Triple Champs

In the wake of the Dodgers' World Series championship the other day, there was some chatter on Twitter about not only who had won a championship in both NPB and MLB but who on that list had also won a World Baseball Classic championship.  The Dodger's victory meant that that group doubled in size as Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto joined Daisuke Matsuzaka and Koji Uehara.  Matsuzaka and Uehara were both on the 2006 WBC champs and Matsuzaka repeated in 2009.  Between Matsuzaka and Ohtani, the group includes the winners of three of the five WBC MVP awards with Matsuzaka having won in both 2006 and 2009 and Ohtani having won in 2023.  Here are WBC cards for all four players:

2009 Konami Baseball Heroes WBC All Tournament Team #W09A001

2006 Upper Deck WBC Moments #CM-22

2023 Topps Samurai Japan #17

2023 Topps Now WBC #WBC-27

There's been some additional comments about Yamamoto having not only an NPB championship, an MLB championship and a WBC championship but also a Premier 12 (2019) championship and an Olympic Gold Medal (officially 2020 but actually 2021).  He's obviously the only one with all five of those.  Hell, he's the only one with even four of those although Matsuzaka and Uehara have Bronze Medals from the 2004 Athens games and Ohtani has a "bronze medal" for the 2015 Premier 12.  And for what it's worth, Matsuzaka's the only one of the four to also have a Summer Koshien championship (1998).

Reading all this made me start wondering how many other players have been on the winning team for the Premier 12, the Olympics and the World Baseball Classic.  Luckily, it's not hard to figure out since there's only been two Premier 12s and the only non-Japanese team to win it - South Korea in 2015 - has never won the WBC.  So it's pretty quickly obvious that the only guys to win all three are the players who, like Yamamoto, were on the Samurai Japan rosters for the 2019 Premier 12, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (played in Yokohama in 2021) and the 2023 World Baseball Classic.  There are six such players, including Yamamoto:

2023 Topps Now WBC Champions #WBCJPN-6

2020 Calbee Samurai Japan #16 Takuya Kai

2020 Calbee Samurai Japan #SJ-08 Kensuke Kondoh

2023 BBM Infinity #17

2020 Calbee Samurai Japan #10 (facsimile signature parallel) Yoshinobu Yamamoto

2023 Topps World Baseball Classic #91

I wanted to pick cards from the sets for the three tournaments but I had to settle for only two of them because for some unknown reason, there were no cards issued for the Olympic team.

Obviously these six have been in this club for over a year and a half now but until the discussion about Yamamoto, it never occurred to me to see who else had been on the winners for all three tournaments.  With the 2024 Premier 12 starting next week, I thought it'd be interesting to see if there's anyone else who might join this club should Japan repeat as tournament champions.

There isn't.

The roster that was originally announced had Hiromi Itoh on it who was on both the Olympic and WBC teams but he's since been scratched.  Taisei (Ota), Hiroto Takahashi, Shosei Togo and Shugo Maki were all on the WBC squad but not on the Olympic team while Ryoya Kurihara was on the Olympic team but the WBC one.  The only player on the roster who was on both the WBC and Olympic teams is Sosuke Genda, who's already a member of this club.

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

Notes:  The 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

Notes:  The 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

Notes:  The 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.

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 Now World Baseball Classic (73 cards)

Topps Now All Tournament Team (12 cards)

Topps Now Samurai Japan (12 cards)

Topps Samurai Japan Team Set (33 cards)

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")

Topps Japan Edition Samurai Japan (25 card insert set)

Topps World Baseball Classic (100 cards)

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:

2023 Topps Samurai Japan Set

Last spring Topps put a set of cards for the World Baseball Classic Champion Samurai Japan on sale on their Japanese website.  If you were in Japan, the set cost 7700 yen but the shipping was free but if you were in the US, the set was "only" 7000 yen (the 700 is the VAT for Japanese citizens) but shipping was 3900 yen.  While I had ordered the Topps Now cards and set for the friendly matches against Australia in November of 2022 directly from Topps, I decided to ask Ryan to order this set for me.  As a result, of course, I didn't get the set until last week.  

The set contained 36 total cards - the 33 card base set and three random parallels or other cards.  There were eight different types of parallels available - "Rainbow" (unnumbered), "Cherry Blossom" (/150), "Blue" (/88), "Green" (/77), "Purple" (/25), "Yellow" (/10), "Red" (/7) and "Gold" (1 of 1).  The other possible inserts were two different Ichiro cards (one for the 2006 WBC team and the other for the 2009 team) and a game used relic of some sort for Roki Ssaski that was numbered to 10.

The base set contains cards for all 31 members of the team along with manager Hideki Kuriyama.  There's also a team card showing the team hoisting the WBC trophy.  This is the only WBC cards for several players including Takuya Kai and Soichiro Yamazaki and the only Topps WBC cards for Yuki Matsui, Yuki Udagawa and Kuriyama.

The cards are OK.  I'm not a big fan of the design as I prefer borderless cards.  On the plus side, the photos are pretty good although I think Lars Nootbaar's photo was also used in the Topps 2 WBC Stars set.  All the text on the cards is in Japanese.  Here's some of the cards as examples:

#17 Shohei Ohtani

#28 Masataka Yoshida

#5 Soichiro Yamazaki

#18 Takumu Nakano

#15 Yuki Udagawa

#22 Yuhei Nakamura

#13 Hideki Kuriyama

I know this is going to come as a complete shock but Topps but very little effort into the backs of these cards.  I know, right?  What a surprise!  Every card has the same paragraph on the back of it along with the player's name.  Here's the back of Tetsuto Yamada's card:

And here's the Google translation of the text:

I got three parallel cards with my set.  Here they are:

#1 Team Card

31 Shosei Togoh

#19 Yoshinobu Yamamoto

As usual, you can see all the cards over at Jambalaya.

2023 Topps World Baseball Classic Cards

Last month Topps issued yet another and probably their last set for the 2023 World Baseball Classic.  The cards were only available in 10 card packs on line for $80-ish and the set had a 100 card base set with parallels, a bunch of inserts, memorabilia and autograph cards.  

I was taking a kind of "wait-and-see" attitude on it and now that I've waited and saw, I think I'm mostly going to pass on it.  There's only six players from Samurai Japan in the base set - all of whom have been featured in several previous WBC sets last year - and the cards of at least five of the six are selling at much higher prices than I want to pay on Ebay or COMC.  I have a lot of Roki Sasaki and Munetaka Murakami cards so I don't really need to be paying $30 or $50 for this one and I see no good reason to spend $10 on another Lars Nootbaar card.

I did decide to pick up a handful of cards from the set though but I concentrated on some low hanging fruit.  I bought seven cards from one Ebay seller - each one was less than $2 - and I thought I'd do a quick post about them.

Four of the seven were the Korean players in the set:

#19

#93

#26

#68

Edman, Kim and Park had all appeared in other 2023 WBC sets but Yang had not.

Next up were the cards of two long time NPB foreign players - although one of them no longer qualifies as a foreigner because he played in Japan long enough:

#27

#7

I picked up this last card simply because I like Harry Ford:

#35

The cards themselves look OK.  They've got a shiny finish on them that make them a little difficult to scan.  One thing I really like about them is the backs have the player's WBC stats and not just for the 2023 WBC.  Balentien and Despaigne's cards show their stats for the 2013 and 2017 tournaments as well while Kim and Yang's cards each have their stats for 2017.  Ford's card has his stats from the 2022 WBC qualifier as well.

After getting these today, I took a look to see what was available at Sportlots and I ended up ordering four more cards - Yu Chang from Taiwan, Andrelton Simmons from the Netherlands, Robbie Glendinning from Australia and Yu Darvish from Samurai Japan (Darvish being the one of the six Japanese players whose cards aren't more than I want to pay).  Not sure if I'm going to get any other cards.  I could see myself getting the other two Australian players maybe but that's probably about it.