The latest auction from Prestige Collectibles started this past Wednesday. There's a lot of interesting vintage items up for sale, including bromides depicting touring US stars from the 1930's and college stars from the 1920's along with a number of examples of die-cut menkos from the 1940's including masks and kites. Items are a bit pricy but a lot of this stuff you won't see anywhere else.
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Prestige Collectibles Auction #51
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Other NPB Players On WBC Rosters
I thought I'd do a quick post rounding up the current and former NPB players on the rosters of the other (non-Japan) teams for this year's World Baseball Classic. According to the list on YakyuDB there are 11 current NPB players playing on various WBC teams. I found another 13 former NPB players on the rosters although it would not surprise me to discover that I missed some.
Travis Blackley (Eagles, 2014)
Mitch Dening (Swallows, 2015)
Chris Oxspring (Tigers, 2006)
Scott Mathieson (Giants, 2012- )
Kuan-Yu Chen (Baystars 2014 Marines 2015-)
Shun-Lin Kaku (aka Chun-Lin Kuo) (Lions 2015-)
Frederich Cepeda (Giants 2014-15)
Alfredo Despaigne (Marines 2014-16, Hawks 2017-)
Alessandro (Alex) Maestri (Buffaloes 2012-15)
Guillermo Moscoso (Baystars 2014-16)
Tae-Kyun Kim (Marines 2010-11)
Dae-Ho Lee (Buffaloes 2012-13, Hawks 2014-15)
Chong-Yong Lim (Swallows 2008-2012)
Seung-Hwan Oh (Tigers 2014-15)
Dae-Eun Rhee (Marines 2015-16)
Japhet Amador (Eagles 2016-)
Luis Cruz (Marines 2014-15, Giants 2016-)
Brandon Laird (Fighters 2015-)
Luis Mendoza (Fighters 2014-)
Wladimir Balentien (Swallows 2011-)
Rick Van Den Hurk (Hawks 2015-)
Loek Van Mil (Eagles 2014)
Orlando Roman (Swallows 2012-15)
Robert Suarez (Hawks 2016-)
Australia
Travis Blackley (Eagles, 2014)
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| 2014 BBM 1st Version #003 |
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| 2015 BBM 2nd Version #372 |
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| 2006 BBM 1st Version #229 |
Canada
Scott Mathieson (Giants, 2012- )
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| 2016 BBM 1st Version #193 |
Chinses Taipei (Taiwan)
Kuan-Yu Chen (Baystars 2014 Marines 2015-)
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| 2016 BBM 1st Version #063 |
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| 2016 BBM 2nd Version #428 |
Cuba
Frederich Cepeda (Giants 2014-15)
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| 2014 BBM 2nd Version #428 |
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| 2016 BBM 1st Version #073 |
Italy
Alessandro (Alex) Maestri (Buffaloes 2012-15)
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| 2014 BBM 1st Version #116 |
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| 2016 BBM 2nd Version #581 |
Korea
Tae-Kyun Kim (Marines 2010-11)
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| 2010 BBM 1st Version #388 |
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| 2012 BBM 1st Version #094 |
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| 2008 BBM 1st Version #182 |
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| 2014 BBM 1st Version #195 |
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| 2015 BBM 1st Version #090 |
Mexico
Japhet Amador (Eagles 2016-)
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| 2016 BBM 1st Version #152 |
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| 2016 BBM 1st Version #203 |
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| 2016 BBM 1st Version #041 |
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| 2016 BBM 1st Version #030 |
The Netherlands
Wladimir Balentien (Swallows 2011-)
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| 2016 BBM 1st Version #181 |
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| 2016 BBM 1st Version #007 |
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| 2014 BBM 2nd Version #410 |
Puerto Rico
Orlando Roman (Swallows 2012-15)
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| 2012 BBM 1st Version #201 |
Venezuela
Robert Suarez (Hawks 2016-)
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| 2016 BBM 1st Version #012 |
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2017 BBM Rookie Edition
BBM's annual Rookie Edition set, which features the players taken by the NPB teams in the previous fall's draft, hit the stores about 10 days ago. Through the magic of Yahoo! Japan Auctions, Noppin and EMS, my set arrived at my door this afternoon.
The set contains 126 cards. 114 of these cards picture last October's draft class with the exception of Fighters sixth round draft pick Yujiro Yamaguchi, who did not sign with the team. This includes hte players taken in both the regular draft and the ikusei draft. Those taken in the regular draft will have cards in the upcoming 1st Version set and the appropriate team set. Those taken in the ikusei draft may never appear on another baseball card. The other 12 cards are a subset called "Early Days" and feature OB players (one for each team) when they either were drafted or in their rookie season. The players don't appear to have been chosen for any reason other than they could sign autographs to be available as chase cards with the set.
I don't know much about any of the draftees other than three of them were with the Shikoku Island League All Star team that played in the Can-Am League last summer - Yusuke Kinoshita (Dragons, ikusei round 1), Shungo Fukunaga (Tigers, round 6) and Yusuke Matsuzawa (Giants, ikusei round 8). Jen_Lei Liao (Giants, 7th round) spent two seasons in the Pittsburgh Pirates organization.
I have long ago run out of anything particularly interesting to say about BBM's Rookie Edition sets. They pretty much are what they are. I will make my annual comment that it would be a much more interesting set if the players were depicted in their high school/college/industrial league/indy minor league team uniforms rather than a posed shot wearing their drafting team's jersey.
Here's some sample cards:
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| #083 |
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| #040 |
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| #098 |
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| #060 |
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| #115 |
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Card Of The Week February 26
It's a bit of old news now but the Brisbane Bandits swept the Melbourne Aces two games to none to win the Australian Baseball League championship for the 2016-17 season. The Bandits won their second consecutive Claxton Shield under the leadership of former Milwaukee Brewer Dave Nilsson. Nilsson spent one season in Japan, playing for the Chunichi Dragons in 2000. It's kind of interesting why Nilsson ended in Japan that season - the 2000 Olympics were being held in Sydney, Australia and Nilsson wanted to be able to play for his nation's team when they were hosting the event. While MLB teams were not willing him to let him leave the team during the season to do so, the Dragons were. He had some injury issues and generally had a poor season with the Dragons, hitting only .180 in 18 games with the ichi-gun Dragons but he ended up leading all batters with a .565 average in the Olympics themselves.
Here's a 2000 Calbee card of Nilsson (whose registered name in NPB was "Dingo") from the "New Face" subset (#N-10):
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I used Nilsson's page on SABR's Biography Project for some of the information in this post.
Here's a 2000 Calbee card of Nilsson (whose registered name in NPB was "Dingo") from the "New Face" subset (#N-10):
I used Nilsson's page on SABR's Biography Project for some of the information in this post.
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2016 BBM Carp Autographed Edition
For the second time in less than a year, I've had a seller on Yahoo! Japan Auctions include a bonus card set with the set I purchased from them. Last summer a seller included the base set for the 2016 BBM Fighters Autographed Edition set with the Classic set and just this month a seller (not sure if it was the same one or not) included the base set for the 2016 BBM Carp Autographed Edition set with my Rookie Edition set.
Like the Fighters set, the Carp set contains 27 cards, all with a gold facsimile autograph. The players included are pretty much everyone you'd expect from the Carp - Hiroki Kuroda, Seiya Suzuki, Takahiro Aria, Kris Johnson, Ryosuke Kikuchi, Yusuke Nomura, etc. I was a little surprised Daichi Ohsera wasn't included but there's not anyone else I really felt was missing.
The cards are fairly attractive although I prefer full bleed photos. I'll voice my usual complaint that the photo selection is pretty uninspired - all batters batting and pitchers pitching. Here's some examples:
You can see all the cards here.
I pretty much feel the same way towards this set that I felt towards the Fighters set last summer - it's a nice little set (especially when it doesn't cost me anything) but I'm still not compelled to pick up the smaller team box sets instead of the larger pack-based team sets. But I will try to remember to use that seller again...
Like the Fighters set, the Carp set contains 27 cards, all with a gold facsimile autograph. The players included are pretty much everyone you'd expect from the Carp - Hiroki Kuroda, Seiya Suzuki, Takahiro Aria, Kris Johnson, Ryosuke Kikuchi, Yusuke Nomura, etc. I was a little surprised Daichi Ohsera wasn't included but there's not anyone else I really felt was missing.
The cards are fairly attractive although I prefer full bleed photos. I'll voice my usual complaint that the photo selection is pretty uninspired - all batters batting and pitchers pitching. Here's some examples:
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| #19 |
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| #08 |
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| #02 |
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| #23 |
I pretty much feel the same way towards this set that I felt towards the Fighters set last summer - it's a nice little set (especially when it doesn't cost me anything) but I'm still not compelled to pick up the smaller team box sets instead of the larger pack-based team sets. But I will try to remember to use that seller again...
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Early Spring Releases
Something a little odd has been going on lately and I think I like it. In the past, BBM's website has typically been much later in announcing new sets than the card shop sites like Discount Niki and Hot Box. But in the last week or so, new sets have been popping up on BBM's website first - in fact as I write this, one of the four new BBM sets I'm going to mention isn't on Discount Niki yet. I'm not sure what's changed but I'm pleased that BBM appears to be making more of an effort to keep their web page up to date than they have in the past.
Anyway, on with the new set announcements...
- This year's version of BBM's Icons box set will be released in late March (Niki says on March 24th) and will be entitled "Icons - Japan Pride". There will be 36 cards in the base set which will break down to three per team. I think the top 2016 draft pick for each team will be one of the three players along with players who are participating in the WBC (although I'm not quite sure about that last part). In addition to the base set, the box will also include one "special" card that could be a die-cut card, a facsimile autographed card or a real autographed card.
- BBM's first team box set will also be released in late March and is for the Fighters. The "Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters Premium" set will contain 29 cards - a 27 card base set, an insert card and a "special" insert card. It looks like the insert card will be one of two "2016 MVP" cards of Shohei Ohtani - I assume one shows him pitching and the other shows him hitting. The "special" insert card appears to be an autograph card. I'm not sure I'm understanding the translation correctly but it appear that the autographed cards will include players who are not in the base set. The MSRP on the set is a tidy 10,000 yen (roughly $100).
- BBM's first two pack based team sets have been announced. BBM's website says that the Swallows and Eagles team sets will be out in early April although Niki has the Swallows set coming out on March 30th and the Eagles set coming out the next day. Both sets will have 81 cards in their base sets, 24 insert cards in various sets and a wide variety of autograph cards. There's not a lot of detail on the Swallows set but the Eagles base set will have 66 cards for the manager and players, a three card "Newcomer" subset, a three card "Great Promise" subset and a nine card "Main Players" subset. The Eagles insert cards will break down into six three card sets ("Starting Pitchers", "Relief Pitchers", "Hits Production Machines", "Scoring Sources", "Youngsters Of Expectations" and "Reputable Veterans") and one six card "Phantom" subset. The Swallows set also has an insert set called "Phantom" - I don't know what this is but BBM appears to be saying that it is a popular super rare insert. Guess we'll find out at the end of the month.
- In addition to the new BBM sets there's been another "Trading mini colored paper"team based set announced by Hits - this time it's for the Carp. Like the other three that have been announced, this one appears to feature just eight players. It will be released on April 22nd.
Anyway, on with the new set announcements...
- This year's version of BBM's Icons box set will be released in late March (Niki says on March 24th) and will be entitled "Icons - Japan Pride". There will be 36 cards in the base set which will break down to three per team. I think the top 2016 draft pick for each team will be one of the three players along with players who are participating in the WBC (although I'm not quite sure about that last part). In addition to the base set, the box will also include one "special" card that could be a die-cut card, a facsimile autographed card or a real autographed card.
- BBM's first team box set will also be released in late March and is for the Fighters. The "Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters Premium" set will contain 29 cards - a 27 card base set, an insert card and a "special" insert card. It looks like the insert card will be one of two "2016 MVP" cards of Shohei Ohtani - I assume one shows him pitching and the other shows him hitting. The "special" insert card appears to be an autograph card. I'm not sure I'm understanding the translation correctly but it appear that the autographed cards will include players who are not in the base set. The MSRP on the set is a tidy 10,000 yen (roughly $100).
- BBM's first two pack based team sets have been announced. BBM's website says that the Swallows and Eagles team sets will be out in early April although Niki has the Swallows set coming out on March 30th and the Eagles set coming out the next day. Both sets will have 81 cards in their base sets, 24 insert cards in various sets and a wide variety of autograph cards. There's not a lot of detail on the Swallows set but the Eagles base set will have 66 cards for the manager and players, a three card "Newcomer" subset, a three card "Great Promise" subset and a nine card "Main Players" subset. The Eagles insert cards will break down into six three card sets ("Starting Pitchers", "Relief Pitchers", "Hits Production Machines", "Scoring Sources", "Youngsters Of Expectations" and "Reputable Veterans") and one six card "Phantom" subset. The Swallows set also has an insert set called "Phantom" - I don't know what this is but BBM appears to be saying that it is a popular super rare insert. Guess we'll find out at the end of the month.
- In addition to the new BBM sets there's been another "Trading mini colored paper"team based set announced by Hits - this time it's for the Carp. Like the other three that have been announced, this one appears to feature just eight players. It will be released on April 22nd.
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Hitoshi Tamura
I was looking through the cards of the latest BBM Retirement set (on-line at Jambalaya but I expect my set to show up in the new few days) and I realized that I had missed the fact that Hitoshi Tamura had retired at the end of last season.
Tamura was born in Kanagawa prefecture and went to high school at Yokohama High School. He was taken in the fourth round of the fall 1994 draft by his hometown team the Baystars (his high school teammate Shoichi Kida was taken by them in the first round). He made his debut with the ichi-gun Baystars in 1997 but he spent much of his time on the farm team until the 2000 season. He didn't really come up to the top team for good until 2003. He had a breakout season in 2004, hitting .305 with 40 home runs and 100 RBIs and followed it up in 2005 with a .304 average and 31 home runs. He lost a month of the 2005 season after he was injured in a car accident however. He played in the 2006 World Baseball Classic but a rib injury limited him to only 39 games in NPB. Following the 2006 season he was traded to the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks for Hayato Terahara.
He broke his leg in 2008 and missed much of that season and part of the following one. He returned with a vengeance in 2010 however, hitting .324 with 27 home runs and made both the All Star team and the Best 9 team for the first time in his career. He played in his only Nippon Series in 2011, hitting .370 with a home run helping the Hawks beat the Dragons in 7 games. After the 2012 season he was traded back to the Baystars along with Yasushi Kamiuchi and Teruaki Yoshikawa for Yuki Yoshimura, Shintaro Ejiri and Shogo Yamamoto. His playing time tapered off over the next three seasons and he was released by the Baystars at the end of the 2015 season. He was picked up as an ikusei player by the Dragons and while they considered registering him and promoting him to the ichi-gun team in the middle of last season, ultimately they never did. He retired at the end of the season and will spend 2017 as a commentator for J-Sports.
His rookie card was #577 in the 1995 BBM set. It looks like his first Calbee card wasn't for another 10 years - #069 in the 2005 set. He also had cards in various Konami, Bandai, Future Bee and Front Runner sets over the years. As far as I know there are no cards of him as a Dragon unless there is a team issue from last year that includes the ikusei players.
I don't have his rookie card but it can be seen on the back of the 2015 25th Anniversary card:
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Tamura was born in Kanagawa prefecture and went to high school at Yokohama High School. He was taken in the fourth round of the fall 1994 draft by his hometown team the Baystars (his high school teammate Shoichi Kida was taken by them in the first round). He made his debut with the ichi-gun Baystars in 1997 but he spent much of his time on the farm team until the 2000 season. He didn't really come up to the top team for good until 2003. He had a breakout season in 2004, hitting .305 with 40 home runs and 100 RBIs and followed it up in 2005 with a .304 average and 31 home runs. He lost a month of the 2005 season after he was injured in a car accident however. He played in the 2006 World Baseball Classic but a rib injury limited him to only 39 games in NPB. Following the 2006 season he was traded to the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks for Hayato Terahara.
He broke his leg in 2008 and missed much of that season and part of the following one. He returned with a vengeance in 2010 however, hitting .324 with 27 home runs and made both the All Star team and the Best 9 team for the first time in his career. He played in his only Nippon Series in 2011, hitting .370 with a home run helping the Hawks beat the Dragons in 7 games. After the 2012 season he was traded back to the Baystars along with Yasushi Kamiuchi and Teruaki Yoshikawa for Yuki Yoshimura, Shintaro Ejiri and Shogo Yamamoto. His playing time tapered off over the next three seasons and he was released by the Baystars at the end of the 2015 season. He was picked up as an ikusei player by the Dragons and while they considered registering him and promoting him to the ichi-gun team in the middle of last season, ultimately they never did. He retired at the end of the season and will spend 2017 as a commentator for J-Sports.
His rookie card was #577 in the 1995 BBM set. It looks like his first Calbee card wasn't for another 10 years - #069 in the 2005 set. He also had cards in various Konami, Bandai, Future Bee and Front Runner sets over the years. As far as I know there are no cards of him as a Dragon unless there is a team issue from last year that includes the ikusei players.
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| 1998 BBM #305 |
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| 2001 BBM #320 |
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| 2006 Upper Deck SP All World Team #AWT-27 |
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| 2007 Calbee #020 |
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| 2010 BBM All Stars #A60 |
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| 2011 BBM Nippon Series #S21 |
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| 2013 Front Runner Baystars Rookies & Young Stars #09 |
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| 2015 BBM 25th Anniversary #073 |
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Package From Ryan
Alan Walden, the ancient newscaster on WBAL radio out of Baltimore back 15-20 years ago, used to open his morning news casts with the phrase "Good morning! We have a lot to talk about". I was never a particular fan of either him or the radio station (I pretty much only ever listened to them for traffic information when I was commuting through Baltimore and when they were the Orioles radio affiliate) but I felt the phrase was appropriate today as I received another box of goodies from Ryan in Japan. I'm going to be doing a lot of posts on the contents over the next few days - the box had five complete card sets in it along with a bunch of singles. I'll start with most of the singles - there's a LOT to talk about...
First up, Ryan found over half the Sports Card Magazine inserts that I was looking for. Issue #64 (published in July of 2007) had three bonus cards from the 2007 BBM 1st Version set - Kuniyuki Kimoto (who had been traded from Nippon-Ham to Orix at the end of June) and two Americans who were returning to NPB after briefly going back to the US - Brian Sikorski and Alex Ochoa. Kimoto had had a card with the Fighters in the actual 1st Version set. This is the only BBM card of Sikorski with the Swallows.
SCM Issue #67 the following January had three original cards for guys who had switched teams that winter. Ryan found me the Osamu Hamanaka card who had traded from Hanshin to Orix in November of 2007. The photo is probably from his introductory press conference with the Buffaloes (as he's wearing a jersey over a dress shirt and tie) and it looks like it was taken outside the Osaka Dome. You can see that someone's wearing a Buffaloes jersey on Hamanaka's right - I'd be willing to bet that that's Makoto Yoshino who was included in the trade (and is not one of the other two cards in the issue).
One of the hot rookies of 2008 was Sho Nakata of the Fighters. Nakata apparently homered in his first at bat in a spring training game that year (technically his first at bat as a professional although his first official at bat in NPB wouldn't come until May of 2009) and BBM used it as an excuse to put a card of him in SCM Issue #68 in March of 2008 (they must have turned this around very fast as he hit the home run on March 1st and the issue would have been out by the end of the month):
Speaking of hot rookies for the Fighters, Yuki Saitoh was the one everyone was talking about in 2011. BBM decided to highlight the first wins and hits by five rookies (including Saitoh) in SCM Issue #87 which came out in May of 2011. The Akiyama card is a kira parallel.
BBM did something similar the following year (issue #93 in May of 2012) although it was more of a highlights subset as it included a couple veterans as well:
In addition to the SCM cards, Ryan also found some BBM singles that I had been looking for. Here's a card from the 2000 BBM Giants set showing the team's top draft picks from the previous three years:
How about a couple cards to fill in gaps in my uniform posts?
And not everything was from BBM. I asked Ryan to look for a 2016 Epoch Dragons Record Breakers set (which is really an 80th Anniversary set for Chunichi) at a "reasonable" price and he sent me a card of Dayan Viciedo from the set to tide me over until he finds one:
He also picked up this really cool 1976 Yamakatsu JY1a card for me off Yahoo! Japan Auctions:
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It's hard to tell from the scan but the card is pretty big - about 7 inches by almost 10 inches. It came with the original 40 year old card wrapper:
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So sorry for the long post but I was pretty excited about all my new cards. Thanks so much to Ryan for tracking this stuff down for me!
First up, Ryan found over half the Sports Card Magazine inserts that I was looking for. Issue #64 (published in July of 2007) had three bonus cards from the 2007 BBM 1st Version set - Kuniyuki Kimoto (who had been traded from Nippon-Ham to Orix at the end of June) and two Americans who were returning to NPB after briefly going back to the US - Brian Sikorski and Alex Ochoa. Kimoto had had a card with the Fighters in the actual 1st Version set. This is the only BBM card of Sikorski with the Swallows.
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| SCM #85 |
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| SCM #86 |
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| SCM #87 |
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| SCM #95 |
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| SCM #96 |
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| SCM #176 |
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| SCM #177 |
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| SCM #178 |
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| SCM #179 |
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| SCM #180 |
BBM did something similar the following year (issue #93 in May of 2012) although it was more of a highlights subset as it included a couple veterans as well:
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| SCM #195 |
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| SCM #196 |
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| SCM #197 |
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| SCM #198 |
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| SCM #199 |
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| 2000 BBM Giants #G103 |
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| 2008 BBM Touch The Game #073 |
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| 2015 BBM Bs Soul #08 |
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| 2015 BBM Bs Soul #22 |
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| 2016 Epoch Record Breakers #18 |
It's hard to tell from the scan but the card is pretty big - about 7 inches by almost 10 inches. It came with the original 40 year old card wrapper:
So sorry for the long post but I was pretty excited about all my new cards. Thanks so much to Ryan for tracking this stuff down for me!
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2014 Hawks "Special Baseball Cards"
Some of the other cards Ryan had picked up for me were some 2014 team issued cards for the Hawks. Now I had previously seen cards from two other 2014 Hawks sets but these did not appear to be related to the other sets. I saw these in two different Yahoo! Japan Auctions and asked Ryan to pick them up. The two auctions had nine cards in all but only four unique cards - I suggested to Ryan that he keep the doubles and he not only took me up on the offer, he beat me to doing a post about it by about six weeks!
The four unique cards are for Kenta Imamiya, Nobuhiro Matsuda, Seiichi Uchiyama and Yuki Yanagita. Here's the front and back of the Yanagita card (since Ryan showed the front and back of the other three cards):
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The breakdown of the nine cards was three Matsuda's, three Uchiyama's two Imamiya's and one Yanagita.
Ryan thinks that the cards were distributed in packs of three as one of the auctions included three cards in a red pack:
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I'd be curious if these were some sort of tie-in with the Hawks alternate red uniforms from that season - especially since the all four players are wearing that jersey.
The four unique cards are for Kenta Imamiya, Nobuhiro Matsuda, Seiichi Uchiyama and Yuki Yanagita. Here's the front and back of the Yanagita card (since Ryan showed the front and back of the other three cards):
The breakdown of the nine cards was three Matsuda's, three Uchiyama's two Imamiya's and one Yanagita.
Ryan thinks that the cards were distributed in packs of three as one of the auctions included three cards in a red pack:
I'd be curious if these were some sort of tie-in with the Hawks alternate red uniforms from that season - especially since the all four players are wearing that jersey.
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2017 BBM Farewell set
BBM's 7th annual set for retiring players came out back in January. As usual I don't exactly know what to call this set - the translation of the title is something like "Regret at Parting Baseball Players" but I always refer to it as the "Farewell" set.
So typically this set contains cards for all the players who announced their retirement the previous year. For the first few years some players would have multiple cards in the set but that's pretty much stopped in the last few sets. This year's edition has 36 cards each showing one player. The big names who retired at the end of last season are all included - Hiroki Kuroda, Daisuke Miura, Saburo (Ohmura), Hitoshi Tamura, Masaru Takeda and Hitoshi Tamura - along with lesser names like Shinji Iwata. Players who were not active in 2016 but did not announce their retirement until mid-season (like Hideki Okajima) are included as are players who were playing overseas in 2016 before they retired (Hitoshi Fujie). Many of the pictures are from the player's retirement ceremonies although some are from their playing days. Some of the photos of the players in action could be from a few years back - for example Hideki Okajima is shown in his Yomiuri Giants uniform which he hasn't worn since 2005.
Anyway there's not a whole lot else to say about this year's set - it's pretty much similar to the other six before it. The only thing I thought a bit odd was that the set did not include a card of Nobuhiko Matsunaka who had announced his retirement last February. Here's some example cards:
Ryan did a post on the set as well that talks about the set's print run, price and chase cards. And as always you can see all the cards at Jambalaya.
So typically this set contains cards for all the players who announced their retirement the previous year. For the first few years some players would have multiple cards in the set but that's pretty much stopped in the last few sets. This year's edition has 36 cards each showing one player. The big names who retired at the end of last season are all included - Hiroki Kuroda, Daisuke Miura, Saburo (Ohmura), Hitoshi Tamura, Masaru Takeda and Hitoshi Tamura - along with lesser names like Shinji Iwata. Players who were not active in 2016 but did not announce their retirement until mid-season (like Hideki Okajima) are included as are players who were playing overseas in 2016 before they retired (Hitoshi Fujie). Many of the pictures are from the player's retirement ceremonies although some are from their playing days. Some of the photos of the players in action could be from a few years back - for example Hideki Okajima is shown in his Yomiuri Giants uniform which he hasn't worn since 2005.
Anyway there's not a whole lot else to say about this year's set - it's pretty much similar to the other six before it. The only thing I thought a bit odd was that the set did not include a card of Nobuhiko Matsunaka who had announced his retirement last February. Here's some example cards:
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| #31 |
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| #35 |
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| #04 |
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| #05 |
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Card Of The Week March 5
NPB Reddit shared an article from the Japan Times a little over a month ago about Kawasaki Stadium and a famous pair of games there. Kawasaki Stadium was built in the early 1950's and was home to first the Taiyo Whales (before they moved to Yokohama in 1978) and then to the Lotte Orions (before they moved to Chiba in 1992) as well as the Takahashi Unions from 1954-56. The ballpark was converted into a football venue in 2000 but some of the old baseball park still remains.
The article discusses a double header played on October 19, 1988 between the Kintetsu Buffaloes and the Lotte Orions. The Buffaloes needed to sweep the last place Orions to pass the Lions (who had already completed their schedule) and clinch the Pacific League pennant. They won the first game 4-3 but were unable to hold a similar 4-3 lead in the second game when Hideaki Takazawa homered in the bottom of the eighth to tie the game up. The game ended as a tie after 10 innings (which was the limit at the time) and the Lions won the PL pennant (and went on to beat the Dragons in the Nippon Series). This particular doubleheader is known in Japan simply as "10.19"
BBM's 2016 "Historic Collection" set celebrating events at old ballparks (The Ballpark Stories) has three cards that deal with this day. I'm fairly certain that the photos on the cards are from the games. There's a card of Buffaloes pitcher Hideyuki Awano, who got the save in the first game and I think gave up the home run to Takazawa in the second game:
There's a card of Yoshio Mizukami of Lotte who I think made a game saving play on a ball hit by Hiromasa Arai (at least if I'm understanding this correctly):
And finally there's a card showing Takazawa's home run:
The article discusses a double header played on October 19, 1988 between the Kintetsu Buffaloes and the Lotte Orions. The Buffaloes needed to sweep the last place Orions to pass the Lions (who had already completed their schedule) and clinch the Pacific League pennant. They won the first game 4-3 but were unable to hold a similar 4-3 lead in the second game when Hideaki Takazawa homered in the bottom of the eighth to tie the game up. The game ended as a tie after 10 innings (which was the limit at the time) and the Lions won the PL pennant (and went on to beat the Dragons in the Nippon Series). This particular doubleheader is known in Japan simply as "10.19"
BBM's 2016 "Historic Collection" set celebrating events at old ballparks (The Ballpark Stories) has three cards that deal with this day. I'm fairly certain that the photos on the cards are from the games. There's a card of Buffaloes pitcher Hideyuki Awano, who got the save in the first game and I think gave up the home run to Takazawa in the second game:
 |
| 2016 BBM The Ballpark Stories #134 |
 |
| 2016 BBM The Ballpark Stories #110 |
 |
| 2016 BBM The Ballpark Stories #114 |
↧
2016 Epoch JWBL Set
I don't know a whole lot about the Japan Women's Baseball League (JWBL). The league was founded in 2009 as the Girls Professional Baseball League (GPBL) and was renamed in 2013. There have apparently always been four teams in the league although the names have changed constantly. Currently the teams are Hyogo Dione, Kyoto Flora, Reia and Saitama Astraia. Ryan knows a lot more about the league of course as he's actually gone to at least a couple games - up in Sendai and near Yokohama. The league has an official YouTube channel with some nice highlight videos:
Ryan has reported in the past on baseball cards related to the league. BBM did cards in at least 2010 and 2011 (no idea how they were distributed) and an outfit called AIAIO has been issuing cards for the league since 2012 maybe although they appear to be either a give away with tickets or possibly sold through AIAIO itself. Last October thought, Epoch issued what I believe is the first national release of baseball cards for the league. It was a 78 card set issued as a traditional pack based set - it was sold in boxes of 20 packs of 5 cards each. It actually was the ONLY set Epoch issued last year as a traditional pack based set instead of a ridiculously overpriced box containing a handful of cards for more than 10,000 yen. There were no insert cards to go with the base set although there were possible autographed cards as well as "checki" cards.
The cards for each team include a card of the mascot, the manager and a coach. There are 22 cards for Hyogo Dione, 21 cards for Kyoto Flora, 13 cards for Reia and 21 cards for Saitama Astraia. Each of the teams has a former NPB player as either coach or manager - Hyogo coach Tomoya Kawaguchi (Orix), Kyoto coach Heisyu Ohhara (Yakult), Reia coach Takanobu Tsujiuchi (Yomiuri) and Saitama manager Shinsaku Katahira (Nankai, Seibu & Taiyo).
I've no idea why Reia has much fewer cards than the other three teams. What's also odd is that Hyogo, Kyoto and Saitama have only one "Rookie" card but Reia has four. Since I don't know anything about the league, I don't know if the player selection is leaving anyone out. I do know that the two players I was aware of - Shingo Kawabata of the Swallows sister Yuki and Minami Takatsuka who had a promo card for the 2015 Real Venus set in SCM #114 - are both in the set.
The cards themselves are pretty attractive and for the most part feature action photos of the players:
I have to say that I find their mascots a bit on the creepy looking side:
If you've been paying attention you'll have noticed that the total number of cards I listed for the teams adds up to only 77. The other card is yet another "First Pitch" card for Ami Inamura:
Despite not knowing much about this league, I really like this set. One of the things I like about it is that unlike BBM's Real Venus sets there's no attempt to glamorize the ballplayers - they're not treated as anything other than the athletes they are. This set would look pretty much exactly the same if the players in the league were all men - of course the name of the league wouldn't make much sense then. (And in fairness I think the 2010-11 BBM sets and the AIAIO cards are the same way.) As a father of two young women that means a lot to me.
You can as always see all the cards at Jambalaya. They have a handful of the autographed cards on line as well.
Ryan has reported in the past on baseball cards related to the league. BBM did cards in at least 2010 and 2011 (no idea how they were distributed) and an outfit called AIAIO has been issuing cards for the league since 2012 maybe although they appear to be either a give away with tickets or possibly sold through AIAIO itself. Last October thought, Epoch issued what I believe is the first national release of baseball cards for the league. It was a 78 card set issued as a traditional pack based set - it was sold in boxes of 20 packs of 5 cards each. It actually was the ONLY set Epoch issued last year as a traditional pack based set instead of a ridiculously overpriced box containing a handful of cards for more than 10,000 yen. There were no insert cards to go with the base set although there were possible autographed cards as well as "checki" cards.
The cards for each team include a card of the mascot, the manager and a coach. There are 22 cards for Hyogo Dione, 21 cards for Kyoto Flora, 13 cards for Reia and 21 cards for Saitama Astraia. Each of the teams has a former NPB player as either coach or manager - Hyogo coach Tomoya Kawaguchi (Orix), Kyoto coach Heisyu Ohhara (Yakult), Reia coach Takanobu Tsujiuchi (Yomiuri) and Saitama manager Shinsaku Katahira (Nankai, Seibu & Taiyo).
I've no idea why Reia has much fewer cards than the other three teams. What's also odd is that Hyogo, Kyoto and Saitama have only one "Rookie" card but Reia has four. Since I don't know anything about the league, I don't know if the player selection is leaving anyone out. I do know that the two players I was aware of - Shingo Kawabata of the Swallows sister Yuki and Minami Takatsuka who had a promo card for the 2015 Real Venus set in SCM #114 - are both in the set.
The cards themselves are pretty attractive and for the most part feature action photos of the players:
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| #54 |
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| #59 |
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| #01 |
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| #14 |
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| #73 |
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| #70 |
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| #22 |
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| #40 |
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| #77 |
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| #78 |
You can as always see all the cards at Jambalaya. They have a handful of the autographed cards on line as well.
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2015 Lions Fan Club set
One of the sets I asked Ryan to pick up for me was the complete (I assume) 2015 Lions Fan Club set. I had seen an auction on YJA for it for only 600 yen so I figured it was time to see what a complete team issued set looked like. I previously wrote about a couple cards I had from this set in a post I did on Lions team issued cards.
The set contains 70 cards total. It appears to contain the entire 70 man roster of the Lions that year (which actually was only 66 players) plus four ikusei players. It does not contain a card for the Lions manager at the time Norio Tanabe. The cards are unnumbered except for the player's uniform number.
I did a comparison of the players appearing in this set and the players appearing in the 2015 BBM Lions set. Tanabe was the only in the BBM set but not in this set. Three of the four ikusei players (Kyohei Maegawa, Daichi Mizuguchi and Daisuke Togawa) do not appear in the BBM set - the fourth one (Ryo Hayashizaki) was moved to the official roster on June 1 that year and so appears in the BBM set. (Mizuguchi was moved to the official roster on July 23 so the Fan Club set must have gone to press before June 1 and the BBM set must have gone to press between June 1 and July 23.)
Here's some sample cards:
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And here's the complete list of the set:
The set contains 70 cards total. It appears to contain the entire 70 man roster of the Lions that year (which actually was only 66 players) plus four ikusei players. It does not contain a card for the Lions manager at the time Norio Tanabe. The cards are unnumbered except for the player's uniform number.
I did a comparison of the players appearing in this set and the players appearing in the 2015 BBM Lions set. Tanabe was the only in the BBM set but not in this set. Three of the four ikusei players (Kyohei Maegawa, Daichi Mizuguchi and Daisuke Togawa) do not appear in the BBM set - the fourth one (Ryo Hayashizaki) was moved to the official roster on June 1 that year and so appears in the BBM set. (Mizuguchi was moved to the official roster on July 23 so the Fan Club set must have gone to press before June 1 and the BBM set must have gone to press between June 1 and July 23.)
Here's some sample cards:
And here's the complete list of the set:
| Number | Player |
|---|---|
| 0 | Morimoto, Hichori |
| 1 | Kuriyama, Takumi |
| 2 | Kaneko, Yuji |
| 4 | Onizaki, Yuji |
| 6 | Seratelli, Anthony |
| 7 | Wakiya, Ryota |
| 8 | Watanabe, Naoto |
| 9 | Ohsaki, Yutaro |
| 10 | Mori, Tomoya |
| 11 | Kishi, Takayuki |
| 12 | Kaku, Shun Lin |
| 13 | Nishiguchi, Fumiya |
| 14 | Masuda, Tatsushi |
| 15 | Ohishi, Tatsuya |
| 16 | Kikuchi, Yusei |
| 17 | Takahashi, Kona |
| 19 | Toyoda, Takuya |
| 20 | Nogami, Ryoma |
| 21 | Togame, Ken |
| 22 | Okamoto, Atsushi |
| 23 | Hirano, Masamitsu |
| 25 | Hoshi, Takanori |
| 26 | Vasquez, Esmerling |
| 27 | Sumitani, Ginjiro |
| 28 | Fujiwara, Ryohei |
| 29 | Koishi, Hirotaka |
| 30 | Okamoto, Yosuke |
| 31 | Iwao, Toshihiro |
| 32 | Asamura, Hideto |
| 33 | Yamakawa, Hotaka |
| 34 | Sano, Yasuo |
| 35 | Makita, Kazuhisa |
| 36 | Yoneno, Tomohito |
| 37 | Okada, Masatoshi |
| 38 | Tamamura, Yusuke |
| 39 | Nakagoh, Taiki |
| 40 | Yamaguchi, Takayuki |
| 42 | Mejia, Miguel |
| 43 | Takahashi, Tomomi |
| 44 | Tonosaki, Shuta |
| 46 | Nakazaki, Yuta |
| 47 | LeBlanc, Wade |
| 48 | Takekuma, Shota |
| 49 | Uemoto, Tatsuyuki |
| 50 | Fukukura, Kentaro |
| 51 | Kimura, Fumikazu |
| 52 | Yamada, Haruki |
| 53 | Ishikawa, Mitsugu |
| 55 | Akiyama, Shogo |
| 56 | Kaneko, Kazuki |
| 57 | Matsushita, Kenta |
| 58 | Kumashiro, Masato |
| 59 | Nagae, Kyohei |
| 60 | Nakamura, Takeya |
| 61 | Tashiro, Shotaro |
| 62 | Komazuki, Hitoto |
| 63 | Satoh, Isamu |
| 64 | Nakata, Shota |
| 65 | Saitoh, Shogo |
| 66 | Tanaka, Yasuhiro |
| 67 | Umeda, Naomichi |
| 68 | Miyata, Kazuki |
| 71 | Aiuchi, Makoto |
| 78 | Fujisawa, Komei |
| 88 | Sakata, Ryo |
| 99 | Mejia, Ernesto |
| 120 | Hayashizaki, Ryo |
| 121 | Maegawa, Kyohei |
| 122 | Togawa, Daisuke |
| 123 | Mizuguchi, Daichi |
↧
↧
2007 BBM Home Run Chronicle set
Ten years ago BBM issued a box set called "HR Chronicle" which celebrated the top home run hitters in NPB history. I've been wavering on picking one up for a while (I almost bought one at Wrappers in Tokyo four years ago) but it wasn't until I found one on Yahoo! Japan Auctions a few months back for 400 yen that I finally decided to get one. Ryan once again was nice enough to pick it up for me, saving me a bunch of proxy service fees. I'm glad I finally got it because it's a nice little set.
The original set had 47 cards in it - a 45 card base set and 2 "premium" cards (which could be photo cards, film cards, bat cards and autographed cards). I only got the box set (which you could have probably figured out by the 400 yen price). The cards are a nice thick stock and feature a photo of the player on the front (well, duh) with the player's total number of NPB home runs in the lower left corner and the player's career home run totals broken into a bar graph by season. Here's the front and back of Sadaharu Oh's card (#01) as an example:
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There's a little crown on each year the player led the league in home runs. Players who played in MLB or the KBO have their home runs shown on the back of their card as well (with purple bars) but those home run obviously aren't included in the total on the front. The home run totals are through July 1, 2007 which of course only affects the 11 active at the time players in the set.
The player selection is a bit interesting. My first thought was that the set featured the top 45 career home run hitters in NPB history. But then I noticed that the last card was of Seung-Yuop Lee who only had 100 NPB home runs at the time. Surely there had been more than 45 guys with over 100 home runs in NPB. The answer is yes, there have been.
I don't have a list of home run totals as of July 1, 2007 but I do know where to find a list as of the 2011 season - the Japanese Baseball Database. Eyeballing that list and accounting for differences in totals for players still active in 2007 and later, it looks like the set includes everyone who had more than 300 home runs at press time - that accounts for the first 31 cards in the set. The top player on the list not included is Akinobu Mayumi with 292 home runs. The set includes 35 of the top 37 guys on the 2011 list - the only ones missing are Alex Ramirex and Michihiro Ogasawara who had a much lower home run total in mid 2007 than after 2011. The remaining cards include a bunch of the big home run hitters from the early days of professional baseball in Japan - Noboru Aota, Yasumitsu Toyoda, Futoshi Nakanishi, Fumio Fujimura, Hiroshi Ohshita and Kaoru Bettoh as well as Randy Bass and the aforementioned Seung-Yuop Lee.
One thing I like about the set is that most of the photos are not ones that BBM has used in other sets - the Oh one is a notable exception but since it shows him hitting home run #756 I think it's undertandable. Here's some more sample cards:
Ryan included the box the set was came in so I took a couple pictures of it to show off how the set was packaged:
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The original set had 47 cards in it - a 45 card base set and 2 "premium" cards (which could be photo cards, film cards, bat cards and autographed cards). I only got the box set (which you could have probably figured out by the 400 yen price). The cards are a nice thick stock and feature a photo of the player on the front (well, duh) with the player's total number of NPB home runs in the lower left corner and the player's career home run totals broken into a bar graph by season. Here's the front and back of Sadaharu Oh's card (#01) as an example:
There's a little crown on each year the player led the league in home runs. Players who played in MLB or the KBO have their home runs shown on the back of their card as well (with purple bars) but those home run obviously aren't included in the total on the front. The home run totals are through July 1, 2007 which of course only affects the 11 active at the time players in the set.
The player selection is a bit interesting. My first thought was that the set featured the top 45 career home run hitters in NPB history. But then I noticed that the last card was of Seung-Yuop Lee who only had 100 NPB home runs at the time. Surely there had been more than 45 guys with over 100 home runs in NPB. The answer is yes, there have been.
I don't have a list of home run totals as of July 1, 2007 but I do know where to find a list as of the 2011 season - the Japanese Baseball Database. Eyeballing that list and accounting for differences in totals for players still active in 2007 and later, it looks like the set includes everyone who had more than 300 home runs at press time - that accounts for the first 31 cards in the set. The top player on the list not included is Akinobu Mayumi with 292 home runs. The set includes 35 of the top 37 guys on the 2011 list - the only ones missing are Alex Ramirex and Michihiro Ogasawara who had a much lower home run total in mid 2007 than after 2011. The remaining cards include a bunch of the big home run hitters from the early days of professional baseball in Japan - Noboru Aota, Yasumitsu Toyoda, Futoshi Nakanishi, Fumio Fujimura, Hiroshi Ohshita and Kaoru Bettoh as well as Randy Bass and the aforementioned Seung-Yuop Lee.
One thing I like about the set is that most of the photos are not ones that BBM has used in other sets - the Oh one is a notable exception but since it shows him hitting home run #756 I think it's undertandable. Here's some more sample cards:
 |
| #14 |
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| #19 |
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| #28 |
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| #29 |
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| #42 |
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BBM on YouTube
I discovered the other day that BBM has an official YouTube Channel. There's only a couple videos so far - box breaks for Rookie Edition and the "Fast Break 2nd Half" basketball cards for the B.League and this video showing off the Shohei Ohtani and Seiya Suzuki memorabilia cards from the upcoming 1st Version set:
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Card Of The Week March 12
Sho Nakata appears to like playing on the international stage. In the 2015 Premier 12, he hit .429 with 3 home runs and 15 RBIs in 8 games. In four games so far in the 2017 World Baseball Classic, he's hitting .357 with 3 home runs and 8 RBIs. He was the big hero in today's nail-biter 8-6 victory by Japan against The Netherlands, with a three run home run in the third and the game winning two RBI single in the 11th.
Here's a card of Nakata from the "Cosmic Cross" set that was distributed in six card quantities in each issue of Sports Card Magazine in 2014:
Here's a card of Nakata from the "Cosmic Cross" set that was distributed in six card quantities in each issue of Sports Card Magazine in 2014:
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| 2014 BBM Cosmic Cross SCM #263 |
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Package From Dani
Ryan is not the only one that I get cool stuff in the mail from. I received a package yesterday from Dani that had a bunch of goodies in it. We have kind of an ongoing trade in progress - I sent her a bunch of cards last year, she sent me a bunch of cards this week so I need to get some cards together for her now.
Here's what she sent me. First up, a couple random cards. She sent me what I think is a Weekly Baseball insert of Ryota Wakiya from 2006:
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Next a Calbee Star Card of Shuichi Murata from 2012:
Next she sent me a card from last year's Nippon-Ham Home Run Sausage set. I've been wanting to get a complete set of these but complete sets are nowhere to be found on Yahoo! Japan Auctions so I will settle for just this one. As a bonus, I'm pretty sure this picture of Shogo Yagi was taken in Arizona last spring:
The bulk of what she sent me was a bunch of her extras from last year's Pro Yakyuu Ai "street clothes" set for the Fighters. She had sent me a couple cards from this set last year but she bought another box and sent me more of her doubles. She said she tried to find the "least goofy" cards for me "but well they are all goofy". She gave me 10 more of the base set cards:
She also sent me a "Shop Campaign Card" for Kensuke Kondoh. I'm not quite sure what this is but it looks like there's one to a box.
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She also sent me an empty pack along with the "Original Binder Application Ticket". Apparently there was some sort of lottery you could enter to get a binder for the set:
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I was tempted to call the set "Professional Baseball Affection" but Dani says that that's the name of the magazine put out by Pro Yakyuu Ai. I now have at least one card for each of the nine players in the set - that'll probably be enough.
I saved the best part of the package for last though. For any number of reasons I was unable to make it to Arizona last month for the Fighters training camp. I felt I had a little unfinished business there from last year, however, and I knew Dani would be going again so I asked her for a favor and she graciously agreed. I mailed her a card that I wanted signed in late January and she got it done on her very first day in Arizona:
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I need to get a good screwdown case to put this in.
Thanks so much for everything Dani! I'll be getting some cards together for you but they probably won't be as cool as these were.
Here's what she sent me. First up, a couple random cards. She sent me what I think is a Weekly Baseball insert of Ryota Wakiya from 2006:
Next a Calbee Star Card of Shuichi Murata from 2012:
 |
| 2012 Calbee #S-42 |
 |
| 2016 Nippon-Ham Sausage #2016N-34 |
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| 2016 Pro Yakyuu Ai #02 |
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| 2016 Pro Yakyuu Ai #16 |
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| 2016 Pro Yakyuu Ai #18 |
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| 2016 Pro Yakyuu Ai #22 |
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| 2016 Pro Yakyuu Ai #28 |
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| 2016 Pro Yakyuu Ai #33 |
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| 2016 Pro Yakyuu Ai #42 |
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| 2016 Pro Yakyuu Ai #43 |
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| 2016 Pro Yakyuu Ai #52 |
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| 2016 Pro Yakyuu Ai #56 |
She also sent me an empty pack along with the "Original Binder Application Ticket". Apparently there was some sort of lottery you could enter to get a binder for the set:
I was tempted to call the set "Professional Baseball Affection" but Dani says that that's the name of the magazine put out by Pro Yakyuu Ai. I now have at least one card for each of the nine players in the set - that'll probably be enough.
I saved the best part of the package for last though. For any number of reasons I was unable to make it to Arizona last month for the Fighters training camp. I felt I had a little unfinished business there from last year, however, and I knew Dani would be going again so I asked her for a favor and she graciously agreed. I mailed her a card that I wanted signed in late January and she got it done on her very first day in Arizona:
I need to get a good screwdown case to put this in.
Thanks so much for everything Dani! I'll be getting some cards together for you but they probably won't be as cool as these were.
↧
↧
2003 BBM Fighters
I've frequently mentioned (well, complained really) that there hasn't been an OB team set for the Fighters that covers their history before they moved to Hokkaido after 2003. Recently I discovered that that's not completely true - their 2003 BBM team set had an OB section to it.
I'd bought a pack from the set back when it came out but I wanted to track down one particular card from it that shows the colorful uniforms of the 1973 Nittaku Home Flyers. When researching the set in Engel, I realized that there were a bunch of OB cards in it. So I tracked a complete set down on YJA and asked Ryan to pick it up for me.
This was the first time that BBM did a team set of any kind for the Fighters. 2003 was the last year that the Fighters played in Tokyo and was also the 30th Anniversary of Nippon-Ham buying the team. I don't know if either of those played a factor in BBM deciding to do a team set for the Fighters that year - it wasn't until 2004 that they started doing pack based team sets for all 12 teams.
The base set contained 126 cards. The first 78 cards are a traditional (or what has become a traditional) team set. There's 66 "regular" cards for the players (and manager Trey Hillman and coach Kazuyuki Shirai) of the 2003 team and two six card subsets - "Top Prospects" and "Top Of Fighters" (team leaders from 2002). Here's some example cards from this part of the set:
The remaining 48 cards in the set were split into seven different subsets. One of these was a two card checklist subset but the remaining ones all dealt with the history of the Fighters. I'll hit each one of these in order.
First up is a six card subset for great dates in Fighters history. The six dates are 11/19/1973 (Nippon-Ham buys the team from Nittaku Home), 10/6/1977 (first time attendance reached one million), 10/13/1981 (winning the Pacific League pennant by beating Lotte in the playoffs), 9/28/1982 (clinching the second half of the 1982 season - they would lose to Seibu in the playoffs), 7/3/1998 (the "Big Bang Lineup" set a hitting record that I can't figure out), and 7/9/2002 (the team announces the move to Sapporo).
The two checklist cards actually do contain a little history themselves as the former mascot Gyorotan and the then-current mascot Fighty are shown in the background. The front of each checklist uses a tinted picture while the back shows the untinted version. Here's the back of checklist #1 (#085) and the front of checklist #2 (#086):
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Next is a four card subset labelled "Uniform Story" that shows the different uniforms worn by the Fighters from 1974 to 2003. The back of each card shows a drawing of the home and away versions of the uniform a la "The History Of Uniform". Here's manager Futoshi Nakanishi modeling the uniform worn during the first half of 1974:
The next group of cards is a nine card "Team Records" subset. As you'd expect from that name, this subset includes the career leaders in a number of categories for the Fighters - saves (88 by Yutaka Enatsu), RBI (683 by Hideo Furuya), home runs (167 by Junichi Kashiwabara), strikeouts (1454 by Yukihiro Nishizaki), managerial wins (631 by Keiji Ohsawa), stolen bases (351 by Makoto Shimada), pitching wins (95 by Naoki Takahashi), hits (1835 byYukio Tanaka) and games played (1435 by Fumio Tamura). Tanaka was the only one of these players still active at the time.
That the Fighters existed before Nippon-Ham bought them is acknowledged in the next subset. This is a three card subset that I do not know the title of. The first card shows Hiroshi Ohshita in a Tokyo Senators uniform in 1946 (the franchise's first season). The second card shows a group of Toei Flyers (including Isao Harimoto) from around 1959-60 and the final card shows the infamous Nittaku Home Flyers alternate uniforms from 1973.
The next three card subset is a summary of the Fighters' 30 seasons while owned by Nippon Ham. Each card covers a decade (1974-83, 1984-93, 1994-2003) and the backs have a summary of how the team did each year and what the attendance was.
The next three cards feature Fighters players on Shukan Baseball covers over the years. One shows Isamu Kida from 1980, one shows Yutaka Enatsu from 1983 and this one shows Yukio Tanaka from 1998:
The final subset is 18 cards devoted to the 1981 Pacific League Champion Fighters called "Legend Of Champions". With the success that the Fighters have had since moving to Sapporo in 2004 it is easy to forget that at this point in their history the Fighters' franchise had only won a single Nippon Series and that was in 1962 when they were owned by Toei. Their 1981 pennant was the only one that the team won between 1962 and 2006. So it shouldn't be a major surprise that there's such a large subset devoted to that team. What is kind of a surprise is that the subset includes Yoshinori Ohkoso, who was the team owner at the time (and I assume the head of the Nippon-Ham corporation). The subset also includes manager Keiji Ohsawa, Yutaka Enatsu, foreign players Tommy Cruz and Tony Solaita, Hideo Furuya, Junichi Kashiwabara, Isamu Kida, Makoto Shimada and Kazumi Takahashi.
I mentioned earlier that I'd bought a pack for this set back when it originally came out. Here's the wrapper:
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The set also included two insert sets - "Fighting Spirit" (18 cards) and "Fighters Best 9" (12 cards - includes manager, relief pitcher and DH if you're wondering how they got to 12). The "Fighting Spirit" cards only have active (at the time obviously) players while the "Best 9" cards include both active and OB. I pulled a "Fighting Spirit" insert in the pack I opened:
On the whole I really liked this set. It does a pretty good job covering the Fighters' post-1974 history. Since the bulk of the OB players are from the 1981 team I think there's some significant players in the team's history that could have been included (Isao Harimoto in a Fighters uniform, Toshizo Sakamoto who was the first ever DH in NPB, Masanori Murakami who was on the 1981 team) but some OB Fighters are better than no OB Fighters. I'd still like an OB team set that covered the pre-Nippon-Ham days. I know that the 2004 BBM Fighters set also contains an OB player subset but I suspect that they are all Nippon-Ham players as well (Harimoto is in that subset though).
Oh, and I'm sure you'd all be disappointed if I didn't show off the card that made me look for this set in the first placed so here it is:
I'd like to acknowledge that I leaned a LOT on Engel while researching this set. I'd also like to acknowledge that it was the now defunct "Fighters Collection" website for showing this card - that's where I learned it existed.
I'd bought a pack from the set back when it came out but I wanted to track down one particular card from it that shows the colorful uniforms of the 1973 Nittaku Home Flyers. When researching the set in Engel, I realized that there were a bunch of OB cards in it. So I tracked a complete set down on YJA and asked Ryan to pick it up for me.
This was the first time that BBM did a team set of any kind for the Fighters. 2003 was the last year that the Fighters played in Tokyo and was also the 30th Anniversary of Nippon-Ham buying the team. I don't know if either of those played a factor in BBM deciding to do a team set for the Fighters that year - it wasn't until 2004 that they started doing pack based team sets for all 12 teams.
The base set contained 126 cards. The first 78 cards are a traditional (or what has become a traditional) team set. There's 66 "regular" cards for the players (and manager Trey Hillman and coach Kazuyuki Shirai) of the 2003 team and two six card subsets - "Top Prospects" and "Top Of Fighters" (team leaders from 2002). Here's some example cards from this part of the set:
 |
| #048 |
 |
| #064 |
 |
| #065 |
 |
| #060 |
 |
| #071 |
 |
| #076 |
First up is a six card subset for great dates in Fighters history. The six dates are 11/19/1973 (Nippon-Ham buys the team from Nittaku Home), 10/6/1977 (first time attendance reached one million), 10/13/1981 (winning the Pacific League pennant by beating Lotte in the playoffs), 9/28/1982 (clinching the second half of the 1982 season - they would lose to Seibu in the playoffs), 7/3/1998 (the "Big Bang Lineup" set a hitting record that I can't figure out), and 7/9/2002 (the team announces the move to Sapporo).
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| #080 |
Next is a four card subset labelled "Uniform Story" that shows the different uniforms worn by the Fighters from 1974 to 2003. The back of each card shows a drawing of the home and away versions of the uniform a la "The History Of Uniform". Here's manager Futoshi Nakanishi modeling the uniform worn during the first half of 1974:
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| #087 |
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| Back of #087 |
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| #091 |
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| #101 |
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| #104 |
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| Back of #104 |
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| #108 |
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| #115 |
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| #125 |
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| #109 |
The set also included two insert sets - "Fighting Spirit" (18 cards) and "Fighters Best 9" (12 cards - includes manager, relief pitcher and DH if you're wondering how they got to 12). The "Fighting Spirit" cards only have active (at the time obviously) players while the "Best 9" cards include both active and OB. I pulled a "Fighting Spirit" insert in the pack I opened:
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| #FS17 |
Oh, and I'm sure you'd all be disappointed if I didn't show off the card that made me look for this set in the first placed so here it is:
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| #102 |
I'd like to acknowledge that I leaned a LOT on Engel while researching this set. I'd also like to acknowledge that it was the now defunct "Fighters Collection" website for showing this card - that's where I learned it existed.
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2000 BBM O-N set
This is going to be kind of an odd story so bear with me for a minute. I've been trying to make sense of something for a couple weeks and I think I finally figured it all out.
According to both Engel and Sports Card Magazine, BBM issued a high end box set in 2000 called "O-N" that was dedicated to Shigeo Nagashima and Sadaharu Oh. There were 2000 numbered sets issued that contained 54 cards each. The 54 cards included a film card, a windbreaker card and a jersey card for each player - so each box had four memorabilia cards and two film cards in it. I don't mean one of four possible memorabilia cards - each box had all four memorabilia cards in it. As you might expect, the original price of the box was pretty high - 30,000 yen (which in 2000 would have been roughly $280).
There were two of these sets available on Ebay a few weeks back. Both were being sold by the same seller. One had a starting price of around $20 and the other had a starting price of around $50. I didn't really notice any differences at the time in the two sets - they were both listed as complete sets - but I did think it was odd they were being listed at two different prices. This wouldn't normally be something I'd be all that interested in but the idea of picking up some memorabilia cards of Oh and Nagashima fairly cheaply was quite appealing so I bid on the cheaper set and won it for $28 (plus $10 shipping). The set showed up a few days later (actually the same day I got Ryan's last package so I was wading in cards that day) and I got very disappointed and confused.
The disappointment came first. As I said, the set was supposed to have 54 cards in it. The set I got had 55 cards in it, but only 51 unique ones. I was missing cards 15, 52 and 54. The last two were exceptionally disappointing as they were the jersey and windbreaker cards for Sadaharu Oh. I contacted the seller and told them that the set was not complete and I wanted them to either supply the missing cards or give me a partial refund. The seller's first reply was "This is a $300 set that sold for $28" and that I could return it for a full refund. I then pointed out to them that first of all it wasn't a $300 set without the two Oh memorabilia cards and second of all that the "book value" of the set really didn't enter in to it - they were supposed to sell me a complete set and they didn't. They backed down pretty quick and agreed to refund me the $5 I asked for. I felt that even without the Oh cards I was getting a pretty good deal on two Nagashima memorabilia cards but I also felt there should be some consequence for them having an incorrect listing. I gathered from the messages I had with them that they are basically a consignment outfit and don't really know much about what they're selling.
On to the confusion. I mentioned that I got 55 cards. Four of the cards were duplicates. Or were they? On closer examination, I realized there were some differences. I had one version that had a red letter on the front and a card number of "ON XX" and another version that had a blue letter on the front and a card number of "ON-BXX". Was there some sort of parallel version of the set as well? There was no indication in either Engel or SCM of there being any sort of parallels. As I looked through the rest of the set, I realized that I had a mix of versions. Of the 55 total cards I had, 31 had card numbers in the form "ON XX" and 24 had card numbers in the form "ON-BXX". Here's the front and back of one of the cards I had duplicates of (card #7):
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Another source of confusion involved the 10 card subset that featured both players. Engel lists all these cards are being gold bordered. Only five of the ones I have have a gold border (and they all have card numbers like "ON XX" - the other five have silver borders on the top and bottom (which all have the "ON-BXX" card numbers.
I had mentioned before that there had been two of these sets on Ebay, the one I won and the one that had a starting price of $50-ish. The other set did not sell so the seller relisted it starting at $10. I took a look at the pictures of the auction and realized that there were multiple Oh jersey and windbreaker cards in the auction. So maybe that's what happened to the Oh cards that were supposed to be in my set. I sent a message to the seller asking about it and basically got blown off - they felt they had already spent enough time talking to me about it. I bid on the second auction but ultimately lost out - the set sold for $42. So I still don't have the Oh cards.
In looking at the photos for the other auction and actually paying attention to the description, I think I finally have figured out what's going on. The box my set came in is black and says "ON 2000 BBM Limited Box". The box for the set in the other auction was red and said "BBM 2000 BBM Basic Set". There were two versions of the set!
The Limited set had 2000 numbered sets while the Basic had 3000. The Basic set is not mentioned in either Engel or SCM (which is really surprising since BBM's the publisher of SCM). The cards with the red letter and the "ON XX" number are from the Limited set while the cards with the blue letter and the "ON-BXX" number are from the Basic set. The gold bordered cards are from the Limited set while the silver bordered cards are from the Basic set. I took a look at all the cards I can see in the following picture and verified that I have the other version of each of them in the set I bought:
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So what I think happened is pretty obvious - someone had one of each of these sets and the cards got mixed together at some point. When the cards were put up for sale, someone did a fairly sloppy job of separating them into the two sets - in fairness the differences aren't entirely obvious, especially if you aren't familiar with card sets. So I've ended up with a franken-set - an unholy hybrid of the two sets. Which I wouldn't mind so much if I had the Oh cards - I'm pretty sure the two in the lower center of the above picture are the ones that should have been with my set. I'm also pretty confident that whoever won the second auction is going to be confused by this as well - maybe they'll read this post and contact me! Not that I expect to be able to get the Oh cards but maybe we can resolve some of the issues with the rest of the set - they won't have a complete set either.
OK, with all of that out of the way, let's talk about the set itself. As I've said a couple times now, it's a 54 card set. There's 20 cards for Nagashima, 20 cards for Oh and 10 cards featuring both of them with the remaining four cards being the windbreaker and jersey cards for them.
The 20 cards for each player pretty much parallel each other - the first five cards of each group feature the player's photo superimposed on a silver baseball. The next five cards feature the player batting - the first of these five cards are the film cards - a card with an actual piece of film embedded in it. The next two cards are dedicated to fielding and the one after that is dedicated to base running. The fourteenth card is for the player's retirement and the fifteenth is for the first Nippon Series the player won as manager (1994 for Nagashima and 1999 for Oh). The sixteenth card is for their respective league championships in 2000 (Nagashima's Giants won the Central League that year while Oh's Hawks won the Pacific League) and is thicker stock than the rest of the cards. Card 17 breaks the pattern - Nagashima's card is for "leisure time" while Oh's features his "batting style" - although both cards show the player with a samurai sword. Card 18 shows the player with his wife while card 19 celebrates the player's playing career (17 years for Nagashima and 22 years for Oh). Card 20 shows each of them during the 2000 Nippon Series - on his card Nagashima is getting tossed in the air while the Giants celebrated beating the Hawks. Here's several of the cards from this part of the set:
The back of ON-B18 shows Nagashima playing Shogi with his son Kazushige who would grow up to play in NPB also:
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The ten cards showing the two players together mostly span their careers together with the Giants. There's one that was taken showing the two of them as opposing managers in the 2000 Nippon Series. Here's a couple examples:
Finally, here's the front and back of the two Nagashima memorabilia cards. The cards came in screwdown cases that don't allow a decent scan so I took pictures instead:
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And when I say that the cards came in screwdown cases, I mean that BBM included them in the set in screwdown cases.
All in all this was a pretty attractive set. BBM did a really good job picking out pictures for the set and I was pleased that there wasn't a lot of duplication between the photos of Oh in this set and the ones BBM used in their Oh tribute set eight years later. I certainly wouldn't have paid $300 for the set but I don't regret spending the $33 I did ($28 winning bid plus $10 shipping minus the $5 I got the seller to refund me) on it.
One last note - I reassembled how I think the box was originally packaged and took a couple photos. The packaging was pretty attractive as well - there was a cardboard sleeve over a felt covered box with a gold satin interior. Engel says that it's like a jewelry box.
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According to both Engel and Sports Card Magazine, BBM issued a high end box set in 2000 called "O-N" that was dedicated to Shigeo Nagashima and Sadaharu Oh. There were 2000 numbered sets issued that contained 54 cards each. The 54 cards included a film card, a windbreaker card and a jersey card for each player - so each box had four memorabilia cards and two film cards in it. I don't mean one of four possible memorabilia cards - each box had all four memorabilia cards in it. As you might expect, the original price of the box was pretty high - 30,000 yen (which in 2000 would have been roughly $280).
There were two of these sets available on Ebay a few weeks back. Both were being sold by the same seller. One had a starting price of around $20 and the other had a starting price of around $50. I didn't really notice any differences at the time in the two sets - they were both listed as complete sets - but I did think it was odd they were being listed at two different prices. This wouldn't normally be something I'd be all that interested in but the idea of picking up some memorabilia cards of Oh and Nagashima fairly cheaply was quite appealing so I bid on the cheaper set and won it for $28 (plus $10 shipping). The set showed up a few days later (actually the same day I got Ryan's last package so I was wading in cards that day) and I got very disappointed and confused.
The disappointment came first. As I said, the set was supposed to have 54 cards in it. The set I got had 55 cards in it, but only 51 unique ones. I was missing cards 15, 52 and 54. The last two were exceptionally disappointing as they were the jersey and windbreaker cards for Sadaharu Oh. I contacted the seller and told them that the set was not complete and I wanted them to either supply the missing cards or give me a partial refund. The seller's first reply was "This is a $300 set that sold for $28" and that I could return it for a full refund. I then pointed out to them that first of all it wasn't a $300 set without the two Oh memorabilia cards and second of all that the "book value" of the set really didn't enter in to it - they were supposed to sell me a complete set and they didn't. They backed down pretty quick and agreed to refund me the $5 I asked for. I felt that even without the Oh cards I was getting a pretty good deal on two Nagashima memorabilia cards but I also felt there should be some consequence for them having an incorrect listing. I gathered from the messages I had with them that they are basically a consignment outfit and don't really know much about what they're selling.
On to the confusion. I mentioned that I got 55 cards. Four of the cards were duplicates. Or were they? On closer examination, I realized there were some differences. I had one version that had a red letter on the front and a card number of "ON XX" and another version that had a blue letter on the front and a card number of "ON-BXX". Was there some sort of parallel version of the set as well? There was no indication in either Engel or SCM of there being any sort of parallels. As I looked through the rest of the set, I realized that I had a mix of versions. Of the 55 total cards I had, 31 had card numbers in the form "ON XX" and 24 had card numbers in the form "ON-BXX". Here's the front and back of one of the cards I had duplicates of (card #7):
Another source of confusion involved the 10 card subset that featured both players. Engel lists all these cards are being gold bordered. Only five of the ones I have have a gold border (and they all have card numbers like "ON XX" - the other five have silver borders on the top and bottom (which all have the "ON-BXX" card numbers.
I had mentioned before that there had been two of these sets on Ebay, the one I won and the one that had a starting price of $50-ish. The other set did not sell so the seller relisted it starting at $10. I took a look at the pictures of the auction and realized that there were multiple Oh jersey and windbreaker cards in the auction. So maybe that's what happened to the Oh cards that were supposed to be in my set. I sent a message to the seller asking about it and basically got blown off - they felt they had already spent enough time talking to me about it. I bid on the second auction but ultimately lost out - the set sold for $42. So I still don't have the Oh cards.
In looking at the photos for the other auction and actually paying attention to the description, I think I finally have figured out what's going on. The box my set came in is black and says "ON 2000 BBM Limited Box". The box for the set in the other auction was red and said "BBM 2000 BBM Basic Set". There were two versions of the set!
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| ON 2000 BBM Limited Box |
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| ON 2000 BBM Basic Set |
So what I think happened is pretty obvious - someone had one of each of these sets and the cards got mixed together at some point. When the cards were put up for sale, someone did a fairly sloppy job of separating them into the two sets - in fairness the differences aren't entirely obvious, especially if you aren't familiar with card sets. So I've ended up with a franken-set - an unholy hybrid of the two sets. Which I wouldn't mind so much if I had the Oh cards - I'm pretty sure the two in the lower center of the above picture are the ones that should have been with my set. I'm also pretty confident that whoever won the second auction is going to be confused by this as well - maybe they'll read this post and contact me! Not that I expect to be able to get the Oh cards but maybe we can resolve some of the issues with the rest of the set - they won't have a complete set either.
OK, with all of that out of the way, let's talk about the set itself. As I've said a couple times now, it's a 54 card set. There's 20 cards for Nagashima, 20 cards for Oh and 10 cards featuring both of them with the remaining four cards being the windbreaker and jersey cards for them.
The 20 cards for each player pretty much parallel each other - the first five cards of each group feature the player's photo superimposed on a silver baseball. The next five cards feature the player batting - the first of these five cards are the film cards - a card with an actual piece of film embedded in it. The next two cards are dedicated to fielding and the one after that is dedicated to base running. The fourteenth card is for the player's retirement and the fifteenth is for the first Nippon Series the player won as manager (1994 for Nagashima and 1999 for Oh). The sixteenth card is for their respective league championships in 2000 (Nagashima's Giants won the Central League that year while Oh's Hawks won the Pacific League) and is thicker stock than the rest of the cards. Card 17 breaks the pattern - Nagashima's card is for "leisure time" while Oh's features his "batting style" - although both cards show the player with a samurai sword. Card 18 shows the player with his wife while card 19 celebrates the player's playing career (17 years for Nagashima and 22 years for Oh). Card 20 shows each of them during the 2000 Nippon Series - on his card Nagashima is getting tossed in the air while the Giants celebrated beating the Hawks. Here's several of the cards from this part of the set:
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| #ON-B1 |
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| #ON-B6 (film card) |
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| #ON 12 |
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| #ON-B17 |
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| #ON-B18 |
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| #ON 21 |
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| #ON-B26 (film card) |
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| #ON 32 |
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| #ON 36 |
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| #ON 38 |
The ten cards showing the two players together mostly span their careers together with the Giants. There's one that was taken showing the two of them as opposing managers in the 2000 Nippon Series. Here's a couple examples:
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| #ON-B41 |
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| #ON-B45 |
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| #ON 49 |
And when I say that the cards came in screwdown cases, I mean that BBM included them in the set in screwdown cases.
All in all this was a pretty attractive set. BBM did a really good job picking out pictures for the set and I was pleased that there wasn't a lot of duplication between the photos of Oh in this set and the ones BBM used in their Oh tribute set eight years later. I certainly wouldn't have paid $300 for the set but I don't regret spending the $33 I did ($28 winning bid plus $10 shipping minus the $5 I got the seller to refund me) on it.
One last note - I reassembled how I think the box was originally packaged and took a couple photos. The packaging was pretty attractive as well - there was a cardboard sleeve over a felt covered box with a gold satin interior. Engel says that it's like a jewelry box.
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Card Of The Week March 19
Wladimir Balentien was named the MVP of Pool E of the World Baseball Classic this past week. He went 8-13 in the three games in Tokyo with 3 home runs and 10 RBIs. Overall for the tournament he's hitting .591, which leads all batters with more than 10 at bats. He's leading in almost every other major offensive category - hits (13), runs (8), home runs (3 tied with five other players), RBIs (10), OBP (.654) and Slugging (1.000). He'll get his next chance to shine tomorrow night against Puerto Rico in Los Angeles.
Here's a card of him from last year's BBM Swallows set (#S71) with Tetsuto Yamada, who also had a pretty good Pool E including two home runs against Cuba on Tuesday:
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Yamada of course will next see action on this coming Tuesday against Team USA. I will be at the games in Los Angeles - I'm flying out of Maryland early tomorrow so I'll be a zombie at the Netherlands-Puerto Rico game but I should be well rested for Tueday night's game. If you're at the games, give me a holler on email or twitter (@npbcardguy) and say hello!
Here's a card of him from last year's BBM Swallows set (#S71) with Tetsuto Yamada, who also had a pretty good Pool E including two home runs against Cuba on Tuesday:
Yamada of course will next see action on this coming Tuesday against Team USA. I will be at the games in Los Angeles - I'm flying out of Maryland early tomorrow so I'll be a zombie at the Netherlands-Puerto Rico game but I should be well rested for Tueday night's game. If you're at the games, give me a holler on email or twitter (@npbcardguy) and say hello!
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