So the first thing to point out is that THIS guy's in the set (#027):
Yu-Chan's card is pretty representative of the draft pick cards. Most of the pictures are of the draftees posing with baseballs or bats, or holding one or both arms up in a guts pose. I kind of liked this one of Toshihito Abe (#040):
They got Fumiya Araki (#055) acting like he was running:
I'm not quite sure what Ichiro Matsushita (#097) is doing here, but it kind of hurts to look:
I really think that BBM could do a better set by showing the draftees in their college, high school or industrial league uniforms rather than these silly posed shots.
This year's set also features 12 cards of active players (one for each team, of course). As opposed to previous editions where the players were depicted in their rookie year, it looks like these pictures were all taken last year. Here's the card of Yoshihisa Naruse (#100):
Previous editions of this set have also contained subsets for new managers and traded players, but this year's set does not.
2 comments:
I *think* several of the poses come from their introductory press conferences with their respective teams. I didn't get many of these cards thanks to the premium prices on the college players I liked, but I did get Kagami's, and recognized his pose on it as the pose he did at the Baystars press conference, with the star on his arm. Matsushita also did a split there, which I'm guessing is how they got that pose for his card. Maybe you can confirm the rest of the poses if you have the Baystars set:
http://www.baystars.co.jp/bay/pickup/new.html
First video on that page, about 2-3 minutes in, they introduce the players. Clearly some were more able to ham it up in front of a crowd and do some wacky pose, I think they were told to do some kind of "appeal" to the audience, basically. So pitchers pose as pitchers, batters pose as fielding/running/whatever. Fumiya Araki was drafted for his speed, I'm pretty sure, so he must have done a running pose?
Thanks for the link and the comment. The pictures definitely come from the team's press conferences. In some of the prior editions it was pretty obvious because you'd see a microphone in front of the player or another player in the background. And a lot of times you could see the guy had a dress shirt and tie on under his jersey.
I just find that the problem with this approach is that the poses are either silly or monotonous. I'd really prefer that they showed the player in their pre-draft team's uniform. Or maybe they could use their high school graduation portraits like Topps did for some of their draft pick cards in the early 90's!
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