Showing posts with label Women's Baseball. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Women's Baseball. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 4, 2024

Ayami Sato

The Toronto Maple Leafs of the semi-pro Intercounty Baseball League announced yesterday that they had signed Madonna Japan's legendary pitcher Ayami Sato to a contract, presumably for the 2025 season.  It's funny - I had never heard of this league before last week when the Hamilton Cardinals announced their signing of Fernando Rodney and now they've had two big news stories in as many weeks.

I thought I'd take this opportunity to show off the cards I have of Sato.  I'm pretty sure I've shown all of these before but never in a single post.  All the cards I have of her are from the Japan Women's Baseball League sets from either AIAIO or Epoch - as far as I know, there are no cards of her with either Madonna Japan or the Lions' Women's team.

2015 AIAIO JWBL #D15-18-01

2016 Epoch JWBL #43

2017 AIAIO #D17-18-05

2017 AIAIO (unnumbered)

2018 AIAIO #18-18-C1

2018 Epoch JWBL #13

That's Minami Takatsuka with Sato on the unnumbered 2017 card.

I have one more card of Sato although she's not identified on it.  The unnumbered 2015 AIAIO card features a photo with a single member of each of the four JWBL teams:


Sato's obviously on the top left with Yuki Kawabata on the top right.  Not positive about the other two players but my best guesses are Yasuko Ohsawa on the lower left and Haruna Tadano on the lower right (although I easily could be wrong).

I'll close this post by mentioning that I was fortunate enough to see Sato pitch during my trip to Japan in 2019.  I went to a JWBL game between Aichi Dione and Saitama Astraia in Ichinomiya, Aichi and Sato was the starter for Dione.  She gave up three runs in the top of the first and loaded the bases with no one out in the second before bearing down and getting out of trouble without giving up any more runs.  She did end up losing the game, however.  Here's a couple not very good photos of her on the mound:




Tuesday, May 28, 2024

GPBL Cards

Since I feel like I have a big backlog of cards to deal with, I'm going to kick off my trip-related posts with some posts about the cards I brought back.  This first post deals with some cards from the Girls Professional Baseball League (GPBL) which was the original name of the Japan Women's Baseball League (JWBL).  I had seen a four card lot of BBM's cards from the league a few months back and asked Ryan to pick it up for me.

There were four cards in the lot - two from 2010 and two from 2011.  Let's talk about the 2010 cards first:

2010 BBM Hyogo Swing Smileys #H08

2010 BBM Hyogo Swing Smileys #HS03

From just looking at the cards, it's not entirely obvious that they're from the same set.  The card number of the first cards has an "H" prefix while the second one has an "HS" prefix.  Luckily, the lot contained the envelope that the cards were distributed in and it has a checklist on it:



The Matsumoto card is in the first column while the Hagiwara card is in the second.  It looks like the "H" checklist and the "HS" checklist are the same.  I'm guessing the "S" in "HS" stands for something like "shiny" as the Hagiwara card has a foil finish on it.

These are the first 2010 GPBL cards I've gotten.  I assume these cards were distrubuted in the envelope at games that year but that's really just speculation on my part.  I know that that in 2011 there were essentially three GPBL sets by BBM (a Hyogo Swing Smileys team set, a Kyoto Asta Dreams team set and a 70-ish card set featuring all the players from both teams) but I have no idea if that was the case in 2010 also.  All I know for sure is that they did team sets for both Hyogo (which these cards came from) and Kyoto (which Ryan has the envelope from).  

Moving on to the 2011 cards...

2011 BBM Hyogo Swing Smileys #H21

2011 BBM Hyogo Swing Smileys #H15

It again is not completely obvious that these cards are from the same set but the checklist that Ryan sent me previously shows both of these cards.  It looks like cards 1-17 and cards 21-37 have the same players but have a slightly different design.

It also appears that BBM did not reuse the same photos for the team set and the 70-ish card GPBL set as neither card of Nonomura from the GPBL set (one of which can be seen here and the other can be seen in this post of Ryan's) use the same photo as the Nonomura card I have here.  Of course, that's just a data point of one so maybe it doesn't hold up for the rest of the cards.

I'd love to get more of these cards but it's so rare that I come across any.

Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Madonna Japan Members In Australia

The 2024 Australian Women's Showcase will be played next week in Lismore, New South Wales and there are five members of Madonna Japan, the Japanese women's national team, who will be participating in it.  Three of those five are veterans of the Japan Women's Baseball League (JWBL) so I thought I'd do a quick post on them.

2018 Epoch JWBL #52

Akari Hoshikawa played four seasons in the JWBL with Reia (2017), Kyoto Flora (2018) and Aichi Dione (2019-20).  2019 was probably her best season when she hit .339 and had a league leading .480 on-base-percentage.  She won the Best Nine award that year at third base.   Since leaving the JWBL (and the league folding), she's been playing for the Awaji Brave Oceans.

2018 Epoch JWBL #53

Tamaki Muramatsu was probably the best catcher in the JWBL's final couple seasons.  She spent five years in the league with her first two seasons with Reia, which was essentially a farm team for the other three teams in the league.  When she graduated to the Kyoto Flora in 2018 she hit .331 and won the Rookie Of The Year award and her first Best 9 award.  She led the league in RBIs in 2019 and won a second Best 9 award.  After the league folded, she was a founding member of the Hanshin Tigers women's team although she ultimately only played for them for one year.  She's been playing for the Hatsukaichi Sun Blaze since 2022.

2018 Epoch JWBL #27

Miwa Naraoka spent six seasons (2013-18) playing for Saitama Astraia and had a career batting average of .311.  She won three Best Nine awards (2016-18), two Golden Gloves (2016-17) and led the league in hits in 2016.  She also pitched in a handful of games in 2014-15.  After retiring from the JWBL, she spent several years playing for the Agec Women's Baseball Club before founding the Kyushu Honeys with Yuki Kawabata.

It doesn't look like either of the other two players, Erika Nakae and Miwa Tanaka, ever played in the JWBL.  Tanaka is currently a member of the Yomiuri Giants' women's team but I'm not sure what team Nakae plays for.

The tournament will be held from May 9th through the 12th and features the Adelaide Giants, Brisbane Bandits and Victoria Aces.  Hoshikawa, Muramatsu and Tanaka will be joining Adelaide for the weekend while Nakae and Naraoka will be with the Aces.

Sunday, February 18, 2024

JWBL Cards

Ryan had sent me a handful of cards for the Japan Women's Baseball League (JWBL) and I thought I'd do a quick post on them.

First up is a card from the 2011 BBM set for the league when it was still called the "Girl's Professional Baseball League" (GPBL).  I've written about this set before so really all I'm going to say about it is that it's the "kira" card for Maya Kawaho:

2011 BBM GPBL #40

AIAIO did cards for the JWBL from 2013 (if not earlier) to 2019 (if not later).  Ryan picked up these two unnumbered cards from the 2013 set for me:




He also picked up these two 2017 cards for me:




I believe that those are real signatures on the front of the cards although that could just be wishful thinking.  

These cards help a little in the ongoing struggle to make sense of the 2017 AIAIO JWBL cards.  Kawabata's card is the first 2017 card I've seen with a card number with an "04" suffix.  Taniyama's card number has an "05" suffix on it and the card design matches the design of the only other 2017 card I have with an "05" suffix - Ayami Sato (which is somewhat fitting to me personally since I saw these two pitchers face off against each other at the JWBL game I went to in 2019).  

Thursday, July 20, 2023

Tigers Women Vs Giants Women

I wanted to do a quick post mentioning that this Saturday at 1800 JST the Hanshin Tigers' women's team will take on the Yomiuri Giants' women's team at Koshien Stadium.  The game will be telecast on Toratele (which can be subscribed to from outside Japan) and Sun TV (don't know the availability outside Japan).

I bring this up because there was a tweet yesterday from the official Koshien Twitter account that they would be selling bento boxes featuring some sort of beef entree at the game which will include baseball cards for the Tigers' women's team.  These would be the first baseball cards I'm aware of for the team.

Since I don't think I'll be making it out to Koshien in time, I will be looking for these on the secondary market.