2009 BBM Carp 60th Anniversary Set

The 1949 NPB season featured eight teams in a single league. Following that season, NPB expanded to 15 teams spread across two leagues - the Central and Pacific. One of the new teams was the Hiroshima Carp (later the Hiroshima Toyo Carp). BBM celebrated the founding of the team by issuing a 60th Anniversary set late last year.

This pack based set follows the pattern established by the other eight previous team Anniversary sets BBM has produced in the last couple years. There's a six card "Carp History" subset that summarizes each decade in the team's history. There are 66 cards for former players, both OB players and players who are still active with other teams either in NPB (like Tomoaki Kanemoto) or MLB (like Hiroki Kuroda). There are 18 cards for the 2009 Carp team (including the since fired manager Marty Brown) and a nine card "Team Record" subset featuring the holders of various career Carp team records.

As you might expect, there's a lot of common territory between this set and 2008's Hiroshima Memorial Set which commemorated the closing of Hiroshima Municipal Stadium. Only one of the OB players in the previous set (Yutaka Enatsu) does not appear in the new set. He's probably the most glaring absence in the group of former players in the set. While the bulk of the players are from the 70's onward (and include pretty much who you would expect - Koji Yamamoto, Sachio Kinugasa, Manabu Kittabeppu, Yutaka Ohno, etc), there's a decent representation of some of the older players - Ryohei Hasegawa and Katsumi Shiraishi for example. My biggest complaint (actually my usual complaint about these sets) is that there aren't many color pictures for the older players.

Here's some sample cards:







From top to bottom, the "Carp History" card for the 1970's (#03), former player cards for Ryohei Hasegawa (#07), Tsunemi Tsuda (#51) and Hiroki Kuroda (#71), 2009 Carp card for Akihiro Higashide (#83) and the Team Record card for Sachio Kinugasa (#91).