Saturday, June 18, 2011

2000 BBM box break


I picked up a sealed box of 2000 BBM on eBay recently, so I thought that I'd do a box break on it. The box contained 30 packs of 10 cards each for 300 cards total. Of those, I ended up getting 7 insert cards - three Best 9 (Takuro Ishii, Norihiro Nakamura and Koji Uehara), two Golden Glove ((Ichiro and Michihiro Ogasawara) and two New Face (Satoru Komiyama and Hiroo Ishii), so obviously then I had 293 "regular" cards. Of those cards, 251 of them were unique. I ended up with 41 doubles and 1 triple (Masaaki Daitoh). (Well, 41 doubles and 1 triple in context of the box itself - I already had a bunch of 2000 BBM so I only got 75 new cards out of the box -which actually isn't bad compared to some of my previous experiences with BBM).

The expected rate for the insert cards is 1 per 15 packs for the New Face and the Golden Glove cards and 1 per 10 packs for the Best 9 cards, so I pretty much nailed the expected number of inserts. I was kind of disappointed (although not terribly surprised) that I didn't get any of the more rare inserts - the '90's Best Nine cards (1 per 60 packs or 1 per two boxes) and the Rookie Reprints (1 per 90 packs or 1 per three boxes) or the Jersey cards for the 1999 MVPs Kimiyasu Kudoh or Shigeki Noguchi. This is actually the second 2000 BBM box that I've gotten (along with a bunch of packs) and oddly enough I've gotten the rarer insert (a Rookie Reprint card of Hideki Matsui), but not a 90's Best Nine card. Just the luck of the draw I guess.

There was one really odd thing that I noticed. This was a Late Series box, so it had updated cards for the Marines and Tigers along with corrections for the "Leader" cards (which were incorrectly labelled "Reader" in the original release of the set). But I noticed when I was figuring out which cards that I didn't already have that there are two different versions of Seigo Fujishima's card (#360). Here's the original version:


Here's the Late Series version:


The backs of the cards appear to be identical (well, the background of the back is the picture from the front of the card - what I mean is that the text appears to be the same on both cards).

Gary Engel's "Japanese Baseball Card Checklist And Price Guide" does not mention this variant, so I can only speculate about why this happened. I guess the most likely reason is that maybe the original card shows someone other than Fujishima. It's kind of weird though - BBM appears to have not really had any error cards in their 20 year history other than the "Reader" cards in the 2000 set. And now it looks like there's another error in the set. Did they hire a new person for quality control in 2000 and the new guy didn't work out?

2 comments:

dfuji42 said...

can anyone tell me how someone from america can get ahold of 2011 bbm baseball cards. i used to be able to purchase them from the yakau shop but they went out of business. my e mail is dfuji42@aol.com if anyone knows i'd appreciate the information.

NPB Card Guy said...

I'd try any of the places I've got listed on the right.