TOKYO — Steps away from Shibuya Crossing, known as the busiest crosswalk in the world, the Topps logo is branded across the entrance to a building, bracketed by images of baseball cards featuring some of the most notable Chicago Cubs and Los Angeles Dodgers players.
Ahead of next week’s Tokyo Series between the teams, Topps launched an interactive trading-card experience to celebrate Japan’s baseball icons. Open through Sunday, the three-floor immersive experience brings fans through the card-collecting world, both shining a spotlight on stars such as Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui and educating how Topps has built its passionate collecting community.
Expanding beyond the United States is a key part of the evolution for Topps, which had its trading-card and collectibles division bought by Fanatics in 2022. Tapping into Asia and particularly Japan has been an emphasis for the company, which is in its fourth year of creating baseball products exclusive to the Japanese market.
“We’re trying to build the momentum, take a very long-term perspective on Japan,” Topps president of trading cards David Leiner said. “Generally speaking, the market here, you have a population of 130 million people, half of them love baseball, so long term we see this as a great market and a really great collector base.”
The top floor of the Topps pop-up features an exhibit dedicated to Shohei Ohtani that includes video highlights of his career and display cases of his cards, donated by collectors, plus two items the slugger contributed himself: a base from his 50-50 game in Miami last year and a bat he used in the World Series.
“The Japanese market was steadily building anyway. (Ohtani) just poured gasoline on the fire,” Leiner said. “Card collecting over here has been growing. Our sales were growing. Shohei, I mean, his career has been great. … It’s really just propelled things.
“I think the levels we’re achieving now we would have achieved without Shohei. We’re getting there a lot faster. Baseball sees big opportunities across Asia, and we’re right there with them in lockstep.”
While Ohtani is a clear driving force for Topps in Japan, there are signs the impact goes beyond the Dodgers superstar, aided by an infusion of Japanese talent in the majors over the last five years that includes the Cubs’ Shota Imanaga and Seiya Suzuki and the Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto and now Roki Sasaki. Their presence in two of the largest U.S. media markets certainly doesn’t hurt either.
In 2021, Topps’ sales in Japan came in at $1.5 million, a figure that increased to $22.6 million in 2024, according to Topps Japan data. The company is expecting a tenfold increase in sales and collectors in the next five years, attributing that impending growth in part to an expansion of local hobby stores in Japan.
Topps has plans for at least six Japanese-specific products this year among its popular Nippon Professional Baseball series, the J1 League (the country’s top professional soccer league) and MLB products specific to the Japanese market in collaboration with Ohtani, who has an exclusive long-term deal with Topps.
Leiner believes Japan is an “easy” nine-figure market for revenue after Topps hit more than $800 million in global baseball sales last year.
“What’s tricky about our market in general is the demand is well exceeding our supply, which is great for collectibles, but we allocate a lot of product,” Leiner said. “So we’ll allocate Japan, say, we might allocate 250 cases. The demand might be 800, it might be 1,000.
“So what we’re trying to do is, when we grow the market, grow it properly, ensure that the product’s being opened, it’s being collected, it’s being consumed. We want to avoid any junk-wax era. We don’t want to oversupply a market.”
One difference Topps has noticed between baseball card collectors in Japan, and by extension in Asia, and the U.S. market is they tend to buy and hold more products than American collectors, who buy and hold but also flip, rip and trade cards.
The potential in baseball-loving Japan is obviously appealing, and products such as Topps’ Tokyo Series special Series 1 release highlight how the company is looking to tap into that area. It started working with Takashi Murakami on the special Tokyo Series box set about six months ago to have it ready to release in time.
“We’re in early days here in Japan for where we can take the market, so we’re really trying to build awareness here, educate collectors,” Leiner said. “And a lot of what we’re doing here, these are entry-level price points as well. There’s definitely demand here for high-end $10,000 boxes and all that. But we think, ultimately, to be most successful and to really grow the market and to introduce new collectors, we’ve got to have some lower-level price points to get people to try it.”
Leiner, 42, has had an up-close look at Topps’ evolution over the last 15 years since joining the company initially as its director of finance. A Highland Park native, Leiner grew up a Cubs fan and remembers filling binders with cards, calling it an embedded part of his childhood.
Leiner’s love of baseball and sports cards led him to run a sports memorabilia and promotions company in high school and through college at Indiana, ultimately exiting that business when he got a job in investment banking and private equity with Goldman Sachs.
While Leiner enjoyed the financial industry, he loved running businesses and eventually joined Topps in 2009, working his way up from the business side to running the global sports and entertainment group until Topps became part of Fanatics, after which he took over his current role.
As a lifelong Cubs fan, Leiner has seen firsthand on the Topps side the impact winning teams on the North Side can have in the card-collecting world. The Cubs’ success between 2015 and 2019 with young stars showed how much the industry taps into those types of teams and players.
“Having a big market like Chicago, 100 years of being Lovable Losers isn’t great for business and isn’t a great moniker to have,” Leiner said, “so when the Cubs made that run, when they won the World Series for the first time in 108 years, it had a really good impact to the business. Kris Bryant was one of the faces of the business. … New York, L.A., Chicago, Boston — these markets, they matter.”
As the Cubs try to return to the postseason, they have built a new core over the last three years. And though much of the attention during the Tokyo Series is deservedly on their Japanese stars, Imanaga and Suzuki, it provides a platform for the country to get to know other players such as Pete Crow-Armstrong, whose Topps Rising Stars card was featured on the wall leading to an exhibit.
“Ourselves and our collectors really like to focus on the young players, the young stars, who’s next?” Leiner said. “And a lot of these young guys, they come up, they’re very exciting and everyone’s looking to find who is that next Mike Trout, that next Derek Jeter, players like that. So Pete Crow-Armstrong is a great example: young, fun, exciting player, really high ceiling to see where he goes.
“A lot of times you have your big markets that drive it obviously, but then it’s those young stars that can really propel as well.”
Originally Published: March 14, 2025 at 7:10 AM CDT
