Sunday, July 26, 2009

Touch The Swallows

BBM announced two upcoming sets the other day - the 2009 "Touch The Game" set and a 40th Anniversary set for the Tokyo Yakult Swallows.

"Touch The Game" is BBM's high end set. The set has 132 cards in it which breaks down as 108 "regular" (player) cards (9 per team), 12 "subset" cards (1 per team) and 12 checklist cards (1 per team). The big attraction of "Touch The Game" is the memorabilia inserts and this year's set has the usual boatload - pieces of balls, bats, uniforms, etc plus autographed inserts. The set will be in stores in late September.

"Touch The Game" is not my cup of tea, so I don't get very excited about it. The Swallows' 40th Anniversary set, however, is just the kind of thing I like. I've been eagerly anticipating this set all year. The set celebrates the 40th Anniversary of Yakult acquiring the team from Sankei in 1970. Like the other recent Anniversary sets that BBM has done in the last year or so, it is a 99 card set containing six "victory" cards, 61 cards of OB players, 26 cards of the current team including the manager Shigeru Takada, and six team record cards (I think). There's also an insert card set for the team's Best 9 over the last 40 years and the usual photo and autograph inserts. The set will be available in late August.

For those who can't wait that long for their Swallows history fix, the team has had a 40th Anniversary website up since the beginning of the season. (Thanks to Tsubamegun for the info.)

1 comment:

Jason Presley said...

Oh how I wish Topps or Upper Deck would commission one of BBM's set designers to create a set for the US market. Topps and (to a lesser extent) Upper Deck seem to be stuck in a rut of designing "baseball cards" whereas BBM just seems to produce beautiful cards depicting baseball players. Comparing BBM and Topps, there's a very noticeable distinction. Especially if you consider the last 10 years of Topps designs, all of which seem to be tied back to previous designs.