New stuff

A couple of items have been announced in the last week or so:

- BBM listed on new set recently that completely stumped me. I can usually figure out what a set is from the url of the web page describing it and having some idea of what's going on baseball-wise in Japan. (The Lions Classic set from last year baffled me because I didn't know about the Lions Classic games.) If I can't figure it out from the url, I'll run the page through a translation and see if I can make sense out of what I get.

Well, this one stumped me. What does "2009_malts" mean? The translations didn't help much - in fact they said something about a "shoot-out" which made me wonder if it wasn't a soccer set and that BBM had put it in the baseball list by mistake. It doesn't help that BBM doesn't put sample cards on the web pages anymore (at least when the page goes up initially).

So, I asked Deanna Rubin for help. And, of course, she knew the answer. There's an old timers game sponsored by Suntory brewery called the Dream Match that gets played every year. The two teams this year were "World Japan 2009" and "The Premium Malts". Deanna gave me a link to a post on SimCentral.net with more details.

The set itself is a box set with 56 cards - 26 cards for the players on "World Japan 2009", 29 cards for the players on "The Premium Malts" and a random insert card with the possibility of an autograph or memorabilia card. The rosters of the teams include Masumi Kuwata, Randy Bass, Masayuki Kakefu, Yutaka Enatsu, Koji Yamamoto and Shinji Sasaoka. The "World Japan 2009" team is managed by Koichi Tabuchi. The GM for the "Premium Malts" is Isao Harimoto. This might be fun to pick up. It will be in stores in September.

Thanks for the help, Deanna!

- Calbee put the checklist for this year's third series up last week. There are 96 "regular" cards (bring the total for all three series to 300) which are broken down to 8 cards per team. There are also four checklist cards, 24 "star" cards (a continuation of a Series 2 subset), and a 12 card "Iron Arm" subset. There's a two card All Star MVP subset (featuring Norichika Aoki and Nobuhiko Matsunaka) and a 20 card "HT" subset that I'm not sure what is.