Matt and I have been working hard to complete a 2022 Set in the original, 2000-style! I'm happy to report that we've finished it, along with a nice assortment of classic stars that we wanted to make as we were going along... I think Matt may have a special plan in store for these cards, the 2022 set, and the OG 2000 set ;)
Without further ado, let's take a look at some classic stars to re-introduce most players favorite Showdown art style!
Up next is yet another 101 win NL East team -- the New York Mets! Frontrunners the majority of the year, a cold spell down the final stretch cursed the Mets to tie for the division crown and play in the "wild card" round... resulting in a brutal bouncing at the hands of the Padres! Despite playoff disappointment, the Mets are great in Showdown form, especially with the 1-2 punch at the top of the rotation!
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Let's get to the 2022 squad!
Introducing the 2011 Showdown Set in 2001 style! With both the Steroid Era (1994-2009) and the Statcast Era (2015-2022) of MLB well represented by Showdown sets, I thought it was time to give the players we remember from the in-between period (the Post-Steroid Era) some love. Many players have never had a Showdown card made as part of a sizable set, so have fun with the novelty of new options for your rosters!
What sort of set is this compared to the ones Showdown players are familiar with? The biggest difference between this and the Showdown Era (OG) sets is
After winning 106 games, Houston entered the playoffs as the #1 seed and the unquestioned favorite in the AL... and they lived up to the hype, cruising to their second title in six seasons. As I mentioned in the classics post, we switched to the 00 style for this set, so please enjoy some Houston studs!
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The young, flashy and exciting Chicago White Sox broke through as World Series contenders in 2021. While their playoff run ended disappointingly in the ALDS, they look like they'll be a serious threat for the next 3-5 years (especially when every other team in the division looks to be in rebuilding stages in 2022). Despite their young and passionate core, they brought in Tony La Russa to manage. Despite some bumps in the road (and a ton of injuries), they won 97 games! If they run it back this year and get the same amount of production from the bullpen/rotation while staying healthier.... 100+ wins and the chance at greater postseason success, here they come!
Thanks to help with the formulas and calculations from Matt, my main card creator buddy and the undisputed master of bringing NBA Showdown into the modern age (including his awesome re-imagining of the game with offense/defense rather than speed/power), I went on a bit of a card creating binge. Like, a lot of cards from a lot of teams. And I want to share them with y'all!
I'm going to start with 234 cards from the 2020s -- I made 8 players per team, plus some scattered superstar cards here and there that seemed fitting from the past few years. I hope you enjoy, and let me know which teams were better/worse than you anticipated!
2020 Los Angeles Lakers (52-19, #1 Seed in West, NBA Champions)
The National League pennant winner was fortunate to the playoffs expanded to allow 6 seeds... and boy oh boy, did they take advantage! Dominating the Cardinals, powering past the NL East champion Braves and then cruising past their fellow wild card Padres in five games, the 9-2 run to the World Series was a sight to behold! The Phillies are led by their big free agent pickups from the last few seasons - Bryce Harper (duh), Zack Wheeler and Kyle Schwarber. Personally, I'm excited to see if they can build on those 87 regular season wins after signing Trea Turner this offseason and, perhaps, snag their first title since 2008!
Now let's get to the 2022 squad!
At one point, it seemed like we were back in 1998: the Yankees had the best record in baseball, the pitching staff was lights out 1-5, the lineup was cruising, and Aaron Judge was the surefire MVP candidate. Unfortunately for the Bronx Bombers (and fortunately for the rest of America), only one of those midseason snapshots was still true by season's end, creating the reason most of you are excited for the Yankees post -- AL MVP Aaron Judge, the new AL home run king! That said, the Yankees still finished with 99 wins and advanced to the ALCS, where they ran into that buzzsaw of an Astros squad.
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Let's get to Judge (and crew)!!
The 2021 NPB regular season is set to wrap up soon (they took a couple weeks off for the Olympics) so what better time to look back at the 2019 season? Just like the 2020 season, the Softbank Hawks won the Japan series over the Yomiuri Giants.
Hayato Sakamoto headlined the Giants and took the MVP award in the Central league. Oddly enough, no one was awarded the Sawamura Award for the best pitcher overall (it covers both Central and Pacific League). As no one met the award committee's, "high standards". It's especially odd when you see Yoshinobu Yamamoto's card when I cover the Pacific League. I suspect they overlooked him since he was only 20 years old in 2019 and Japan really likes to acknowledge the veterans. If you recall, Yamamoto had a great card in 2020. And he's been the best pitcher again in 2021 (1.46 ERA in 186 innings at the time of writing this post). I'm really hoping he makes the jump to the MLB at some point.
I went with a 2001 aesthetic this time around. Although the way I did the points stayed the same so that the sets could be used together, if desired. I ran a few multiple regression analysis models for the points to try and eliminate outliers, so I am hoping I cleaned up that area from the previous set I made. There are a few cards I would adjust from that set (which is on TTS available for anyone to use). I believe the photographs I was able to use are a step up from 2020, as I realized I could search for names using Japanese characters (through Google translate) and I would find a much better sampling to select from.
Special thanks to all the card creators. Matt, Peter, Bob, Jeff, Matt Gula. And anyone else from the discord that weighed in on design choices. As always, I welcome feedback!
Let's start with the Central League!
Yomiuri Giants 77-64-2 1st place Central League. Lost to the Hawks in the Japan Series.
Some familiar faces on this team from the 2020 set. The aforementioned MVP winner Sakamoto had a prodigious season and card to match. Shun Yamaguchi is a workhorse and would be someone's early draft pick. Hirokazu Sawamura came over and pitched for the Red Sox in 2021 and gets a solid, if not spectacular, card with the Giants. Tomoyuki Sugano won the Sawamura Award in 2017, 2018, and the Best 9 award in 2020, but in 2019 was only so-so.
Foils: Hayato Sakamoto, Yoshihiro Maru, Shun Yamaguchi
We're back in the NL for the next team -- the 111 win LA Dodgers, who somehow improved on 2021's 106 campaign... and failed to win the World Series either year. This year, the Dodgers cruised to their incredible win mark due to depth at.... well, basically every position, even sans Max Scherzer. Let's just keep the refrain going -- another year, another "Dodgers would win 120 games and the World Series with me as the manager" post!
Let's check out the squad!
Today is one of my favorite days in sports, especially for the NBA, outside of Opening Night, the playoffs, and the NBA Finals the trade deadline is so exciting, and today lived up to the hype. New beginnings for players and teams, as well as the fans can try to imagine the way their favorite team or least favorite team, will now look after a roster shakeup. If you're a big NBA fan like me, Woj and Shams were blowing your phone up today and the few days leading up to the deadline with notifications. So what I did was take my NBA Showdown format and much like the MLB Trade Deadline set, I tried to make cards for the players that I believe were the most impactful of those moved this past week. Lets go over the trades
FINALLY breaking their twenty year playoff drought, the Mariners were absolutely America's darlings this year, even if they fell sadly short in the ALDS. They've got an exciting superstar in AL rookie of the year Julio Rodriguez, whose combination of speed, power, defense and charisma in CF has everyone thinking of one former star...
Now let's see the 2022 squad!
This, like most of my projects, started as a small idea to make a few Super Season cards and then spiraled out of control into me making a full set (with eyes on a second set already...). This is not meant to be a comprehensive list of all the best seasons in Japanese baseball history, but rather a mix of legends and some fun Super Seasons. With an emphasis on players that played in both MLB and NPB, and/or players with cards in the original sets. While making the set, I found a nice YouTube video (link) with a list of the 100 best NPB players ever and the best offensive seasons ever (link). I leaned heavily on these both to fill out the set, with each of the 100 players earning at least one card. I used the defensive and WAR stats from this website as well. A truly invaluable (if slightly dubious when it comes to old defensive stats) resource, as when I started I was going off of reputation for the defensive ratings.
For players with a single card, I generally picked their best WAR season, although sometimes I just picked their best overall offensive season. For players with multiple cards, I mostly tried to pick two seasons that were good, but different enough to make two unique cards. For example, Hiromitsu Kadota's two best seasons by OPS were 1981 and 1988, but his slash lines in those years were, .313/.431/.655/1.086 and .311/.429/.633/1.062 respectively, so it wouldn't be that fun to make two almost identical cards. So he has some "worse" seasons for cards because they are more unique. Also, if they had long careers with multiple teams, I tried to represent each.
I went back and forth on the best ways to present these cards...but I think I've settled on the first post being the best 100 players in NPB history (again based on that video) and then the second post will be the rest (Don't worry plenty of fun ones there too).
Quick note on photos and logos. I did my best to match years and uniforms, but with some sparse photography out there for most of these players it is a crapshoot. And sometimes in the case of photos and logos I chose aesthetics over accuracy.
The National League was extremely top-heavy with THREE teams earning over 100 wins in 2022, including Atlanta, the NL East champion. While none of those teams even advanced to the NLCS, they're all loaded in Showdown -- for Atlanta, even with Acuna performing well below his usual standard due to injury, that means a deep rotation and very, very fun bullpen.
Let's get to the team!
One thing I failed to mention was the "Legend" vs "Super Seasons" distinction. Simply out, before 1990 and the card, got the NPB Legend logo and look and after 1990 they got the Super Season logo and look. Rather arbitrary. Just like the order these cards are presented in.
Your NL Central champions!!! They started slow and ended seemingly even slower, and then bowed out of the postseason almost immediately... but it was still the best Brewers team of my lifetime and continued what's almost inarguably been the greatest 4-year stretch in Brewers history (postseason every season!).
Its been a long time since I have posted some NBA stuff on the blog, been doing most things on my own, and showing glimpses on twitter and in the discord. But here I am back, as I am slowly working on the 2022 NBA Showdown Set. Now since last time, some thing have changed, and I know my formulas have changed multiple times, but while the original game was fun, I could never pinpoint exact calculations in the speed and power area, and found some flaws and exploitations in how they rated players. So I went back to my original style, and that is an offensive and defensive rating. To me it plays better in a team building style, as you decide do I take the offensive guy who is a defensive liability, or do I build with a more balanced player. In my opinion it can lead to more versatility in team building. So as the Finals are about to begin I figured I would kick it off with the two final teams standing in the NBA. This should give you an idea of what to expect from this set. I will try to give more explanations as I go along about the changes in the game as well.
It is officially World Series Week, and I for one a hyped, the Tampa Bay Rays and Los Angeles Dodgers are going to have an awesome series with lots of showdown star power in the series. In this post were going to look at the AL West and if it wasn't for Tampa Bay, we may have had the worst World Series Showdown team ever. Not because of them being a bunch of cheaters, but because the regular season version of the Astros was not very good... all the averages and on bases dipped from the last couple years (since they must now see how hard it is to hit like every other team in the league when you don't know what is coming). Okay, I have gotten all my Astros bashing out of the way, so let's BANG on through the AL West and see what the studs (and duds tbh) will be joining the set of stars and that have already been released.
