BBM listed a couple more new sets this week on their website. I think they're now caught up with everything that was listed on AmiAmi.
- This year's edition of the All Star set will be released in early September and for the first time in several years I don't think the design is completely hideous. As usual, this is a box set containing cards of every player who made the All Star roster as well as the manager and coaches for each league. In addition, there are cards for the MVP of each of the three games this year (Kazuhiro Hatakeyama, Takeya Nakamura and Atsunori Inaba) for a total of 73 cards altogether. If I'm reading the web page correctly, this will be the first time since the 1990's that there is not a card of the top vote getter in the fan balloting.
- The Tokyo Big Six Autumn Version set is a boxed set containing 38 cards - 36 "regular" cards (team card and five players per team) plus two insert cards - one "Heroes" card featuring an active Tokyo Big Six player and one "Legends" card featuring a former player. There are six possible cards in each insert set - one for each team. Unlike the Spring set, it looks like the "Legends" set contains OB NPB players rather than active NPB players - the sample cards include Shigeo Nagashima (Rikkio), Koichi Tabuchi (Hosei), Daisuke Yamashita (Keio), Katsumi Hirosawa (Meiji) and (I think) Akinobu Okada (Waseda). (I'll be curious to learn who the "Legend" from Tokyo is - the wikipedia page for the league lists a film director as the only "notable alumni" from Tokyo.) The set will be released in mid-September to coincide with the beginning of the Fall season.
- BBM is branching out in their collegiate sets this fall with the release of an 80th Anniversary set for the Tohto University Baseball League. This will be a pack-based set containing 99 "regular" cards - 45 cards of retired former players from the league, 45 cards of former players still active in professional baseball and nine cards for "Record Holders". There is also an 18 card insert set called "Super Best 9" and possible autograph and photo cards. What the set does not have is any currently active collegiate players from the league. The release date is not listed here, but AmiAmi's listing has it as late September.
Based on these two collegiate sets, I'm kind of hoping that BBM's going to do two things in the future. The first is that they do an OB set for the Tokyo Big Six league. I think 2012 will be the 85th Anniversary of the league (started in 1925, but shut down for a couple years during the war - Tohto started in 1930 so the 80th Anniversary only makes sense if you take into account the years they didn't play during the war), so that might be the perfect excuse to do the set. The second is that maybe they'll consider doing a regular set for the Tohto League. The main problem with doing the set is that BBM insists on having the same number of cards for each team and there's 21 teams in the league! Maybe the answer is to do a team card and two player cards for each team, so there'd be a total of 63 cards in the set.
1 comment:
Oh, sorry I didn't see this sooner. The "Legend" pictured there for the University of Tokyo is former Fighters pitcher Ryohei Endoh -- drafted in 1999, appeared in exactly one pro game ever, currently works in the team's front office. I think so far Takahiro Matsuka has actually had a more successful pro career overall, but maybe they didn't go for him because he's still an active player?
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%81%A0%E8%97%A4%E8%89%AF%E5%B9%B3
It's funny, but 17 has been more of Todai's "ace number" than 18...
They have a list of players at the bottom of the page for Tohto, though it's not all the players in the set clearly as it's only like 36 total.
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