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Card Of The Week March 15

March 15, 2015, 5:04 pm
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I saw a tweet yesterday from someone who in honor of Pi Day had sent out a list of MLB players whose career ERAs were close to 3.14.  One of the pitchers mentioned was Kazuhiro Sasaki, who had a career ERA of 3.143284 over his four years pitching for the Mariners.  Here's a card of Sasaki from the 1998 Future Bee set (#9):


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JBR 22 "Box" Break

March 17, 2015, 7:11 pm
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I picked up an odd item recently (actually two odd items - I'll get to the other one later this week) - it's a group of unopened packs from an odd bromide set from the 1988 that Engel calls JBR 22.  There were 32 packs on a string with a cardboard cover on it - I think the term for this is a "taba".  I think the intent is that the buyer would pull a pack off the string to buy it but I'm not entirely sure of that.  Here's some pictures of the whole thing:

Front

Back

Side

The cards themselves are pretty basic.  The fronts are borderless color photos and the backs are blank (except for the occasional prize notation).  Probably more than most bromide cards, these feel more like photographs on heavy paper stock than baseball cards.  The cards are a little longer and narrower than the standard size - about 2 1/4 inches by 3 3/4 inches.

Engel lists around 40 cards in the set.  I got 32 unique cards out of the 32 packs in the taba, so I now have roughly 80% of the set (although I am not positive that all the cards I have match cards Engel lists - I may have a couple uncataloged ones).

Player selection for the set is a bit odd.  Only eight of the 12 teams are represented in the set - Chunichi, Hanshin, Hiroshima, Kintetsu, Nippon Ham, Seibu, Yakult and Yomiuri (so no Hankyu, Lotte, Nankai or Taiyo).  Five of those teams (Chunichi, Hanshin, Hiroshima, Kintetsu and Nippon Ham) are only represented by a single player.  There are 18 Seibu Lion cards in the set but three players (Koji Akiyama, Kazuhiro Kiyohara and Kimiyasu Kudoh) are on 13 of those.  There are 10 Giants cards but six of them are Tatsunori Hara or Masumi Kuwata.  Finally there are seven Yakult Swallows cards and six of them are of Kazushige Nagashima (Shigeo Nagashima's son).  1988 was the younger Nagashima's rookie season so this is one of the few times that cards were made of a rookie player.

For the most part the photos on the cards are pretty good.  Here's some examples:

Yasushi Tao

Koji Akiyama

Lions players

Kimiyasu Kudoh

Kazushige Nagashima

Sadaaki Yoshimura
Some of the cards have writing on the front of them and that writing actually looks awfully familiar...

Tatsunori Hara
Hmm, I've seen this image before somewhere.  Looks an awful lot like card #1 from the 1988 Calbee set over at the Calbee Collector's site:


I suspect but I'm not positive that the cards that have text on the front are unauthorized copies of Calbee images.  I also suspect that at least a couple of the cards without text may be unauthorized copies as well.
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2015 BBM Rookie Edition Set

March 19, 2015, 5:27 pm
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BBM released this year's edition of the Rookie Edition set a little over a month ago.  This is their annual draft pick set, featuring pretty much all the players who were taken in last October's draft (looks like the only guy not in the set is Yuichi Sato who was taken in the first round of the ikusei portion of the draft by the Dragons but did not sign with them).

I find myself running out of things to say about this set every year - other than the players featured, it's pretty much the same set year after year - especially the last couple which has had the exact same subset to go along with the player cards.

So let's get on with it - there are 103 player cards covering all the players who signed out of the draft, including those in the ikusei portion of the draft (who you may never see another card of again unless you get the team's BBM team set).  There are two cards that are kinda-sorta checklist cards - they show a head shot of each of the 103 draftees.  One card is for the Pacific League teams and the other is for the Central League teams.  There's a 12 card subset called "Then & Now" that features two players on each card - the top draft pick for each team paired with another player from the past (some still playing, others retired).  It's not entirely obvious what the connection between each pair of players is - the only one I know for sure is that Sachiya Yamasaki of Orix shares a card with his father Akihiro, who played for the Giants and Fighters from 1980-91.  For the third year in a row Masahiro Tanaka is paired with the Eagles top pick - this year it's Tomohiro Anraku.

For all my comments about the sameness of this set from year to year, it's not a bad set.  BBM used a thicker stock on the cards this year so they have some nice heft to them.  The design of the player cards is a little busier than in the last few years - normally I don't like those kind of designs much but it's a nice departure for this set.  I will voice my standard complaint about this set - it would be nice if the player pictures were something different than posed shots wearing the uniform of the team that drafted them.  The best would be photos of the players in their high school, college, industrial league or independent league team uniform, but I'd settle for the senior prom/high school graduation photos like Topps used in the early 90's on their draft pick cards.  Something other than the kinds of photos that BBM has used for 13 years now (16 if you count the draft pick cards in the 2000-02 Preview sets).

Here's some example cards:

#025

#048

#073

#095

#105

#109

Coincidentally, Ryan did a post on this set today also.  And as always you can see all the cards over at Jambalaya.
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1987 Amada Heat Sensitive Giants "Box" Break

March 20, 2015, 5:35 pm
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The other odd item I picked up recently (after the JBR 22 "taba") was another "taba" for a late 1980's set - the 1987 Amada "Heat Sensitive Giants" set (JGA 15).  This one had 36 packs on a string with a cardboard cover over the whole thing.

Front

Back

Side
The packs for JBR 22 were plain blue envelopes but the packs for this set had text and photos on both sides:

Pack Front

Pack Back
The set contains 36 cards total but there are only 11 players in the set - all members of the Giants (as you might expect from the name of the set).  Each player has at least 2 cards - Tatsunori Hara has the most with six.  Several of the cards use recropped versions of the same pictures - like these two of Kiyoshi Nakahata:



The cards themselves are a bit smaller than the standard size - around 2 1/4 by 3 3/8 inches.  Here are some other examples:

Warren Cromartie

Tatsunori Hara

Masumi Kuwata

Kazuhiro Yamakura
The reason that the cards are called "heat sensitive is because of their backs.  There are 10 numbered areas on the back of the card that are black when cold but when heated up (by putting your finger on them) will reveal text.  I think the idea is that you could play a baseball game with each area revealing a particular outcome of an at bat (although I don't know how you would randomly generated a number between 1 and 10 unless you had a 10 sided die).  There are also three additional black areas on the back that when heated up reveal a rock/paper/scissors symbol:

Back of one of Kaoru Okazaki's cards
I got 30 unique cards out of the 36 packs in the "taba" which isn't too bad although not as good as I did with the JBR 22 "taba".  I was a little disappointed because I already had five cards from this set and I got all five again but that's the risk you take when getting a bunch of packs for a small set.

Two of the packs contained a small slip of paper with the card that I think indicates that I won something (although for all I know they could say "Inspected by number 5"):



Ryan had mentioned the other day that frequently the tabas would have cards attached to the back cover.  I think that in addition to serving as an example card, these might also be prize cards - cards given to the person who got the "winning ticket" (or a card stamped as a "winner").  So the idea would be if I pulled this "ticket" from a pack, I'd take it to the store owner and they'd give me one the cards from the outside of the taba.  Unfortunately, there's no cards on the taba I got and I'm not sure what the prize cards for this set would have been anyway.
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Card Of The Week March 22

March 22, 2015, 5:52 pm
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Autographed copies of Rob Fitts' latest book (Mashi: The Unfulfilled Baseball Dreams of Masanori Murakami, the First Japanese Major Leaguer") are now available from Rob's web site and unautographed versions can be pre-ordered from Amazon (the book goes live next week).  I was looking at Rob's Kickstarter page (for bringing Murakami to the US this summer for a book tour) and I couldn't help but wonder about something - the Nankai Hawks sent three players to the US in 1964 to play in the San Francisco farm system.  Murakami is the only one of the three to play in the majors.  Whatever happened to the other two?

The other two players were Hiroshi Takahashi and Tatsuhiko Tanaka.  While Murakami pitched for Fresno in the Class A California League, Takahashi and Tanaka played for Magic Valley (Idaho) Cowboys of the Rookie Class Pioneer League (curiously it looks like 1964 was the first year that the Pioneer League had a "Rookie" Classification and it looks like it was also the first year it was short season - in 1963 each team played around 127 games but they only played 66 in 1964).*

*FYI - the only future major leaguers on the Magic Valley team were Ken Henderson who had a 16 year career mostly with the Giants, White Sox, and Cubs and Bob Schroder who spent some time with the Giants over four seasons in the mid to late 1960's. 

Both Takahashi and Tanaka returned to Nankai in 1965 (given the controversy over the Giants exercising their option on Murakami, it would have been surprising if Nankai had allowed them to stay in the US).  Their paths diverged pretty quickly after their return to Japan - Tanaka (whose Japanese stats at Baseball Reference don't link to his minor league stats) only appeared in 26 games with the ichi-gun Hawks over two seasons (1965 & 66).  He switched to pitching (and changed his name to Tatsuhiko Yoshikawa) in 1968 but it didn't work out and he retired following the 1969 season (Source:  Japanese Wikipedia).

Takahashi, on the other hand, spent parts of 18 seasons playing at the top level in NPB - first for Nanaki, then for the Toei/Nittaku Home Flyers/Nippon Ham Fighters and finally for the Lotte Orions - before retiring after the 1982 season.  His primary claim to fame is that he was the first player in NPB history to play all nine positions in one game, pulling the stunt on September 29, 1974*  (Source:  Japanese Wikipedia).

*For the record the only other NPB player to play all nine positions in one game was Akihito Igarashi of the Orix Blue Wave on June 3, 2000.

As you might expect, there aren't a whole lot of cards of these two.  In fact, there are no cards that I'm aware of for Tanaka at all.  Takahashi has a grand total of four - two Takara cards from his final two seasons with Lotte in 1981-82, a card in the 2008 BBM Lotte 40th Anniversary set and a card in the 2010 BBM Memory Makers set.  (SportsCardForum.com's Inventory Manager lists a couple cards for him with the Swallows in the mid 00's but that's not the same Hiroshi Takahashi).

Here's the Memory Makers card of Takahashi (#029).  The back mentions the game that he played all nine positions in but I don't know if the picture is from the game - his normal position was catcher.


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Swallows Team Issued Sets

March 22, 2015, 6:47 pm
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Probably the biggest category of uncatalogued modern (post 1991 cards) Japanese baseball cards are those that are issued either by the NPB teams themselves or their official fan clubs.  I think the latest edition of Engel that dealt with modern cards only listed a couple sets and that's over six years out of date now.  Jason did a post from a few years ago listing all the cards from all the sets that he has located (and he's still updating this post as he learns about new stuff) which is probably the most comprehensive listing of these cards that exists in the English speaking blogosphere.  I don't intend to change that, but I did think that I'd start doing some posts on some of the team sets (OK, cards from team sets) that I've been picking up lately and provide a complement to Jason's post.

I'm going to start with some cards I've gotten from the Swallows because these turned out to be kind of confusing and they serve as a warning to how deep this rabbit hole might be...

The first set I have representation from is the 2008 "Premium Card" set.  I only have two cards from this set - Shun Takaichi (#Ys07) and Ryuji Miyade (#Ys39):



Next up is a second "Premium Card" set from 2008.  This one is labeled "Vol. 2".  I have three cards from this set - Ryo Kawashima (#Ys05), Atsushi Kinugawa (#Ys19) and Yasushi Iihara (#Ys29):



This set has a "kira" parallel (that may not be clear from the scan):


I thought initially that there was also a "red facsimile autograph" parallel for this set as well, but when I looked closely I realized that these cards were actually from another set - a "Printing Autograph Premium Card Vol. 2" set.  I have three cards from this set as well - Shigeru Takada (#YsS01), Masanori Ishikawa (#YsS04) and Tatsuyoshi Masubuchi (#YsS05).



The Swallows did something similar for 2009.  I have one card from a "plain" team set and two cards from a similar looking set with a red facsimile autograph.  I'm not sure what (if any) name the set has.

My card from the "plain" set is Yasushi Iihara (#Ys37):



My facsimile autograph set cards are Ryohei Kawamoto (#YsS08) and Kazuhiro Hatakeyama (#YsS12):



I have a couple cards from another 2009 set.  These are clear plastic cards similar to the 2001 BBM Golden Glove cards.  They are essentially one-sided as the backs of the card simply show the reverse of the image on the front.  I have three of these - Shinya Miyamoto (#YsC06), Hiroyasu Tanaka (#YsC07) and Kazuki Fukuchi (#YsC08):


The next cards I have are from 2011 and again there are two similarly looking sets - one with no autographs and one with autographs.  Again there is no indication on the cards what the name of the set is.

I only have two cards from the "plain" set - Katsuki Dobashi (#Ys03) and Aaron Guiel (#Ys41):



I have seven from the facsimile autograph set - Kyohei Muranaka (#YsS06), Tatsuyoshi Masubuchi (#YsS08), Shohei Tateyama (#YsS09), Yuki Shichijyo (#YsS10), Atsushi Fujimoto (#YsS15), Kazuhiro Hatakeyama (#YsS17) and Shingo Kawabata (#YsS18):



I have six cards from another 2011 set that has a "kira" finish on the front - Kyohei Muranaka (#YsK03), Masanori Ishikawa (#YsK04), Shohei Tateyama (#YsK05), Hiroyasu Tanaka (#YsK08), Osamu Hamanaka (#YsK09) and Norichika Aoki (#YsK10):



Finally I have three cards from a similar "kira" set from 2012 - Shohei Tateyama (#YsK05), Katsuki Akagawa (#YsK06) and Tsuyoshi Ueda (#YsK10):



The only cards listed here that explicitly list the year they came out are the 2008 cards.  The cards I think are from 2009 have the "Yakult 40th Anniverary" logo on them which is why I figure they are from 2009.  I'm going by what the seller of the cards said for the 2011 and 2012 cards so it's possible that those are not correct.

I don't know how these cards are distributed - if it is by pack then it wouldn't surprise me to discover that the facsimile autograph cards as well as the "clear" and "kira" cards are insert sets associated with a base team set.
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More New BBM

March 25, 2015, 4:36 pm
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BBM is finally starting to get caught up on their upcoming releases.  They put information for a couple new ones up on their website in the last week or so.

- As I think everyone expected, BBM is issuing an 80th Anniversary set for the Hanshin Tigers.  At 81 cards in the base set, this set is smaller than either of the two previous Tigers Anniversary sets - the 70th in 2005 and the 75th in 2010 - which both had 99 cards in the base set.  There's pretty much no subsets in the set, just a difference between whether the player is an OB player (66 cards) or a current player (15 cards).  There's a 15 card "Tigers Heroes" insert set and the usual assortment of autographed cards.  The set will be out in late April.

- The next two of BBM's annual team sets will be for the Buffaloes and the Hawks.  Both are pack based sets with 81 cards in their base set.  The Buffaloes base set will have 69 "regular" cards (for the manager and players), two checklist cards and an unidentified 10 card subset.  There will be three insert sets - "Bs Triplets" (3 cards), "Lockdown Relievers" (6 cards) and "Horn Attack" (9 cards) - and numerous autograph cards, including dual signature ones.  The set will be released in early April.  The Hawks set will have 68 "regular" cards (for the manager and players) and a number of subsets - a three card Daisuke Matsuzaka puzzle, three "Road To Record" cards, four "2014 Award" cards along with three single card "subsets" - "Next Decade", "2014 Japan" (Nippon Series Champs?) and a checklist.  There are two nine card insert sets called "Super Hawks" and "Hyper Hawks" and a wide variety of autographed cards.  This set will be out in late April.
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Cracking The SCM Price Guide Code

March 26, 2015, 6:11 pm
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Sports Card Magazine (SCM) is published six times a year by Baseball Magazine Sha.  There is a vintage card checklist in each issue, the contents of which rotate from issue to issue.  I confirmed tonight that there's an actual pattern to this rotation.  Now granted, this isn't exactly on a par with cracking Enigma or (more appropriately) Purple but it did take having enough issues on hand to figure it out.

I put it all in table form.  The four columns on the right are all the recent issues of SCM that I have (per year of publication date) which I used to confirm this rotation.

Publication DateCover DateChecklist Contents2015201420132012
JanuaryMarchSumo/Other Sports10910397
MarchMayBaseball - BBM104
MayJulySoccer - J League?10599
JulySeptemberBaseball - nonBBM106100
SeptemberNovemberSoccer - non J-League?10710195
NovemberJanuaryWrestling10896

I want to note here that SCM actually uses the English word "soccer" in labeling those two checklists which I find kind of surprising.

I have a couple issues from 10 years ago that do not follow this pattern so I don't know how long ago this particular sequence of vintage checklists started.  And of course, past performance is no guarantee of future performance.  But I'm pretty confident right now that SCM Issue 110 (which comes out Saturday) will have the complete BBM listing for its vintage price guide.
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Marines Team Issued Sets

March 28, 2015, 7:13 pm
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To continue my posts on team issued sets, I thought I'd do a quick one a couple sets I have cards from for the Marines.  These sets were issued through the Marines Fan Club called Team26.

I have five cards from the 2011 set.  I've actually done a post showing all five before but I'll repeat one of them here (with the card back):


The cards are unnumbered except for the player's uniform number.  The cards I have are Toshiaki Imae (#8), Yoshihisa Naruse (#17), Yuki Karakawa (#19), Tomoya Satozaki (#22) and Yoshifumi Okada (#66).

I have six cards from the 2012 set - five player cards plus a team card.  Here's one of the player cards along with the team card:





Like the 2011 cards, the 2012 cards are unnumbered except for the player's uniform numbers.  The five players I have are Tadahito Iguchi (#6), Toshiaki Imae (#8), Yoshihisa Naruse (#17), Yuki Karakawa (#19), and Katsuya Kakunaka (#61).
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Card Of The Week March 29

March 29, 2015, 11:54 am
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Yoshitmo Tsutsugoh of the Baystars was the first player to multiple home runs this season, hitting one in each of his first two games.  This, of course, put him on pace for 143 home runs for the year but his lack of a home run in today's game dropped his projected total to about 95.  The fun you can have with small sample sizes...

2013 BBM Baystars #DB99

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Sports Card Magazine #110

March 31, 2015, 6:57 pm
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It's that time again - the latest issue of Sports Card Magazine (#110) hit the shelves in Japan on Saturday.  My copy showed up yesterday.  The cover price of this issue was 2110 yen, which is over 300 yen more than last issue and a whopping 1100 yen over what issue #102 cost (the last issue in 2013 before SCM went to 12 insert cards per issue).  I'm not exactly sure what caused the jump in price and I'm not positive that it will be permanent.

The cover story deals with Daisuke Matsuzaka and Hiroki Kuroda and their return to Japan.  It's kind of interesting even if I can't read the article - it shows a bunch of cards for both of them (all BBM of course) and has little head to head competitions between comparable cards - best rookie card (Matsuzaka's 1999 card over Kuroda's 1997 card), best autograph card (Kuroda's 2004 Carp Expert over Matsuzaka's 2003 Lions), best game used memorabilia card (Matsuzaka's 2002 1st Version Glove card over Kuroda's 2005 2nd Version Undershirt card), best insert card (Matsuzaka's 2002 Touch The Game All Star over Kuroda's 2007 Carp Shining Star), best parallel (Kuroda's 2007 1st Version "1 of 1" over Matsuzaka's 2006 2nd Version "hologram autograph") and best MLB memorabilia card (Kuroda's 2014 Topps Supreme autograph & patch card over Matsuzaka's 2013 Topps Five Stars Golden Graphs autograph card).

The color section also contains a two page article on BBM's first four team sets for 2015 (the Eagles, Swallows, Buffaloes and Hawks) which also contained a schedule for the release of all the team sets in 2015 (Carp, Fighters and Dragons will be out in late May, the Tigers will be out in early June, the Marines and Baystars in late June and the Lions and Giants in early July).  Most of the remainder of the color sections is ads for BBM's recent and upcoming releases - 1st Version (2 pages), Eagles, Swallows, Hawks, Buffaloes, Giant Step (half page), Fighters Horizon (half page), Icons - Aces and Tigers 80th Anniversary.  The most significant new piece of information out of these pages is that 1st Version will have team checklists and they will be the team mascots yet again.  The most interesting piece in the "newsprint" section is an article on all the new foreign players in NPB for 2015.  This article shows US cards for a number of the players including Topps, Bowman, Panini and even a Tennessee Smokies card of Marines pitcher Dae-Eun Rhee.

There are checklists for all the BBM issues shown in the color section and the revolving vintage checklist and price guide is for all of BBM's baseball cards (as predicted).

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

Best Card Of This Month:  Keisuke Honda autograph card from 2014-15 Japan National Team (soccer)
Best Item Of This Month:  BBM Rookie Edition
Hot Card Lists
Rookies:
1. 2015 BBM Rookie Edition Kazuma Okamoto (#54)
2. 2015 BBM Rookie Edition Kona Takahashi (#39)
3. 2015 BBM Rookie Edition Kohei Arihara (#23)
4. 2015 BBM Rookie Edition Takayoshi Noma (#67)
5. 2015 BBM Rookie Edition Sachiya Yamasaki (#14)
6. 2015 BBM Rookie Edition Tomohiro Anraku (#45)
7. 2015 BBM Rookie Edition Ryosuke Nomura (#76)
8. 2014 BBM 1st Version Daichi Ohsera (#239)
9. 2013 BBM 1st Version Shohei Ohtani (#183)
10. 2007 BBM 1st Version Masahiro Tanaka (#211)

Autograph & Memorabilia:
1. 2015 BBM Masters Of Insert Kazuhiro Kiyohara autograph card
2. 2014-15 Japan National Team Keisuke Honda autograph card
3. 2015 BBM Rookie Edition Kazuma Okamoto facsimile autograph parallel
4. 2015 BBM Rookie Edition Kona Takahashi facsimile autograph parallel
5. 2015 BBM Rookie Edition Kohei Arihara facsimile autograph parallel
6. 2015 V Premier League (Volleyball) Megumi Kurihara autograph card
7. 2014-15 Japan National Team Yoshinori Muto autograph card
8. 2015 BBM Rookie Edition Takayoshi Noma facsimile autograph parallel
9. 2015 BBM True Heart Mio Shirai autograph card
10. 2015 BBM True Heart Mio Shirai autograph photo card

Finally, the best part of each issue is usually the enclosed baseball cards.  This issue has 12 "Cross Plasma" cards.  "Cross Plasma" is this year's cross set subset for BBM.  There are 36 "Cross Plasma" cards in the 1st Version set and if BBM continues what they've done in past years, there will be 36 more cards in each of the 2nd Version and Genesis sets.  These 12 cards (one for each team) are not promo versions of 1st Version "Cross Plasma" cards but bonus ones - they are numbered CP 37 to CP 48 while the "Cross Plasma" cards in 1st Version are CP 1 to CP 36.  I'll be curious to see if BBM does this two more times this year - making it 36 SCM "Cross Plasma" cards to go with the 36 in each of the "flagship" sets.

The cards themselves resemble the "Cross X" subsets from previous years (Stream in 2010, Blast in 2011, Blaze in 2012, Wind in 2013 and Cosmic Cross in 2014 SCM) - a photo of the player superimposed on a "plasma" background on the front and the original picture on the back:

CP37/SCM308

Back of CP37/SCM308
The players in the set include two players returning from the US (Matsuzaka and Hiroyuki Nakajima), two players who changed teams over the winter (Takahiro Arai and Yoshisa Naruse) and three rookies (Kohei Arihara, Kona Takahashi and Tomohiro Anraku):

CP39/SCM310
I lucked into a silver facsimile autograph parallel for Atsushi Nohmi:

CP44/SCM315
All 12 cards can be seen at Jambalaya.
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1991 BBM Box Break

April 2, 2015, 5:03 pm
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I've had some correspondence lately with a reader named Jay who told me that he had recently picked up an unopened box of 1991 BBM off of Ebay.  I asked if he'd be willing to contribute information and photos for a "box break" and he graciously agreed.

The 1991 BBM set featured 399 cards in its base set plus 12 "team logo" hologram cards as the only chase cards.  The cards were sold in boxes of 30 10 card packs.  According to Engel, the hologram cards were inserted into the boxes at a rate of 2 per box.  The set was also available as a factory set which did not include any of the holograms.

Here's the photos Jay sent me:










Jay was very impressed by BBM's decollation - "The amazing thing was I got NO duplicates".  So out of 30 packs of 10 cards, he got 299 unique cards plus one team logo hologram (for the Fighters).  What's more, each pack contained the cards in numerical sequence - for example, the cards in a pack were numbered from first to last as "7, 28, 45, 77, 98, 130, 179, 230, 283, 321" while the next would be "6, 27, 44, 76, 97, 129, 178, 229, 282, 320".  I've opened boxes from 1992 and 1994 in the past and did not see this behavior (and I'm pretty sure I got duplicates) so I suspect it was only for 1991.  I would guess BBM realized pretty quick that something like that would make it possible for someone to predict what cards would be in unopened packs simply by opening the top pack in the stack of packs.  (This is assuming that I'm not misunderstanding what Jay sent me and the two example sequences he sent are actual pack sequences and not just something he put together for an example).

Besides the 10 cards, each pack also contained what I think is a promo for the 1991 set - it has a breakdown of the cards in the set (30 cards per team, 23 Leader cards, 10 Nostalgic Stars and the 12 team hologram logos) although it does not mention the 6 checklist cards.

Jay was understandably pretty pleased with his take - for $34.95 (plus free shipping), he picked up about three quarters of BBM's inaugural set.

Thanks for sharing the photos and the information Jay!
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Eagles Team Issued Sets

April 2, 2015, 5:57 pm
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Here's a couple card sets for the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles.

I've got seven cards from a 2006 set that Jason has identified as the "Seat Holders Club" card set.  Here's the front and back of one of them:



Jason has a list of around 50 cards from this set over at his post on team issued sets that includes all seven of the cards I have.

I have four cards from the 2009 Seat Owners Club set, another set that Jason has an extensive checklist of (along with the 2007, 2008 and 2010 sets and partial checklists for the 2011 & 2012 sets).  Again, I'll just show the front and back of one of the cards I have:




Ryan picked up a card from what may be another 2009 Eagles issued team set a couple months back.

I also picked about nine cards from a 2013 Eagles issue:



What's nice about this set is that we actually know a lot about it.  For starters, Ryan picked up a pack of it a few years back, so we know it was sold in six(?) card packs.  Even better, however, is the fact that Jambalaya has the full set up at their site.  There are 74 player cards in the base set plus two "SS" subsets - one of 11 cards and one of three cards.  There are also 12 insert cards and (according to Ryan), three jersey cards and 34 autograph cards.

Jambalaya is located in Fukushima, Tokohu, so they've been selling the Eagles team issues the last few years.  Last year's set contained 69 player cards in the base set plus sixteen additional subset cards along with a 10 card insert set.  This year's set was apparently just released this week (in time for their home opener Tuesday?) and contains 76 player cards plus 17 subset cards in the base set along with another 10 insert cards.  Not sure of the details about memorabilia or autograph cards for either set but Jambalaya does have a couple autograph cards from the 2014 set for sale.
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Orix Team Issued Sets

April 3, 2015, 11:28 am
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Some more team issued sets, this time from Orix.

I've got six cards from the 2011 BsClub set:



These are actually numbered and the numbering implies that there's only 19 cards in the set.  Here's what I have:

#2 - Yoshihisa Hirano
#3 - Mamoru Kishida
#4 - Chihiro Kaneko
#5 - Satoshi Komatsu
#8 - Shinji Shimoyama
#9 - T-Okada

I've also got 16 cards from the 2013 BsClub set (I'm going by the Ebay seller's description for the year as the card themselves don't say what year):



These cards are unnumbered other than the uniform number.  Here's the list of what I have:

#11 Takahiro Matsuba
#17 Shun Tohno
#19 Chihiro Kaneko
#30 Taiki Mitsumata
#31 Shunichi Satoh
#34 Shinya Nakayama
#38 Shuhei Kojima
#46 Takayoshi Kawabata
#48 Makoto Yoshino
#57 Nobuyoshi Yamada
#58 Ryo Toda
#59 Shohei Tsukahara
#61 Kohdai Matsumoto
#63 Issei Nakamura
#115 Daiki Hara
#119 Shoki Kakihara

I thought that the seller I bought this from had two other auctions for cards from this set that I did not bid on but I've been searching completed auctions on Ebay and not finding them.

Actually now that I do some looking around, Kohdai Matsumoto was only with Orix in 2013 so that would pretty much confirm the year.
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Card Of The Week April 5

April 5, 2015, 3:21 pm
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The Giants beat the Tigers yesterday by a score of 9 to 5.  This was significant because it was the 1000th time that the Giants had beaten the Tigers in the two team's history going all the way back to 1936.  If I'm reading the translation of this Nikkan Sports article correctly, it looks like the Giants' first ever victory against the Tigers was Eiji Sawamura's no-hitter against them on September 25, 1936.  This was also the first no-hitter in Japanese professional baseball history.

BBM commemorated this no-hitter (as well as almost all the others in Japan up until 2012) with a card in the 2012 No-Hitters set.  Since it was the first no-hitter, it's the first card in the set:




H/T Yakyu Baka for the link to the Nikkan Sports article
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2015 BBM Softbank Hawks 10th Anniversary

April 7, 2015, 5:52 pm
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BBM put out a set celebrating the 10th Anniversary of Softbank buying the Hawks from Daiei about a month and a half ago.  This set was a pack based set and featured 81 cards in its base set that were split between three groups - OB players, 2014 players and "Memories Of The Decade".

There are 63 cards for OB Softbank Hawks players.  As usual this includes both retired players as well as former Hawks who are still active either in NPB (like Toshiya Sugiuchi) or MLB (Munenori Kawasaki, Tsuyoshi Wada).  The only two managers that the Softbank Hawks have had - Sadaharu Oh and Koji Akiyama - are included in this group.  The rest of the players include pretty much every one you'd expect - Kazumi Saitoh, Hiroki Kokubo, Nagisa Arakaki, Arihito Muramatsu, Julio Zuleta, Naoyuki Ohmura and Jose Ortiz for example.  There really isn't anyone I could think of who is missing from the set.  I thought there were a few players who were included that were kind of odd picks - both Kenji Johjima and Tony Batista only played one season for Softbank (both in 2005) but at least both were significant contributors that one season.  There's a couple other guys who I'm really wondering why they were included - Yudai Deguchi (6 ABs in 10 games in 2005), Tetsuya Matoyama (40 games in 2008) and Masanori Taguchi (10 ABs in 6 games in 2005).  I wonder if BBM was scrambling to get enough players to fill in 63 cards.  The photos on the cards are nice but fairly unremarkable:

#20

#45

#49
There are nine cards for the 2014 Hawks.  It's not quite a Best 9 for the 2014 team - there are two pitchers (Kenji Ohtonari and Tadashi Settsu) but no catcher.  The other seven players are Yuya Hasegawa, Yuichi Honda, Kenta Imamiya, Nobuhiro Matsuda, Nobuhiko Matsunaka, Seiichi Uchikawa and Yuki Yanagita.

#70
The "Memories of The Decade" subset is also nine cards.  Instead of being numbered with the rest of the set, they are numbered M01 to M09.  The "memories" being commemorated are the official introduction of the Softbank Hawks in January 2005, the Interleague Championship in June 2008, Koji Akiyama taking over as manager from Sadaharu Oh in October of 2008, clinching 1st place in September 2010 (I think), the 2011 Nippon Series Championship, their walkoff win against Orix last October to clinch 1st place, their 2014 Nippon Series Championship, Kimiyasu Kudoh being named manager in November 2014 and Daisuke Matsuzaka being signed in December 2014.

#M09
I'm not going to lie - this is an odd little set.  First of all, it's kind of strange that this set came out this year rather than last year since 2014 was Softbank's 10th season (the Eagles started in 2005 as well and their 10th Anniversary set came out last year).  It's also kind of odd that 44% of the most memorable moments for the Hawks happened between October and December of last year.  It's also extremely odd that all the player cards show the players in their home white uniforms - no away jerseys, none of the colorful alternate jerseys, nothing but white tops.  I kind of get the feeling that the Hawks and/or BBM decided that they needed to get a card out of Matsuzaka in a Softbank uniform as quickly as possible and worked backward from there.  This set just seems kind of superfluous, especially considering that there was a 75th Anniversary set for the Hawks just a few years ago.

You can see all the cards at Jambalaya and Ryan has a post describing the set as well.
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Gurriel

April 7, 2015, 6:14 pm
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I don't have a whole lot to add to the discussions that have been going on regarding DeNA's decision to void Yulieski Gurriel's contract and place Lourdes Gurriel on the restricted list.  I think it's a shame that the elder Gurriel will not be in the Baystars lineup this year and I can't help feeling that the possibility of Gurriel being able to move to MLB in the near future is a factor in all of this somehow. But what do I know?

Actually what I do know is that despite the voiding of his contract, there will most likely be cards of Yulieski Gurriel in Japan this year.  The BBM 1st Version checklist that appears in SCM 110 lists two cards for him - his "regular" card (#286) and a Cross Plasma card (#CP32).  (The Cross Plasma card appears on the webpage for the set at BBM's web site).  I suspect that it's unlikely that BBM will remove the card from the set as it's probably too late to do so - the set will be released in less than two weeks.
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RIP Jose Capellan

April 9, 2015, 5:05 pm
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2015 Calbee Series One

April 9, 2015, 5:56 pm
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The first of three expected sets from Calbee this year was released a couple weeks back.  The base set contains 103 cards, split up between 84 "regular" player cards, 12 "Exciting Scene" cards, 3 "Legend" cards and four checklist cards.

The design of the front of the "regular" player cards for Calbee has been essentially unchanged since around 1997 it's actually big news this year that there's a bit of change this year.  Instead of the players name being in white text, this year it's in black text with a white outline.  Other than that, this year's cards pretty much look like every other Calbee set, including the great photography:

#065

#014

#033

#045

#004
The 84 "regular" player cards are split up evenly between the 12 NPB teams with each team having seven cards.  Many of the photos are from last year but Calbee did manage to include several players who changed teams over the winter, either returning from MLB (Daisuke Matsuzaka, Kensuke Tanaka and Hiroyuki Nakajima) or changing NPB teams (Eiichi Koyano, Keiji Ohbiki and Yoshihisa Naruse) as well as a couple rookies (Tomohiro Anraku and Kohei Arihara).  Another notable player included is Alfredo Despaigne - this is his first Japanese card other than an SCM insert card last year.  (And there are players included in the set other than Yamazaki and Higa.)

The "Exciting Scene" subset (or non-premium insert set) commemorates 12 "exciting" events from last year, one for each team.  As usual I'm not entirely sure what the events are but the players in the subset include Shohei Ohtani, Masahiro Yamamoto, Shintaro Fujinami, Tetsuto Yamada, Rainel Rosario and Daisuke Miura:

#ES-11
The three card "Legend" subset is for three players who retired at the end of the 2014 season - Atsunori Inaba, Makoto Kaneko and Tomoya Satozaki.  Calbee had a similar subset in Series One last year.

#L-3
The four checklist cards feature team celebrations from either late last season or the post season - the Hawks winning the Nippon Series, the Giants clinching the Central League title in September, the Buffaloes winning Game 2 of Stage One of the Pacific League Climax Series (kind of odd since they didn't win the First Stage, the Fighters did) and the Tigers beating the Giants in the Final Stage of the Central League Climax Series:

#C-4
All the cards can be seen at Jambalaya (including the Star inserts and some of the mail-in premium sets and cards).
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Card Of The Week April 12

April 12, 2015, 5:00 am
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For some reason runs were very hard to come by in Sendai this past week.  On Tuesday, the Hawks and Eagles played to a scoreless tie in 12 innings, the first tie of the season.  On Wednesday, the two teams went another 9 and a half scoreless innings until the Eagles finally pushed a run across in the bottom of the 10th.  The run was scored on a leadoff walk to Toshihoto Abe, a sacrifice bunt by Akihisa Makida, intentional walks to Kazuo Matsui and Kazuya Fujita and a sacrifice fly by Takero Okajima.  I imagine that Okajima looked something like this when he saw the run score:

2013 BBM Eagles #E96

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