph by Pete Cava (which also appeared in the 1992 edition of the SABR publication "The National Pastime"), specifically the following paragraph:

I don't know what Mr. Cava's sources were as he didn't list them in the monograph and I can't ask him because unfortunately he passed away a few years ago.  I don't mean to criticize Mr. Cava here.  It's easy sometimes to forget just how much information is available at our fingertips now.  

What's kind of odd is that one of the other sources referenced in the Wikipedia article - an article from the October 26th edition of the Lincoln (Nebraska) Star entitled "U.S. Ends Tour On Sour Note" - states "In their Olympic exhibition doubleheader at Tokyo's Meiji Stadium Oct. 11, the Americans tied a Japan College All-Star team 2-2 and beat a non-pro Japanese team 3-0." so there's a contemporary English source confirming the Japanese Wikipedia version.

The collegiate team (seen above with Team USA) had 18 players - 11 from Komazawa, two from Chuo, two from Hosei, two from Keio and one from Rikkio.  Twelve of these players would go on to play professionally.  Here's the roster:

I'm not going to do mini-biographies of the players like I did for the other Olympic team rosters but I will make some comments about some of the players.  Atsushi Nagaike is the biggest name here - he won two Pacific League MVP awards (1969 & 1971) and led the league in home runs and RBIs three times each.  Shozo Doi and Toshimitsu Suetsugu were key members of the V9 Giants.  Doi managed the Orix BlueWave in the early 1990's and is most famous (infamous?) for saying that Ichiro Suzuki would never be able to hit with that batting stance.   Taisuke Watanabe's claim to fame was throwing the first perfect game in Tokyo Big Six history.

I have cards of nine of the twelve players to play in NPB, including cards of five of them as collegiate players from either the 2011 BBM Tohto 80th Memorial set or the 2011 BBM Legend Of Tokyo Big Six set.  Here's cards of these players.  For anyone I have both a collegiate card for and an NPB card, I'll show the collegiate card first:

2011 BBM Legend Of Tokyo Big Six #068

1973 Calbee #23 (Shozo Doi)

2013 BBM Greatest Games 10-22 1973 #18

2011 BBM Legend Of Tokyo Big Six #024

1967 Kabaya-Leaf #63 (Isao Hirono)

2011 BBM Legend Of Tokyo Big Six #050

1974/75 Calbee #768 (Atsushi Nagaike)

1975/76/77 Calbee #31 (Tsuyoshi Ohshita)

2021 BBM Dragons History 1936-2021 #13

2011 BBM Tohto 80th Memorial #21

1978 NST #212 (Toshimitsu Suetsugu)

1968 Shonen Book (Shiro Takegami)

2011 BBM Legend Of Tokyo Big Six #023

The corporate league team (seen above with Team USA) also had 18 members - 11 from Nippon Express, two from Nippon Oil, two from Nippon Steel Pipe, and one each from Sumitomo Metal, Nippon Columbia and Kanekalon Kaneka.  Only three of these players would have professional careers.  Here's their roster:

I only have cards for two of the three players who went on to play in NPB and I kind of found the one I didn't have cards for to be the most interesting.  Shigeo Kondo spent eleven or so years playing in the industrial leagues before putting himself up for the 1971 NPB draft.  At 29 years and one month, he was the oldest player ever drafted at the time when he was chosen by Lotte in the sixth round.  His record would stand for eleven years before 30 years and five months old Norio Ichimura was taken by the Dragons in the third round of the 1982 draft.  Here's cards of the other two future NPB players:

1979 TCMA #82

2010 BBM Lions 60th Anniversary #64