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2013 BBM Lions Promo

November 1, 2014, 1:27 pm
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I got a package in the mail the other day with my recent Yahoo! Japan Auction pickups (via kuboTEN).  I'll be doing a couple posts in the next day or two about what I got.

The first item is a small (10 card) promo set that BBM did for last year's Lions team set.  9 of the cards are basically parallels of nine base cards in the Lions team set and the tenth card is a promo parallel of one of the insert cards.  Like many of the promo cards that BBM distributes via book stores and magazines, the regular and promo versions of the cards use the same photos but the promo version uses different colors.  Here's an example:

2013 BBM Lions #L43 & Promo #PR7
The backs of the cards are identical except for the card numbers:


The promo for the insert card has a tad more information about the set.  Apparently these cards were distributed at a "Stadium Event", presumably Seibu Dome.  I did a little bit of looking around on the web and I found some information that may be for the event.

2013 BBM Lions #LV8 & Promo #PR10
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2014 BBM WE LOVE HOKKAIDO

November 1, 2014, 2:08 pm
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The Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters do a promotion each year (I think) called "We Love Hokkaido" where they wear a special uniform for a number of games.  This year, BBM put out a box set in conjunction with the promotion.  Entitled "WE LOVE HOKKAIDO", it's a 29 card box set with 28 cards in the base set and any number of possible "special" cards - real or facsimile autographs or die-cut cards were among the possibilities.  As usual with this sort of thing, I picked up an opened box, so I just have the base set.

What I find interesting about this set is that it shows players wearing the uniforms used in previous year's promotions.  According to the inner flap of the box, players can be shown wearing the 2007 (dark blue with a black left sleeve), 2008 (black with a dark blue left sleeve), 2009 (dark purple(?) with a light purple "yoke" and left sleeve), 2010 (gold with a black left sleeve) and 2013 (red with a white left sleeve).  In fact, while the box shows players modeling the 2014 version of the uniform, none of the players are shown wearing it - I think this is because the cards were being sold at the same time as this year's promotion.

Beyond the photos, I think that this set has one of the more attractive layouts that BBM has done.  I'm not usually much for cards with no backgrounds but the dark background used here with an overlay of the silhouette of Hokkaido looks very good.  And the horizontal format is also very nice.  Here's some example cards showing each year of uniform (along with the 2014 regular uniform):

#27

#05

#13

#21

#01

#12
You can see all the cards at Jambalaya and Ryan had a good write up on the set as well.

BBM did a similarly themed set for the Hawks a few years back where they included cards of players wearing the annual brightly colored jerseys from previous years.


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Card Of The Week November 2

November 2, 2014, 3:13 pm
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The 2014 Nippon Series wrapped up last Thursday with the Hawks beating the Tigers 1-0 in Game Five  to win the Series 4 games to 1.  While the 4 games to 1 total might make you think this was a very one-sided series, it actually was pretty exciting.  Games Two and Five were each decided by one run and Game Four went 10 innings before the Hawks won on a three run sayanora home run by Akira Nakamura.  The Series also featured one of the most unique endings ever as the Tsuyoshi Nishioka was called out for interference on a throw to first for the final out of Game Five.

I thought I'd feature cards of all the award winners for the Series (or at least the ones that BBM used to highlight in their Nippon Series sets):

Series MVP Seiichi Uchikawa (2001 Upper Deck #1)

"Fighting Spirit" Randy Messenger (2010 BBM 1st Version #121)

Outstanding Player Yuki Yanagita (2011 BBM Rookie Edition #002)

Outstanding Player Dennis Sarfate (2012 Front Runner Carp Starting Lineup #11)

Outstanding Player Shota Takeda (2013 BBM Hawks 75th Anniversary #91)

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2014 BBM 2nd Version Set

November 8, 2014, 7:52 pm
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It was Christmas for me this past week - on Monday I got a box of goodies from Ryan in the mail and on Tuesday I got a package of the latest BBM and Calbee sets from Hiro. So I've been busy getting cards organized and trying to get started on all the related posts - I'm hoping to have them all wrapped up in less than a week but we'll see...

2014 BBM 2nd Version Set Summary

Size: 301 cards (cards numbered 409-696, then 13 cards of "Ceremonial First Pitch" subset are separately numbered FP01-FP13)
Cards Per Team: 19 (team card + 18 players)
Team Card Theme: Candids
Number Of Leader Cards: N/A
Checklists: 0
Subsets: 1st Version Update (36), Ceremonial First Pitch (13), Birth Of Hero (12), Power To The Team (12)
Inserts: Binary Star
Memorabilia Cards: 6 rookie memorabilia cards (numbered to 200 with a limited to 20 patch parallel for 5 cards), 9 "Art Of Auto" autographed cards
Parallels: At least one signature parallel for some of the 1st Version Update cards. Silver, Gold (numbered to 100), Holographic (numbered to 50) and Red (numbered to 25) signature parallels for subset of the regular cards (between 4 and 6 per team). Foil parallels of the "Power To The Team" and "Birth Of Hero" subsets (numbered to 100). Holographic foil parallel of "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards. I think there are two separate autograph parallels for the "Binary Star" insert set (one numbered to 100 and one numbered to 25) but I don't know the details.
Notable Rookies: None

There's something about this year's 2nd Version set that doesn't quite sit well with me but I can't quite put my finger on it. The design of the regular cards isn't bad - some circles and lines with text at the bottom of the card that doesn't get in the way of the picture. And the photography is the typically fine photography that we've come to expect from BBM:

#477
#445
#639
#585
#481
I think my problem with the set is that although the photography is very good, the pictures are all pretty much run of the mill - pitchers pitching, batters batting and fielders fielding. There aren't any shots of players running the bases or even just sitting in the dugout or high-fiving a team mate. In past years some of the photos in the 2nd Version sets have featured some of the odd promo uniforms some of the teams will wear for a series or two during the season but other than a couple Lotte players wearing the "Chiba" jersey and one shot of Tatsuhiko Kinjoh wearing an alternate DeNA jersey, I think everyone in this set's in the standard home or away jerseys.

I will also make my annual comment that some of the players have photos in this set that are very similar to their 1st Version cards, like Yoshio Itoi:

1st Version #122, 2nd Version #530
These are minor gripes, though, as the set is quite nice. Although the grey on the backs keeps reminding me of the 1993 Classic Best minor league cards...

#656 (Tetsuto Yamada)
The stats on the back of the cards are up to May 18th this season.

Twenty seven of the players featured in the regular cards did not appear in the 1st Version set: Kenta Asakura, Tatsuro Hamada, Masato Matsui and Shinji Tajima of Chunichi; Ryota Imanari and Minoru Iwata of Hanshin; Shingo Ishikawa, Naoki Miyanishi and Kenji Satoh of Nippon Ham; Takuya Hara and Kei Igawa of Orix; Masato Kumashiro, Hichori Morimoto, Tomomi Takahashi, Naoto Watanabe and Randy Williams of Seibu; Hiroyuki Fukuyama, Wataru Karashima, Akihisa Makida, Tetsuro Nishida and Takahiro Shiomi of Rakuten; Takahiro Araki, Ryohei Kiya and Orlando Roman of Yakult; Shuichiro Osada and Shun Yamaguchi of DeNA and Yuya Kubo of Yomiuri.

Once again, there's a 36 card "1st Version Update" subset that features three players per team who also did not have a card in the 1st Version. A couple times in the past there have been players who both appeared in the Update subset and the regular 2nd Version cards but that is not the case this year. As usual, there are a number of late signing foreigners (John Bowker, Ernesto Mejia, Anthony Carter, Loek Van Mil) and other Japanese players who for whatever reason were left out of 1st Version but made more of a contribution than BBM expected - Kenshin Kawakami, Nobuhiko Matsunaka, Keiichi Hirano, Itaru Hashimoto. Or not (Yuki Saitoh). As always, I have no idea why BBM selects some players to show up in this subset rather than just give them 2nd Version cards. Significantly, the Update subset contains cards of the first two non-defector Cuban players to join NPB this season - Frederich Cepeda and Yulieski Gurriel. Since Gurriel didn't join the Baystars until early June, I was pleasantly surprised to see him in this set:

#439
#428
The "Birth Of Hero" subset features 12 players (one for each team) who are either rookies or close to it.  I'm a bit thrown by the fact that Carp pitcher "Allen Kuri" is labelled "Aren Kuri" both here and on his regular 2nd Version card.

#669
The "Power To The Team" subset contains 12 cards (one per team but you probably had already guessed that).  Each of the players represented is a foreigner.  Despite the use of "Power" in the title, they aren't all power hitters - pitchers are also included (and I don't know enough about them to tell if they are "power" pitchers).

#679
I've classified the team cards as having "candid" shots but most of them appear to be some sort of post game thing - either the team celebrating on the field (although I actually don't think this Buffaloes one is a post game celebration) or something going on during the "hero of the game" interviews.  

#689

#688

On the other hand, I'm really not sure what the one for the Giants is about at all:

#691
For the first time, BBM separated the "Ceremonial First Pitch" subset into a separately numbered non-premium subset.  I have no idea why, although I wonder if they are considering making it an insert set.  This year's role call of Japanese celebrities is model Yuka Harada, boxer Naoya Inoue, comedian Eiko Kano, ski jumper Noriaki Kasai, model Ruriko Kojima (WARNING - link is NSFW), actor, screenwriter, etc Kankuro Kudoh,  volleyball player Megumi Kurihara, actress/singer Erina Mano, model Tsubasa Masuwaka, model Karen Michibata, 2014 Miss Nippon Moeka Numata, wrestler Bob Sapp and actor Nobuo Yana.

#FP07
Ryan did a post on this set back when it came out in August (and I used some of his information for this post, along with SCM #106).  Jambalaya has all the base set cards, most of the inserts and a bunch of the parallel and memorabilia cards up on their site.
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2014 Epoch Carp The First Victory 40th Anniversary

November 8, 2014, 8:56 pm
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The box that Ryan sent me last week contain mostly a bunch of box sets that between March (when I got his last box) through August or so.  Most of the box sets were from either Front Runner or BBM so I'll do posts on them in groups but there was a single set from Epoch that I'll do in this post all by itself.

The Hiroshima Carp were an "expansion" team that came into existence (or at least graduated from amateur to professional status) when professional baseball in Japan moved from the eight teams in one league format of 1949 to the 15 teams in two leagues format of 1950.  Like many of the other teams in NBP not named the Lions, Hawks or Giants, it took a while for the Carp to become much of a success.  Their first Central League pennant wasn't until 1975 and their first Nippon Series championship wasn't until 1979.  They've gone the longest in NPB since their last Series Championship (1984) and their last Central League pennant (1991).  So all six Central League pennants and three Nippon Series championships for the Carp came between 1975 and 1991.  This is a short enough period that a player could fit all six years into their career, although I don't think anyone quite did it - Manabu Kitabeppu missed the 1975 pennant winner by one year and Koji Yamamoto played for the first five winners and managed the 1991 team.

Now you might not think that 2014 is a round number anniversary year for 1975 but apparently you would be wrong - 2014 is the 40th season since 1975 (if you include 1975) so it would be completely appropriate to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the Carp's "First Victory" in 1975.  I don't know if the Carp themselves did anything this year to celebrate but Epoch decided to release a box set back in the spring to commemorate it.

Epoch has been releasing a couple box sets a year with the All Japan Baseball Foundation/OB Club/Japanese Baseball Promotion Club since 2009 but for whatever reason they decided this year to release this particular box set on their own.  The set came with an autographed card but (as always) I got an opened set with just the base cards.

The base set has 54 cards - 48 player cards and six cards for each year the Carp won the pennant.  The 48 cards contain pretty much everyone you'd expect - Yamamoto, Kitabeppu, Sachio Kinugasa, Yutaka Ohno, Yoshiro Sotokoba and Yutaka Enatsu along with some more recent players like Koichi Ogata, Shinji Sasaoka, Kenjiro Nomura and Tomonori Maeda.  All three managers from 1975 to 1991 - Takeshi Koba, Junro Anan and Yamamoto - are all included although Yamamoto is depicted as a player.  Epoch managed to sign a couple players who didn't show up in any of BBM's OB Carp sets - Shuichi Fukasawa and Shigeki Morioka. Pretty much the only players who are missing are the foreign players - Gail Hopkins, Richie Scheinblum, Adrian Garrett, and Jim Lyttle are the most significant of these.

The cards themselves are pleasant enough - they're a nice sturdy stock.  All the photos are pretty much run of the mill shots - a couple are black and white (Fukasawa and Morioka actually) but the majority are color.  Probably my biggest gripe would be that the gold embossed lettering doesn't show up in scans very well.

Here's a sample of the cards - you can see all of them either at Jambalaya or Ryan's blog:

#47 (Koji Yamamoto)

#06 (Yutaka Enatsu)

#40 (Tomonori Maeda)

#07 (Tsuyoshi Ohshita)

#49 (1975 Central League Champs)

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Card Of The Week November 9

November 9, 2014, 2:51 pm
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I'm a little late on this news but almost two weeks ago it was announced that Chihiro Kaneko of the Orix Buffaloes had won this year's Sawamura award.  There's been a lot of speculation that Kaneko might ask the Buffaloes to post him this offseason which since it's kind of not looking like the Carp are going to post Kenta Maeda would make him the biggest prize coming out of NPB this winter.  Actually that might be the case even if the Carp do post Maeda.

Here's a card of Kaneko from the 2008 Calbee set - they did a "Opening Game" subset that year featuring a card each for the starter and cleanup hitter on Opening Day for each team - the cleanup hitter for Orix that day was Tuffy Rhodes (just so you know):

2008 Calbee #OP-23

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BBM Box Sets From Spring 2014

November 9, 2014, 5:18 pm
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Continuing with the bounty from the package from Ryan, here's a write up about four of the box sets that BBM put out earlier this year.  As usual, I got all opened sets but each of these sets had some premium card included - autographs, die-cut parallels, etc.

The National Honor

Last May the Japanese government conferred the "People's Honour Award" on Shigeo Nagashima and Hideki Matsui.  Both BBM and Calbee included cards in their sets last year commemorating the cermony but BBM decided to up the ante by releasing a box set called The National Honor which included four cards for each of the four baseball players who've won the award - Sadaharu Oh (I think the award was "invented" to honor him in 1977), Sachio Kinugasa, Nagashima and Matsui.  The four cards show each of the players during their playing days.  There are two additional cards showing Nagashima and Matsui at last year's ceremony, making it a total of 18 cards in the set.  

The cards feature beautiful, full bleed photos on heavy card stock.  My only complaint is that the gold foil on the front of the cards is a bit much.  Here's some example cards:

#01

#07

#09

#14

Rookie Edition Classic

As a small follow up to last year's Classic set, BBM released a 24 card box set called Rookie Edition Classic back in March.  Last year's Classic set featured cards current players using the format of the inaugural BBM set in 1991 (and they are following up with a set this year that will be released later this week using the 1992 card design).  The Rookie Edition Classic set features 12 current players and 12 OB players on cards using the 2003 BBM Rookie Edition design, which was the first Rookie Edition set.  The pictures for all 24 players are from their rookie years.  There's a player for each of the 12 teams represented in each of the groups, although since the players are shown in their rookie season there's no player shown in a Eagles uniform - their representative, Kazuo Matsui, is shown in his 1994 Seibu Lions uniform.  The OB players are all from the 1990's - the earliest is Shinji Imanaka from 1989 and the latest were Koji Uehara and Katsuaki Furuki from 1999

This is an interesting idea which BBM has done a couple of times before with SCM insert cards in 2009 and 2010.  The one thing that kind of rubs me the wrong way is that if the point of a "Classic" set is to show current players in an older card format, shouldn't the cards in this set have been of players in the 2014 rookie class?

Here's a couple examples (Jambalaya has all the cards but I couldn't find any post by Ryan about the set):

#04

#20

Icons - Big Guns

BBM did box sets in 2011 and 2012 called "Diamond Age" to celebrate players born in 1988 and 1989 respectively (I suspect originally to print another card for Yuki Saitoh in 2011).  Last year they did a box set called "Icons - Hope" instead featuring young players (but not necessarily 23 year olds).  This year they did another "Icons" box set but instead of young players, the theme this year is "Big Guns".  The set has 27 cards - 24 of them feature two sluggers from each team.  There are a lot of gaijin represented in the set, including Andruw Jones, Wladimir Balentien, Tony Blanco, Craig Brazell and Kila Ka'Aihue.  Oddly enough, Brad Eldred did not make the set (the other Carp player is Shota Dobayashi) but Kevin Youkilis, who ended up only hitting one home run in Japan, did.  The other three cards highlight certain players - one card features Balentien for setting the home run record last season, one card highlights "MLB Stars" Jones and Youkilis and the other showcases a quartet of former Osaka Toin high school sluggers - Takeya Nakamura and Hideto Asamura of the Lions, Sho Nakata of the Fighters and Ryosuke Hirata of the Dragons.

Ryan did a post on the set and (again) Jambalaya has all the cards on line, but here's a couple examples anyway:

#24

#27

Speed & Smart

This last BBM boxed set is kind of an odd one for them.  If I told you that the set had 24 cards in the base set and featured both current and OB players, what would you expect the distribution of players per team to be?  If you've been paying attention to what BBM almost always does, you'd expect that there'd be 12 active players (one per team including the Eagles) and 12 OB players (one per team including probably the Kintetsu Buffaloes instead of the Eagles).  Well, in this case you'd be wrong!  There are 14 current players and only 10 OB players.  What's more, the 14 current players are split unevenly among only nine teams.  The 10 OB players are split between only seven teams.

The theme of this set is base running, presumably the smart and speedy type.  All the photos in the set are of base runners (which must be where all the photos that would have normally gone into 2nd Version ended up this year).  The cards have full bleed photos and 16 of them (two thirds of the set) use a horizontal format which works well in showing players sliding.  The OB players are kind of from all over - the oldest player is Shigeru Takada who debuted in 1968 but a couple players who retired in 2009 (Norihiro Akahoshi and Koichi Ogata - I have to mention that this is the Koichi Ogata from the Carp as the Koichi Ogata from the Giants also appears in the set).  The one player that I would have to say is missing from the set is Yutaka Fukumoto of the Hankyu Braves, who's the career leader for stolen bases in NPB.  Other than that, I have to say that it's a nice little set with some great action photos:

#04

#17
Ryan did a post about this set already too and Jambalaya has the complete set up for viewing as well.
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2014 BBM Giants

November 10, 2014, 7:06 pm
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My teenage daughter sat down next to me at the kitchen table a few years back and said "Dad, we need to talk about something I found in your office." She pulled out a Yomiuri Giants hat.  "What is this?  Has everything you've ever said been a lie?" I had to explain to her that my sister's husband had had a couple of month internship* in Tokyo back in the summer of 1989 and they'd brought me back a few Japanese baseball souvenirs - a Giants hat, a Giants mascot car window thing-y and the 1989 edition of Wayne Graczyk's annual Japanese Baseball guide.  At the time I didn't know a whole lot about Japanese baseball and they're not really sports fans so none of us really had much of an opinion regarding the Giants.  It wasn't until I learned more and started following things closely that I developed a dislike for the team.  But I still have the hat (and the car window thing-y) sitting around my office.

*My brother-in-law has always worked in academia since he got his doctorate so when I was recently asking my sister where he had done his internship in Tokyo and she said "Ricoh", I kept thinking she meant "Rikkio", one of the Tokyo Big Six universities.  It took a little bit before it got through my head she meant the printer company.

This was going through my head this past summer when BBM released their annual team set for the Giants.  I don't usually get team sets and I really don't like the Giants that much but this year's set is really attractive, so after much reflection on it (and deciding how to break the news to my daughter*), I decided to pick up the set.

*She really doesn't care all that much

Ryan's excellent post about the set kind of makes what I'm about to say redundant, but I'm going to go ahead anyway.  The base set is 108 cards, a little larger than the 90-99 cards that the other 11 team sets contain.  There are 80 "regular" player cards - this includes manager Tatsunori Hara, 64 players on the Giants official roster (that can be up to 70 players) and 14 ikusei players (the Giants have the second largest roster of ikusei players in NPB after the Hawks).  I'm pretty sure that this is everyone on the Giants roster this past year with the exception of Hector Mendoza, who didn't sign with the Giants until after this set went to press.  So for once here's a BBM set that I can't complain that they left someone out...

Anyway, the base cards in this set are really striking.  There are black bars at the top and bottom of the card that frame the photo well without being obtrusive.  Probably half the cards use a horizontal format which works really well.  The photos themselves for the most part are quite good.  Here's some examples:

#G061

#G033

#G028

#G022

I will point out that a couple of the cards of ikusei guys used head shots instead of action shots and this format didn't quite work for those:

#G069
BTW - I don't know where those dots by his eyes came from.  They're not on the card and not in my scan.  Somehow Blogger has added them when it loaded the image.

Mercifully, BBM limited the mascots to a single card in the set, which also functions as the checklist:

#G081
There's three subsets in the set.  The first is a five card subset called "Giants Chemistry".  Each of these cards features two players - one of whom is a newcomer to the Giants in 2014.  The pairings are Kan Ohtake & Tomoyuki Sugano, Seiji Kobayashi & Shinnosuke Abe, Yasuyuki Kataoka & Hayato Sakamoto, Hirokazu Ibata & Yoshinobu Takahashi and Leslie Anderson & Jose Lopez.

#G085
Next is a four card subset called "Coming Giants".  This features several promising young players for the Giants - Tomoyuki Sugano, Shoki Kasahara, Seiji Kobayashi and Itaru Hashimoto.  I think Sugano is more of a guy who has arrived rather than is on the way but that may not have been so obvious when the set went to press.  There's actually four cards of Sugano in the set - his regular card and he appears in all three subsets.  You'd think he was related to the manager or something...

#G087
The final subset is the 18 card "Giants Pride" subset.  This has become a staple of the Giants team sets the last five years at least.  The cards show posed shots of Hara and 17 of the Giants biggest stars in various places around the Tokyo Dome (bullpen, dugout, corridors, batting cage, etc).  They may not be as attractive as the regular player cards, but they're pretty distinctive on their own.

#G105

#G102
You can see all the cards at Jambalaya.
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Strange BBM Timing

November 15, 2014, 11:15 am
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I usually check Discount Niki's website to see what new sets are coming down the pike (or dori in this case I guess) but I don't usually post about a BBM set until they (BBM) have put something up on their own website.  Most of the time that works pretty well, but every so often for some reason BBM doesn't put up anything on their site for a particular set until after the set gets released.  That's what's happened with this year's edition of the Classic set - it got released on Thursday (the 13th) but BBM didn't have anything on their website about it until Friday (Japan time).

This is the second edition of BBM Classic.  It's BBM's version of Topps' Heritage and/or Archive sets where current players are featured using older card formats.  The base set has 108 cards - 72 (six per team) cards of current players using the 1992 BBM format and 36 (3 per team) OB players using another card format that I don't recognize.  I'm not positive that it's actually a "classic" format - it may be new for this set.  There's several insert sets - a 12 card "Best 9" set that isn't really a "Best 9" set as it's one player per team.  The set uses the 1997 Best 9 format.  There are three other 12 card insert sets that I think may all be limited - Run Producers (based on a 1998 Diamond Heroes format), Above Average and Pitcher Perfect (both base on 1999 Diamond Heroes formats).  The big draw is the autograph cards - BBM "bought back" cards and had players sign them as well as having autographed editions of the base cards from the set.  Since the set is already out you can see all the cards over at Jambalaya (base cards here, Best 9 inserts here, rarer cards here).

BBM also put something up on their website about a new set in their "Legend" series - Carp Legend.  What's odd here is that this set isn't going to be released until late December but BBM still doesn't have anything up on their website about the Lions Legend set that's coming out next week.  Very odd.

The Carp Legend set will contain 81 cards in its base set.  72 of these cards will highlight players who played on the six pennant winning Carp teams from 1975 through 1991 (hmm, this sounds familiar).  The other nine cards will feature "All Time Carp" - significant Carp players who did not play in that era - an excuse to get a card of Kenta Maeda in the set.  I'm kind of amused that the one subset has reddish borders and the other has greenish borders - seasonal colors with a set coming out around Christmas time.  The set will also have a nine card insert set entitled 80's Best Nine and a boatload of possible autograph cards.
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Card Of The Week November 16

November 16, 2014, 3:44 pm
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The big news of the weekend was Samurai Japan clinching the Japan All Star Series by having four pitchers combine to no-hit the MLB All Stars yesterday.  Takahiro Norimoto of the Eagles started and threw five perfect innings, striking out six.  Yuki Nishi of the Buffaloes (no stranger to no-hitters himself), followed with two no-hit innings, although he walked one and hit a batter (breaking the toe of Robinson Cano).  Kazuhisa Makita of the Lions and Yuji Nishino of the Marines finished up with a single inning apiece.

Here's Norimoto's first BBM card from the 2013 Rookie Edition set (#65):



I've been enjoying watching the games this week except that I've been watching the English broadcasts from MLB.  I almost wish I was listening to the Japanese broadcasts so that I wouldn't understand what they were saying.  The mis-pronunciations have been grating (Yomiuri has a long "o" sound and Kenta Maeda's surname is pronounced My-da, not May-eeda) and the factual errors have been pretty bad as well - the Tokyo Dome does not seat 70,000, it's more like 46,000.  MLB broadcaster Mark Derosa was bragging during the first game (the one at Koshien against the combined Tigers-Giants team) that he had done some research on Shuichi Murata and discovered that Murata had hit "20 home runs ten times in his 12 year career with the Giants".  Apparently Derosa's "research" didn't reveal that Murata had only played three years with the Giants - the other nine were with the Yokohama Baystars.  What would be nice is if they had someone in the booth like John Gibson or Jim Allen, someone who speaks English and is knowledgable about both NPB and MLB and could ensure they pronounced names correctly and didn't make egregious factual errors.

Of course, that would take the MLB broadcasters caring.  I've felt they've had a very condescending attitude towards the Japanese players, fully expecting the MLB Stars to beat them handily.  I've been hearing a steady stream of excuses and alibis all week - "they're not familiar with the ballpark", "you know it's been a long time since some of these guys have played any meaningful games", and "the MLB All Stars are doing a lot of tourist-y stuff and the baseball's kind of secondary on this trip".  During yesterday's game, Paul Severino actually tried to bring up jet lag as an excuse but Daryl Hamilton pretty much shot it down.  While I agree with the folks who say that this isn't a particularly star-studded MLB line up, I also think they've run into a much better Samurai Japan team than they were expecting.
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2014 BBM All Star Game Memories 90's Set

November 16, 2014, 6:03 pm
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As a repeat of last year, once again BBM did not do the annual All Star set they had done from 1991-2012 and instead did a nostalgic set about All Star games.  Last year it was a set dedicated to the All Star Game Memories of the 1980's - this year it's a set dedicated to the All Star Game Memories of the 1990's.

Like last year's set, this year's set has 90 cards in the base set - 81 "regular" player cards plus nine more cards split into two subsets.  It looks like all the cards were taken during the actual All Star games but it's difficult to tell.  Unlike last year when there were other players visible in the regular player cards that made it obvious that the pictures were taken at all All Star games, the photos on this year's cards pretty much don't show anyone other than the subject of the card.  On the other hand, the photos are all kind of grainy and appear to be mostly taken at night so they probably are all from the games:

#21

#23

#76

#40
I'm pretty sure that Kadota's card shows him running around the bases after hitting a pinch hit home run in Game 2 of the 1991 All Star series - his last All Star game home run in his last All Star game.

There's a lot of great players - both Hall Of Famers and near Hall Of Famers - in the set:  Koji Akiyama, Kazuhiro Kiyohara, Tatsunori Hara, Kimiyasu Kudoh, Masumi Kuwata, Atsuya Furuta, Hiromitsu Kadota, Norihiro Komada, Hiroki Kokubo, Akira Etoh, Tomoaki Kanemoto, Tomonori Maeda, Hiromi Makihara, Yutaka Ohno, Kenjiro Nomura and Hideki Matsui (who hasn't met an OB set he didn't want to be in for a while now).  There are some gaijin players included like Tom O'Malley and Ralph Bryant and some Japanese players who played in MLB like Kazuhiro Sasaki, So Taguchi, Hideki Irabu, Tsuyoshi Shinjo and Satoru Komiyama.  There's also a handful of guys who were still active players in 2014 - Masahiro Yamamoto, Kazuo Matsui, Koji Uehara, Takashi Saito, Kenshin Kawakami and Norihiro Nakamura.  

There's a bunch of cards that show guys holding up signs indicating that they won MVP awards for games.  This card of Atsuya Furuta shows him holding up the sign for winning for Game 1 of the 1991 Series - a game in which he threw out three base runners.  (Furuta also won the MVP for Game 2 in 1992 when he hit for the cycle.)

#65
The set is missing a few major players, however, so a few major events of the All Star games in the 90's are not commemorated.  That game Kadota homered in in 1991 ended up going 12 innings and finished in a tie.  Koji Akiyama (then of the Lions) managed to ricochet a foul ball off one of his eyes in the 12th inning and had to leave the game.  Since the Pacific League was out of position players at this point, Hideo Nomo came into the game to finish Akiyama's at bat.  For defense in the bottom of the 12th, left fielder Takeshi Aikoh moved to center to replace Akiyama and Lions pitcher Kimiyasu Kudoh went in as the left fielder.  Nomo isn't in the set and both Akiyama and Kudoh are shown as Hawks so nothing from this incident made the set.  Daisuke Matsuzaka, who made his All Star game debut in the first game in 1999 by striking out five in three innings (and giving up two runs to take the loss) in also not in the set.  My favorite 90's All Star game event - Ichiro Suzuki's pitching appearance in Game 2 in 1996 is kind of included - Shingo Takatsu, the batter he faced (who was pinch hitting for Hideki Matsui), is shown batting and I assume that it's from this at bat:

#44
In addition to Nomo, Matsuzaka and Ichiro being missing from the set, two other guys that you would expect to be in the set - Hiromitsu Ochiai and Takuro Ishii are also absent.

There are two subsets in the set.  The first is a three card subset called "Start To Stardom".  The three players included (Shinjio Hiyama, Hiroo Ishii and Hitoshi Taneda) are all shown receiving the MVP award for the Fresh All Star game (the minor league All Star game).

#83
 Like last year's set, the final six cards in the set are combination cards that show multiple players.  They were my favorite cards in last year's set but I'm kind of "meh" about them this year.  For one thing there's a bright yellow overlay on the photos that acts as a border around what would otherwise be an attractive picture.  The other thing is that the pairing are just kind of uninspiring.  And this one of Makoto Sasaki and Koji Akiyama looks very similar to a card BBM issued back in 1996:

#89
Probably my favorite of the combination cards (all labeled "2 Stars Meet" except the last one with Tsutomu Kameyama, Hideki Matsui and Tsuyoshi Shinjo - that one is of course "3 Stars Meet") is this one of Hiromi Makihara and Atsuya Furuta:

#87
Jambalaya has all the cards available for viewing here and Ryan did a great post on the set back when it came out last August.

I would expect that BBM will go to the well again next year and do an All Star Game Memories 00's set.  I'd like to see them go earlier but the 00's set will probably be fun too.
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Last BBM Issues Of 2014 (Maybe)

November 17, 2014, 5:59 pm
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After having very little new stuff on their website for a couple weeks, BBM has apparently decided to get caught up on everything they've got in the pipeline, at least for the next two weeks...

- the "Legend" set I mentioned the other day for the Lions will be released this Friday (the 21st).  The set will highlight the years from 1982 to 1994, when the Lions won 11 Pacific League pennants and 8 Nippon Series championships.  Like the Carp Legend set that's coming out in December, the base set will contain 81 cards - there's no indication that there's any sort of subset which would be a first for a "Legend" set.  There's a nine card insert set entitled "80's Best 9" (again like the Carp set) and a large number of autograph cards.

- BBM is releasing a box set for Kenta Maeda on November 27.  Entitled Red Samurai, it will contain 28 cards - a 27 card base set and one "special" card.  The base set will have 18 cards dedicated to "Milestones" and a nine card puzzle called "Amazing".  The special cards include home, away and home and away jersey cards, undershirt cards, ball cards, metallic cards (I think this is a mail-in redemption), and autograph cards.  Several of these also have parallel versions available.

I think these two issues are BBM's final two sets that will be labeled as 2014 issues.  The first set that is labeled as a 2015 issue (the annual "Historic Collection" set) is also being released on November 27.  It's not unheard of for BBM to issue a set labelled with a particular year after having already issued a set labelled with the following year, but everything I've seen so far that they are releasing in December is labelled 2015.


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2014 BBM 80th Anniversary Batters Edition Set

November 18, 2014, 6:30 pm
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BBM followed up their 80th Anniversary Pitchers Edition set (issued in May) with a Batters Edition that they issued in August.  Like the earlier set, this one contains 99 cards - 90 player cards and 9 cards for "All Time Leaders".

BBM did a pretty good job selecting the batters appearing in the set.  Unlike most of their recent OB sets (and like the Pitchers Edition), there's a decent representation of players from before the 1970's including guys like Masaru Kageura, Shigeru Chiba, Kazuto Tsuruoka, Noburo Aota and Wally Yonamine who don't appear in BBM's OB sets very often.  There's a lot of the guys who you would expect in a set like this though - Sadaharu Oh, Shigeo Nagashima, Katsuya Nomura, Hiromitsu Kadota, Tetsuharu Kawakami, Isao Harimoto, Sachio Kinugasa, Koji Yamamoto, Koji Akiyama, Kazuhiro Kiyohara and Hideki Matsui to name a dozen or so.  There are a number of gaijin - Randy Bass, Tuffy Rhodes, Alex Ramirez, Ralph Bryant, Alex Cabrera, Leron Lee and Boomer Wells - and a number of active NPB players from 2014 - Kazuo Matsui, Wladimir Balentien, Seiichi Uchikawa, Shinnosuke Abe, Kosuke Fukudome, Takeya Nakamura, Atsunori Inaba, Nobuhiko Matsunaka, Michihiro Ogasawara, Norihiro Nakamura,Yoshinobu Takahashi, Motonobu Tanishige and Shohei Ohtani.  There's also one MLB player - Norichika Aoki.  There's a couple notable omissions - Hiromitsu Ochiai and Ichiro Suzuki - and I can think of a bunch of guys that there are arguments that can be made about why they should be in the set rather than some who are - Bobby Rose jumps to mind - but it's a pretty good representation of the best hitters over the years in NPB.

The pictures used in the set are very good.  It must be quite a challenge for BBM to find pictures that haven't already been used many times for some of the players who show up in OB sets frequently but BBM lived up to in several cases.  For example, I've never seen this shot of Nagashima before and I have over 180 cards of him.

#21
On the other hand, the photo used for Sadaharu Oh is about as generic as they get:

#23
Here's some other example cards:

#29

#36

#08

#38

#73
The nine "All Time Leader" cards celebrate the guys who hold the records for highest batting average in a season (Randy Bass) and career (Leron Lee), home runs in a season (Wladimir Balentien) and career (Sadaharu Oh), career RBIs (Oh), stolen bases (Yutaka Fukumoto), games played (Katsuya Nomura) and hits (Isao Harimoto) and longest consecutive games played streak (Sachio Kinugasa).  (Nomura will probably be passed by Motonobu Tanishige next year - he's only 26 games behind him and he can write himself into the lineup).  Here's the card for Lee:

#97
As always, you can see the cards at Jambalaya and check out Ryan's post on the set.

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More New BBM Sets

November 18, 2014, 6:41 pm
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BBM's webmaster is apparently working overtime - there's been six new baseball sets unveiled on their website in the last week (plus two non-baseball sets).  The two latest ones are two more OB team sets from the "ACHIEVEMENT" series that started with the Nankai Hawks and Hankyu Braves sets released last month.  These two are for the Kintetsu Buffaloes and the Taiyo Whales and there's not a whole lot more information available about them.  The Buffaloes set apparently will concentrate on the Pacific League pennant winners from 1979, 1980 and 1989.  The Whales set will feature players from the last few years that the team played in Kawasaki before moving to Yokohama in time for the 1978 season.  I guess I'm most interested in the Whales set since that's not an era that's been covered by any of BBM's OB team sets.  The sets will (I assume) feature the same kinds of facsimile and authentic autograph cards that the Hawks and Braves sets have.  They will both be out in mid-December.
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2014 Calbee Series Three

November 19, 2014, 6:06 pm
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The last of the sets I got from Hiro a few weeks back was this year's Series Three from Calbee.  Like the previous two Series, there was 100 cards in the set - 84 player cards (7 per team), a 12 card "Clutch Hitter" subset/non-premium insert set (1 per team) and four checklist cards.

The thing that hits you about all Calbee sets is the photography and this one is no exception.  If anything, the photography in this set exceeds expectations.  Lots of interesting action shots and candids:

#204

#189

#191

#228

#211

#219

#215

There's a bunch of cards showing players wearing some of the "special" uniforms from this season:

#202

#173

#190

#218

#179
One minor disappointment with the set is that there's only one card that uses a horizontal format.

#209
Nearly half (37) of the 84 players depicted in the set appeared in either the first or second Calbee Series this year as well.  In fact, there's five players who appear in all three of this year's Series - Hayato Sakamoto, Sho Aranami, Yoshio Itoi, Kenta Maeda and Takeshi Toritani,  If there was one thing that I'd like Calbee to change, it would be that I'd like less repetition of the players.

The "Clutch Hitters" subset is kind of uninspiring - all twelve players are depicted batting (as you might expect).  This is the only Calbee card for four of the players this year - Ryota Arai, John Bowker, Itaru Hashimoto and Anderson Hernandez.

#CL-11
The photos on the four checklist cards highlight some events in games from the first half of the season - Tiger pitcher Shintaro Fujinami homering against the Carp on April 15; Takahiro Suzuki of the Giants in a game the Giants beat the Fighters on May 26, the Eagles celebrating on the field after scoring four runs in the bottom of the ninth to beat the Tigers on June 3 and Takayuki Kishi celebrating his no-hitter against the Marines on May 2:

#CL-10
As always, all the cards can be seen at Jambalaya.
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San Jose Japantown Book Launch

November 21, 2014, 7:13 pm
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Card Of The Week November 23

November 23, 2014, 3:00 pm
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I mentioned the other day that Wally Yonamine was in BBM's 80th Anniversary Batters Edition and that it was kind of rare for him to appear in an OB set.  He's also in the new Giants 80th Anniversary set as well but he's only been in a couple of BBM's OB sets over the years - the 20th Century Best 9 from 2000, the 2003 Sluggers and 2006 Nostalgic Baseball sets and the two Dragons Anniversary sets.  BBM has always shown Yonamine as either a Giants player or a Dragons manager.  But Yonamine actually ended his playing career with the Dragons in 1961.  I picked up a card showing him on the Dragons a few months back, from the 1961 Marusan JCM 12d set:


I have to say that this is kind of like seeing Harmon Killebrew in a Kansas City Royals uniform - it just doesn't look quite right.
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2014 BBM Giants 80th Anniversary

November 25, 2014, 8:11 pm
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Got a couple sets in the mail yesterday a little quicker than normal.  One of them was BBM's latest team Anniversary set - the Giants 80th Anniversary set.

The base set contains 99 cards, split into four subsets.  The first subset is a six card "History of Giants".  Each card covers a different time period in Giants history with a picture on the front from the time period.  Each time period has a different name on the card (in Japanese so I'm relying on Google translate of Jambalaya's page for the set) - "Dawn Of Giants" (1936-44), "Second Golden Age" (1946-1960), "V9 Giants" (1961-74), "From Slump To Glory" (1975-88), "March Of The Giants" (1989-2001) and "21st Century Giants" (2002-2014).  Here's the "From Slump To Glory" card ("slump" referring to the Giants sole 6th place finish in 1975):

#04
The second subset is for OB Giants players.  As usual in these sets, "OB" players include both retired players and former Giants players who are still active in either NPB or MLB (or in one case, the Baseball Challenge League).  At 69 cards, this is the largest subset in the set (as you'd probably expect).  Also as you'd expect, the subset contains Sadaharu Oh, Shigeo Nagashima, Isao Shibata, Isao Harimoto, Tetsuharu Kawakami, Hideki Matsui, Tatsunori Hara, Tsuneo Horiuchi, Kiyoshi Nakahata, Koji Uehara and Suguru Egawa.  There's a good selection of older players like Eiji Sawamura, Victor Starffin, Noburo Aota and Shigeru Chiba, although as usual the bulk of the players represented are from the 1960's and later.  Every Giants manager is included in the set either as a player or a manager - Sadayoshi Fujimoto, Haruyasu Nakajima, Hideo Fujimoto, Osamu Mihara, Shigeru Mizuhara, Kawakami, Nagashima, Motoshi Fujita, Oh, Hara and Horiuchi.

There is a notable lack of foreign players - only Wally Yonamine and Alex Ramirez are included in the set.  Warren Cromartie is probably the biggest foreign player omission but Tuffy Rhodes wouldn't have been out of place in the set.  I was kind of surprised to see that Kazuhiro Kiyohara was not included in the set.  I was less surprised to see that Hiromitsu Ochiai and Masaichi Kaneda are not in the set as Ochiai has not appeared on a baseball card since 2011 and Kaneda doesn't show up very often.

The photos used in the subset are pretty good.  Most of the players are depicted in a photo that I don't think has been used for a card before (with the exception of a couple of the older players that there simply aren't many photos for).  I knocked BBM's 80th Anniversary Batters Edition set the other day for having a pretty generic picture of Sadaharu Oh - this set makes up for it:

#27
 Here are some other example cards:

#11

#20

#24

#50

#37
The third subset is 15 cards for the 2014 team.  Unlike the OB cards, these are pretty nondescript.  The 15 players include pretty much who you'd expect - Abe, Sugano, Sugiuchi, Murata, Takahashi, Sakamoto, Chono and Kamei.  None of the Giants' foreign players from 2014 (Leslie Anderson, Frederick Cepeda, Jose Lopez, Scott Mathieson) appear in the subset.  The photos are all pretty generic as well - pitchers pitching and batters batting with the exception of this card of Takahiro Suzuki:

#88
The final subset is a nine card "Giants Team Record" subset.  This features nine different players (five batters and four pitchers) and nine different statistical categories.  Three of the batters don't actually lead the statistical category they represent on their card - Shigeo Nagashima is #3 in games played (Sadaharu Oh is #1), Tetsuharu Kawakami is #3 in hits (Oh is #1) and Tatsunori Hara is #4 in RBI (Oh again is #1 - both for the Giants and for NPB).  Everyone else in the subset is #1 in the category on their card - Oh (home runs), Isao Shibata (stolen bases), Tsuneo Horiuchi (games pitched), Takehiko Bessho (wins), Hiromi Makihara (strikeouts) and Mitsuo Sumi (saves).

#95
If it isn't clear from what I've written, I do like the set.  It's attractive and a good representation of the history of the Giants.
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Sports Card Magazine #108

November 28, 2014, 6:14 pm
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The latest issue of Sports Card Magazine (#108) hit the newsstands in Japan this week and I got my issue from Amazon Japan via DHL today (ordered it on Wednesday, got it just over 48 hours later!).

Like last issue though, this isn't a great issue for the Japanese language illiterate like myself.  The cover "story" is basically a five page promotion for this year's edition of BBM's annual Real Venus set which is dedicated to women athletes.  Nothing wrong with the set itself but as it's not a baseball set, I personally am not that interested in it (although it does feature a baseball player - more about that in a minute).

The "New Card Information" section includes two page spreads on the new "Memories Of Uniform" and "Classic" sets as well as information on the "Lions Legend", "Carp Legend", "Red Samurai" and the "Achievement" box sets for the Hawks, Braves, Buffaloes and Whales.  The section also includes full page promotion sheets for the "Idoling" set and the "Real Venus" set (so six of the 16 color pages in the magazine are dedicated to the "Real Venus" set).

The "newsprint" section of the magazine has a four page article related to the new "Memories Of Uniform" set - I think it talks some about uniforms that did not make the set.

Their list of "Best Cards" for the issue is:

Best Card Of This Month:  Autographed Ball Card for Yulieski Gurriel from the BBM Genesis set
Best Item Of This Month:  BBM Genesis
Hot Card Lists
Rookies:
1. 2014 BBM 1st Version Daichi Ohsera (#239)
2. 2014 BBM 1st Version Allen Kuri (#240)
3. 2014 BBM 1st Version Yuki Matsui (#019)
4. 2014 BBM 1st Version Seiji Kobayashi (#185)
5. 2007 BBM 1st Version Masahiro Tanaka (#211)
6. 2013 BBM 1st Version Shohei Ohtani (#183)
7. 2013 BBM 1st Version Shintaro Fujnami (#130)
8. 2014 Calbee Daichi Ohsera (#59)
9. 2014 Calbee Yuki Matsui (#1)
10. 2014 BBM 1st Version Daiki Tohmei (#129)

Autograph & Memorabilia:
1. 2014 BBM Genesis Yulieski Gurriel autographed ball
2. 2014 BBM Genesis Yuki Matsui autographed ball
3. 2014 BBM Rookie Edition Premium Yuki Matsui autograph exchange
4. 2014 BBM Genesis Kenta Maeda super patch
5. 2014 BBM Dragons Michihiro Ogasawara autograph
6. 2014 BBM 2nd Version Daichi Ohsera jersey
7. 2014 BBM 80th Anniversary Batters Edition Katsuya Nomura autograph
8. 2014 BBM 2nd Version Shota Dohbayashi super patch
9. 2014 BBM Rookie Edition Premium Daiki Tohmei autograph
10. 2014 Front Runner Baystars Signature Edition Yulieski Gurriel autograph

This month the rotating checklist & price guide spotlights pro wrestling cards.  There's also a checklist & price guide for all the 2014 baseball issues (up to October) from BBM and Calbee (although no Front Runner sets and only the Nagashima set from Epoch).  There is also a "New Card Checklist" for all the BBM issues that have been released or are scheduled to be released between October and the end of the year.

I'm a little bummed about the baseball cards included with the magazine.  Like every other issue this year, the magazine included 12 cards.  Six of them are the final six cards for the "Cosmic Cross" set that BBM has included in all the issues this year.  The other six are all promo cards for the "Real Venus" set - baseball player Yu Katoh, footballer Yuria Obara, swimmer Hitomi Nose, fin swimmer Satsuki Fujimaki, billard player Kaori Ebe and unicycler Ayaka Satoh.  As I mentioned above, I'm not all that interested in the "Real Venus" set so I would have preferred promo cards for baseball issues.

I've been trying to do a little bit of research on Yu Katoh but beyond discovering that she was a candidate for the women's Samurai Japan team, I haven't found out too much.  It looks like she plays for a team called Asahitrust - I don't know what that is.  Are there industrial league teams for women or are there women on industrial league teams?

SCM #290

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2014 BBM Classic

November 29, 2014, 7:42 pm
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BBM issued their version of the Heritage and Archives sets done by Topps a few weeks back.  The set is called Classic and it uses a "classic" BBM card design for current players.  This is the second edition of the set.  Last year's used the set design from 1991, BBM's first year.  This year they are using the 1992 BBM design so it would probably be safe to assume that, like Topps Heritage, BBM will reuse their old designs in sequential order - in other words, I'd expect them to use the 1993 design next year, the 1994 design in 2016, etc.

I need to clarify that when I say the set uses the 1992 design, I actually don't mean the entire set.  The set contains 108 cards but only 72 of them - the 72 for active players - uses the 1992 design.  The other 36 cards are OB players and their cards use a different design.

I'm not positive but I think there were only three players in the 1992 BBM set that were still active in 2014 - Motonobu Tanishige and Masahiro Yamamoto of the Dragons and Takashi Saito of the Eagles.  Only Tanishige appears in the Classic set so I'll show the front and back of his cards from both sets:

1992 BBM #93

2014 BBM Classic #055

1992 BBM #93

2014 BBM Classic #055
The biggest differences between the two designs is that the team logo watermark on the back of the card has been replaced with a logo for the Classic set and the new cards are the standard size instead of the 2 3/8 by 3 5/16 inches size that the 1992 set used.

The 72 active player cards are split evenly between the 12 teams (so there's 6 cards per team).  The players included most of the big stars - Shinnosuke Abe, Hayato Sakamoto, Sho Nakata, Shohei Ohtani, Yoshio Itoi, Takeshi Toritani, Matt Murton, Chihiro Kaneko, Yoshio Itoi, Kenta Maeda, Seiichi Uchikawa, etc.  There's also a number of rookies including Daichi Ohsera, Yuki Matsui, and Ayumu Ishikawa.  One of the Cuban players, Yulieski Gurriel, also appears in the set.  My only real complaint about the cards is that, like BBM's 2nd Version set this year, the photos are pretty generic - pitchers pitching and batters batting.

#033

#052

#007

#001
The 36 OB cards are also split evenly between the 12 teams (3 per team).  I don't recognize the card design that BBM used for the OB cards - I think it actually is a new design.  Not sure what the criteria for inclusion in the OB subset was (other than agreeing to autograph a bunch of cards for BBM).  Similar to my complaint about the active player cards, the images on the OB cards are almost all pitchers pitching and batters batting, although Isao Harimoto's card is pretty cool regardless.  Daisuke Yamashita is the only player shown fielding.

#090

#103

#075
I like this set and I really like the concept but I'd like to see BBM improve some stuff.  Either eliminate the OB subset altogether (preferably replacing them with more of the current players) or either use an older, non-BBM card design (menko, Kabaya-Leaf or even use a Topps design) or use the same format as the rest of the cards (like Topps has done with Archives).

One thing that BBM could have done with this set that would have been cool was to replicate a couple of the subsets from the original set.  The original set had a subset dedicated to the 11 ballparks in regular use at the time (the Fighters shared the Tokyo Dome with the Giants).  Five of those ballparks are no longer in regular use (and only two of those are still standing) and one of the others (Seibu Dome) is significantly different than it was in 1992 (it has a roof on it now).  This would have been a great opportunity to have an up-to-date ballpark subset.  In addition, the original set had a subset of multi-player cards (all with two players).  Since BBM hasn't done multi-player cards in their flagship sets since 1996, this would have been a good way to bring the concept back.

Jambalaya has all the cards here, including the inserts.
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