BBM celebrated their 35th year of doing baseball cards in 2026 and late in the year their parent company, Baseball Magazine Sha, published the 4000th issue of Shukan (Weekly) Baseball magazine. To commemorate both of these occasions, BBM issued a set with the somewhat unwieldy name of "35th Anniversary & Shukan Baseball 4000th" or something like that. The set was originally supposed to be released in December but it ended up getting delayed for a few weeks and didn't actually make it into the stores until early January.
I was intrigued enough by the set that I decided that I would buy it. After all, I had bought BBM's sets for their 20th (2010), 25th (2015) and 30th (2020) Anniversaries so it'd be understandable if I broke my pledge not to buy anymore new stuff and picked it up. It was a little on the pricey side - well, the set itself wasn't pricey but shipping was, especially since I was only getting the one set. The total for everything was 7687 yen which worked out to $53.33. That broke down to 1500 yen ($10.42) for the set, 500 yen ($3.47) for ZenMarket's fee, 600 yen ($4.17) for domestic shipping and 5078(!) yen ($35.27) for overseas shipping via DHL. As far as I can tell, I did not have to pay any tariffs on the set - I didn't pay anything extra to ZenMarket and I wasn't charged anything by DHL. I suspect this was because the set was so cheap - if I'd ordered more stuff, I'd have probably had to pay something.
As usual, I only got the base set, which contained 238 cards. The base set is split not quite evenly between cards of OB players (118 cards) and active players (120 cards). I suspect that BBM had issues lining all the OB players up as when the set was originally announced back in October, it was supposed to be 240 cards in total with 120 OB players. This was probably the source of the delay in the publication of the set. The active player cards are further split between "regular" cards and "rookie" cards done in the style of the initial BBM set in 1991.
Previously BBM had limited themselves to only players who were active in 1991 or later in their Anniversary sets but with Shukan Baseball having started in 1958, they were able to also include players from the previous 33 years as well to this set. The set therefore includes legends like Sadaharu Oh, Shigeo Nagashima, Katsuya Nomura, Masaichi Kaneda, Kazuhisa Inao, Sachio Kinugasa, Yutaka Fukumoto, Hiromitsu Kadota, Koji Yamamoto, Atsuya Furuta, Hideki Matsui and Hiroki Kuroda. There's a couple retired foreign players - Randy Bass and Warren Cromartie. Bass shows up in sets pretty frequently but this is the first appearance by Cromartie in a BBM set since 2013. There's a fair number of active MLB players in the set as well - Yu Darvish, Seiya Suzuki, Masataka Yoshida, Yusei Kikuchi, Yuki Matsui and Kodai Senga - although none of the Dodgers' ex-NPB contingent - Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto or Roki Sasaki - are included. As usual there are a number of notable players missing, including the usual suspects of Ichiro, Hideo Nomo, Yutaka Enatsu and Kazuhiro Kiyohara. I was kind of surprised, though, that the set didn't include Isao Harimoto, Masaaki Koyama, Choji Murata, Tsutomo Itoh, or Kosuke Fukudome.
My initial hope for the set was that the front of each card would be a reproduction of a Shukan Baseball cover but, alas, that was not the case (although there are "secret versions" of 36 of the cards that ARE reproductions of the magazine covers but I didn't get any of those). Having done some cursory inspection of the cards online, however, I got the impression that all the photos in the set had appeared on the cover of issues of the magazine over the years and that the cover of the magazine would appear on the back of the card. But when I got the cards and was able to look at them all, I was surprised (and a bit disappointed) that only some of the cards featured what had been a cover photo. Only 79 of the 118 OB cards had the cover photos - here's an example of the front and back of one that did:
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| #077 |
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| #077 |
I thought that "ok, maybe some of these guys were never on the cover of the magazine" but then I noticed there were some cards (18 in all) that had a magazine cover on the back that had a DIFFERENT photo than the front had. Some appeared to have photos on the front that could have been taken at the same time:
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| #052 |
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| #052 |
Others just had a different (and in some cases inferior) photo on the front:
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| #017 |
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| #017 |
There's another 21 players whose card doesn't feature a magazine cover on the back. Twenty of those cards just have the same photo on both sides of the card. I'm kind of surprised that BBM couldn't find a cover photo of Kazuhiro Sasaki and some of the other players:
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| #049 |
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| #049 |
That final cover-less card is for Haruki Ihara and weirdly features a different photo on the back than the front. I've no idea why his card is like this (and, to be completely honest, I've no idea why he's even in the set. I mean, no offense to him, but if I making a list of the most significant players or managers over the last 68 years, he's not making the top 500, despite winning a Pacific League pennant in one of the three and half years he was a manager):
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| #100 |
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| #100 |
Despite my disappointment that not all the photos were cover shots, there were some decent ones in the set:
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| #036 |
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| #094 |
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| #057 |
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| #061 |
All of these except the Arakawa card had been cover photos. The back of Arakawa's card shows a Shukan Baseball cover with another photo of him on it although it still shows him as a Yakult Atom.
The 120 active player cards are split into two groups - 108 "regular" cards (similar to the OB cards but with a different border color) and 12 1991-style cards for 2025 rookies. Most of the major 2025 NPB stars are in the "regular" cards, including 2026-MLB players Munetaka Murakami, Kazuma Okamoto and Tatsuya Imai. Other big names include Hiromi Itoh, Teruaki Sato, Kensuke Kondoh, Chusei Mannami and Shugo Maki. There's also a handful of foreign players including Livan Moinelo, Raidel Martinez, Sandro Fabian, Franmil Reyes, Jose Osuna and Tyler Nevin. There are also eight 2025 rookies included in the "regular" cards (as opposed to the 1991-style cards). I was a little surprised that neither Yuki Yanagita nor Takeya Nakamura were in the set. You could argue that neither played enough in 2025 but neither did Hayato Sakamoto and he's in the set so some fan service is not out of the question.
Only 16 of the 108 "regular" active player cards featured a photo that had been used on a Shukan Baseball cover, including one of my favorite cards from the set:
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| #135 |
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| #135 |
Posed shot in front of the Koshien Stadium scoreboard? Proof that you can do a posed photo that doesn't look like a mug shot? Yes to both. Topps, please take note.
The other 82 active player cards feature the same non-cover photo on both the front and back:
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| #159 |
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| #159 |
The photo selection for the active players isn't great - way too many "pitchers pitching, batters batting" shots - but there are some good photos in the set. It's probably not a coincidence that most of the were cover shots, including all the ones I'm using as examples:
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| #147 |
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| #201 |
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| #124 |
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| #140 |
Again, attention, Topps! You can do a posed shot of a player that's more interesting than just a head and shoulders image of a player staring at the camera with no expression.
The last batch of cards in the set to talk about are the twelve 1991 style cards that feature one 2025 rookie for each team. I've kind of mixed feelings about these cards as they seem like kind of an afterthought as well as really the only thing in the base set that really has anything to do with it being BBM's anniversary. The twelve rookies are Yusei Ishizuka (Giants), Takato Ihara (Tigers), Yu Takeda (Baystars), Tai Sasaki (Carp), Yuto Nakamura (Swallows), Yumeto Kanemura (Dragons), Yudai Shoji (Hawks), Reo Shibata (Fighters), Misho Nishikawa (Marines), Ruo Muneyama (Eagles), Yusuke Mugitani (Buffaloes) and Seiya Watanabe (Lions). Everyone but Shoji and Watanabe were their team's first pick in the 2024 draft (Shoji and Watanabe were their team's second picks). My biggest gripe about this subset is that seven of the players (Nishikawa, Kanemura, Ihara, Shibata, Watanabe, Muneyama and Takeda) were in the "regular" player cards as well. I think I'd really have preferred BBM to have these guys only show up in the the 1991 subset and include seven other players in the "regular" cards. Here's the Muneyama card:
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| #236 |
I guess ultimately I'm feeling kind of "meh" about the set. It had such promise but I think the execution by BBM could have been better. It is possible that I'm being a little hard on the set since I violated my "not buying any new sets" pledge to pick it up. I'm getting kind of gun-shy since this is the second set I've picked up since making that pledge and the second one that I'm somewhat disappointed with (the first being last year's Epoch "Career Achievements Japan National Team" box set). Maybe I just need to stick to my guns and not get anything else.
One cool thing BBM could have done in the set was have a subset of cards showing covers of Shukan Baseball that had multiple players on it. After all, the first ever issue of the magazine featured a photo of both Tatsuro Hirooka and Shigeo Nagashima. There is a "Combined" insert set showing two players but it just shows an OB player and an active player from each team as opposed to a multi-player photo.
You can see all the cards over at Jambalaya (including some of the autographed cards and premium parallels and inserts).
