2010 BBM Memory Makers

BBM's first official set for 2010 was in stores last November. It's the latest "Historic Collection" set called "Memory Makers". Like most of the previous editions, this year's set has 144 cards - 72 OB players and 72 active players. The active players are evenly divided among the 12 teams (6 per team) but the OB players are not.

I'm a little hazy on what this year's set actually commemorates. The Google translation says something about players having "the most shining moment in his career". Of course, if I could read Japanese, the backs of the cards would probably explain what was being celebrated...

So not knowing what the set really commemorates, it's hard to say whether the player selection for the OB players leaves anyone obvious out. What I can say about the selection is that (like the Epoch All Japan Baseball Foundation set) it's an eclectic group of players. I'd guess that only about a third of the OB players in the set have appeared in any of the last three years of "Historic Collection" sets (and some of them like Masumi Kuwata, Kei Igawa, Masahide Kobayashi and Kazuhiro Kiyohara did so as active players). The set is lacking any of the really big names - no Oh, Nagashima, Nomura, Kaneda, Ochiai, Kadota, Yamamoto, Kinugasa, etc. While as usual the bulk of the players are from the 70's and later, there's a couple guys like Eiji Bandoh, Isao Hirono and Hiroshi Takahashi who played earlier. It's probably safe to say that this set highlights OB players who are bit more obscure than normal.

On the other hand, the active players in the set are pretty much a straight forward representation of the current stars of NPB - Ramirez, Darvish, Aoki, Iwakuma, Ogasawara, Nakajima, etc.

Some sample cards:






From top to bottom, the OB cards for Eiji Bandoh (#056), Hisashi Ohno (#041) and "the other" Yukio Tanaka (#022) and the active cards for Seiichi Uchikawa (#142) and Nobuhiko Matsunaka (#107).