The Orix Buffaloes clinched their third consecutive Pacific League pennant last Wednesday.  While pitchers Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Hiroya Miyagi, Sachiya Yamasaki and Shunpeita Yamashita have been getting most of the attention this year, Kohei Azuma's the one who's done something that no one's done for over 80 years.  Azuma has won his first seven decisions as a starter.  That's in "first seven" for his career, not this season.  The last pitcher to start their career with seven winning decisions was Hall Of Famer Hideo Fujimoto in 1942.

Azuma has followed an unlikely path to his current success.  He was the ace pitcher on the Kobe Koryo Gakuen High School baseball team as a second year student but suffered a back injury during his junior year.  He was taken by Orix in the second round of the development player (ikusei) draft in 2017 but didn't play at all during 2018 due to abdominal pain.  He was healthy for all of 2019 and went 5-7 with a 3.84 ERA for Orix's farm team.  He hurt his right arm and shoulder during spring training in 2020 and between that and COVID he only pitched in six games all year, going 0-2 with a 6.87 ERA.  

At this point he'd been a development player for three years so his contract was up and the team released him but resigned him to a new contract afterwards - still as an ikusei player.  He had a strong start to the 2021 season but his performance tailed off until his season came to an early stop when a batted ball fractured his arm in late September.  He pitched well enough last season for the team to finally bring him on to the official 70 man roster in late July, making his ichi-gun debut on July 30th with a start against the Chiba Lotte Marines.  He got his first win in his second start - against the Fighters on August 6th.  He was sent back to ni-gun shortly after that but later made two appearances in relief with the top team.

He opened this season in the bullpen for the ichi-gun team but was sent back to the farm team to start after only a few appearances.  After going 5-2 with a 2.18 ERA in 11 starts on the farm, Orix called him back up in late July.  He's currently 6-0 with a 1.71 ERA.

Since he's been an ikusei player for most of his career, he does not have many baseball cards.  As far as I can tell, he's had five cards in four sets.  He has a card in the 2018 BBM Rookie Edition set, two cards in the 2018 Epoch Buffaloes Rookie & Stars set and a card in the 2019 Buffaloes team issued set.  His only card (so far) that doesn't have him as a development player is in this year's BBM Buffaloes team set.  I expect that he'll have his first BBM "flagship" card in the "1st Version Update" subset of this year's Fusion set.  Here's one of his 2018 Epoch Buffaloes Rookies & Stars cards (#35a):

H/T NPB Reddit

My oldest daughter started dating someone when she was a freshman at the University Of Maryland - Baltimore County (aka UMBC, the destroyer of everyone's NCAA brackets in 2018).  One time when she was visiting her boyfriend's family at their house just north of Baltimore, she mentioned her father's twin odd hobbies of collecting Japanese baseball cards and writing a blog about them.

Her boyfriend's father replied, "Your father might be interested to know that I have Sadaharu Oh's autograph."

Indeed I was.  When I eventually met him, he explained that Oh had attended the "Tops In Sports" Banquet some time in the 1980's and he had gotten Oh to autograph his program.

The "Tops In Sports" banquet was an annual event put on by the Maryland Professional Baseball Players Association every January for almost 50 years.  The first one was held in 1954 and I believe the last one was held in 1998 - there's an article behind the paywall at the Baltimore Sun that indicates that the 1999 event was canceled due to some conflict with the Orioles.

My daughter broke up with this particular boyfriend a while ago and went on to marry someone else so I never got to see the autograph.  And I didn't know which year Oh attended.  But still it was cool to discover that he had visited Baltimore...or at least Baltimore County as the event was actually held in Towson, just north of the city.

Fast forward to last week - I discovered that someone on Ebay was selling photos of Oh from the event!  The auction is for a set of five photos featuring Oh.  They are from the estate of Frank Sliwka who ran the banquet for years.  I swiped the photos from the auction but I've done a little cropping to zero in on each photo individually.

This first photo shows Oh, Sliwka and Henry Aaron:

Oh signing a ball for Sliwka:

The three people on the left are Sliwka, then-Baltimore mayor (and later Maryland Governor and Comptroller) Willam Donald Schaefer and Oh.  I think the guy on the far right is Irv Hall, the president of the Maryland Professional Baseball Players Association at the time.  I'm not sure who the other person is - the program for the event (I'll get to that in a minute) lists a couple possibilities - Kensaku Hogen from the Japanese Embassy; Hioroaki Hirano, "Director of International Liaision, Tokyo 'Yomiuri' Giants" (Not sure if his name was spelled right in the program and I think they meant "Liaison"); Dr. Hiroshi Nakazawa from St. Agnes Hospital and restauranteur Lanny Miyamoto.  Or it could be none of those.  Maybe it's Oh's translator.

Oh was the recipient of the "Babe Ruth Crown" so here's Sliwka holding over his head as they pose with the unidentified gentleman from the previous photo.

Here's Oh holding the crown while flanked by Sliwka and yet another unidentified person:

Here's one last photo from the auction showing all five photos at once:

I mentioned earlier that I'd seen a program for the event.  After I saw this auction last week I did some searches on the internet to see what I could find out about the event.  I hit pay-dirt twice.  I found an article on the banquet from the Washington Post written by Tom Boswell which established that the event was in January of 1985.  Then I found an archived Ebay auction over at Worthpoint for a program from the event.  It looks like it's the same seller who's selling the photos.  It establishes that the date of the event was January 11th, 1985.  I've again swiped the photos from the program:

Looks like it was an interesting lineup of people.  One of the players at the event - Jim Traber (mispelled "Trabor" in the program) would eventually spent two seasons in Japan with the Kintetsu Buffaloes.

I always enjoy discovering the intersections of Japanese and American baseball and as this was so close to home, it was particularly satisfying.

Calbee's second and apparently final set for 2023 was released about a month ago.  That's about two months later than normal and usually right about now is when Series Three would be getting released but for reasons that still don't make a whole lot of sense to me Calbee decided this year to delay Series Two until August and do away with Series Three altogether.  This was on top of their previous decision to lower the number of "regular" player cards in each Series from 72 to 60.

The total number of cards in the set,,,er, Series is 76 - 60 player cards, 12 "First Win" subset cards and four checklist cards.  Let's dive into the player cards first.  Calbee has continued their dedication to finding the blandest, dullest photographs possible for their cards.  Almost every photo is either a pitcher pitching or a batter batting.  There's some variety in the batting photos - a couple shots at the end of the player's swing or the batter starting to leave the batters box or even one guy bunting - but they're still pretty boring.  There's exactly one card showing a fielder fielding and - just like Series One - only one card that uses a horizontal format.  There's also one card showing a player apparently celebrating a walk off hit which may be the best photo in the whole set.

Judging a Calbee Series on the players it contains is always dicey since it's normally only a third of the set but given that there's no Series Three this year, I feel somewhat justified in criticizing the player selection.  On the plus side, the set contains some stars like Roki Sasaki, Yuki Yanagita, Koji Chikamoto, Teruaki Satoh, Hiroya Miyagi, Sosuke Genda, Takeya Nakamura, Shota Imanaga, Shugo Maki, Sho Nakata and Tomoyuki Sugano.  There's only one rookie (in the "2022 draft pick" meaning, not the "eligible for the Rookie Of The Year Award" meaning) - Takuya Hiruma of the Lions.  There are a handful of guys who switched teams over the winter - Hisayoshi Chono, Hideaki Wakui, Toshiki Abe, Nobuhiro Matsuda and Yota Kyoda.  But neither of the two biggest names to move to new teams last winter - Tomoya Mori and Kensuke Kondoh - have cards.  Mori at least appears in the "First Win" subset but Kondoh won't have any Calbee card this year at all.  Neither will Chusei Mannami.  Neither of last year's league MVPs - Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Munetaka Murakami - will have a "regular" player card although they are both in Series One's "Title Holder" subset and Murakami appears on a Series One checklist card and has a "First Win" card.

Here's some example player cards:

#083

#106

#075

#088

#071

I should probably point out that the cards are numbered 61 to 120 in continuation of the numbering from Series One.

The "First Win" subset commemorates each team's first victory of the 2023 season.  Three of the cards feature the first wins for the three first time managers - Kazuo Matsui of the Lions, Masato Yoshii of the Marines and Takahiro Arai of the Carp.  The remaining nine cards all feature players including the aforementioned Mori and Murakami as well as Masahiro Tanaka, Sho Nakata, Shuhei Takahashi, Kotaro Kiyomiya, Ryoya Kurihara, Koyo Aoyagi and Kentaro Taiga.  One thing odd about this subset is that typically Calbee doesn't have multiple cards of a player in a Series so if a player has a "regular" card they won't be in a subset and vice versa.  But there's four players in this subset who also have "regular" cards in the Series - Nakata, Takahashi, Kiyomiya and Kurihara.  The photos used in this subset are the best in the whole set as this card of Murakami shows:

#FW-07

The last four cards in the set are the four checklist cards which are numbered 05-08 in continuation of the checklist cards from Series One.  Each card features a highlight from the first week or so of the season - Kaima Taira's first career start after over 200 relief appearances, Yuki Matsui getting his 200th save, Shota Morishita making the Tigers' Opening Day lineup as a rookie and Takayuki Kajitani playing in his first game since July 10th, 2021.  Here's Matsui's card:

#C-06

So to sum it all up, I give this set a hearty "meh".  The "First Win" subset's not bad - the topic's a little dull but at least a lot of the photos are good.  But the rest of the set is pretty dull.  And not to sound too much like the odd joke about the two guys complaining about a restaurant where the one guy gripes that the food is terrible and the other one laments that the portions are too small, I really wish Calbee was still doing a Series Three this year.  They'd have a better player selection and with more cards they;d have more chances of picking better photos.  Hopefully things will be back to normal next year.  In the meantime you can see all the cards in this Series over at Jambalaya.

The Women's Baseball World Cup was last played in 2018.  The next one was supposed to be played in Tijuana, Mexico in 2020 but was postponed a year due to COVID and ultimately canceled.  The newly rescheduled tournament is being handled a little differently than previously.  The 12 participating teams were split into two separate groups with completely separate group stages.  Group A consisted of the US, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Hong Kong and South Korea.  They played their stage last month in Thunder Bay, Ontario with the US, Canada and Mexico moving on.  Group B consisted of Japan, Taiwan, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Cuba and France playing in Miyoshi, Japan.  That group wrapped up today with Japan going undefeated.  Taiwan and Venezuela also advanced.  The top three teams from each group will meet in the final tournament that will be played in Thunder Bay at some yet to be scheduled date in 2024.

Japan historically has dominated this tournament.  There have only been eight tournaments had Japan has won gold in the last six of them after winning silver in the first two.  I expect them to win next year as well.

I thought I'd do a quick post on the team's roster for the Group B portion of the tournament.  There are twenty players on the roster and I have cards for thirteen of them from when they played in the Japan Women's Baseball League (JWBL):

2017 AIAIO #D17-11-02

2015 AIAIO #A15-02-01

2018 Epoch JWBL #52

2018 Epoch JWBL #11

2015 AIAIO #F15-10-01

2015 AIAIO #R15-42-01

2010 BBM Real Venus #34

2016 AIAIO #F16-03-01

2016 Epoch JWBL #74

2018 Epoch JWBL #27

2017 AIAIO #D17-18-05

2018 Epoch JWBL #78

2016 Epoch JWBL #17

As far as I can tell, the autographs on Bandoh and Izumi's cards are authentic.

After the demise of the JWBL after 2020, at least three NPB teams have established women's teams - the Lions, the Tigers and the Giants.  The Lions and Tigers each contributed three players to the team (Ayaka Deguchi, Kae Iwami and Ayami Sato from the Lions; Mizuki Bandoh, Iori Miura and Erika Nakae fromt the Tigers) while the Giants contributed two (Kana Onodera and Miwa Tanaka).  Yuki Kawabata had retired as a professional player after the 2018 season so I was a little surprised to see her on the roster (although she's only 33).

Additionally I have cards for the team's manager Rise Nakashima and two of the three coaches.  Both Katsuhiko Kido and Hiroki Fukutome played in NPB.  Fukutome also coached in the JWBL so I'm showing a card of him from one of their sets.

2016 Epoch JWBL #41

1995 BBM #214

2018 Epoch JWBL #45

There were at least two players on other teams who had experience in the JWBL.  Australian infielder Shae Lillywhite played for South Dione in 2013 while Taiwanese infielder Hsieh Yu-ying played for Kyoto Flora in 2018.  I don't have any cards of Lillywhite but I have this card of Hsieh:

2018 Epoch JWBL #64

There were two events that I thought would make a good "Card Of The Week" topic this week but since I couldn't decide between them, I decided to do both of them.

On Thursday the Hanshin Tigers clinched the Central League pennant with a win over the Giants.  Manager Akinobu Okada's team won their first pennant since 2005 when they were managed by...Akinobu Okada.  The Central League didn't start doing playoffs until 2007 so the Tigers also clinched a spot in the Nippon Series that year by winning the pennant.  Here's Okada's card from the 2005 BBM Nippon Series set (#26) - that's Bobby Valentine, manager of the Chiba Lotte Marines on the right side of the photo.  The Marines swept the Tigers that year 4-0:

Yesterday, Chusei Mannami of the Fighters led off the bottom of the first inning against the Hawks with a solo home run.  The Hawks tied the game with a run in the fifth inning and the game remained knotted at 1 until the bottom of the ninth.  With one on and one out, Mannami stepped to the plate and did this: