Friday, January 20, 2012

2011 BBM Nippon Series Set


BBM's 2011 season comes to a close with the annual Nippon Series box set.  The set contains 63 cards this season - cards for every player who appeared in the Series between the Hawks (25) and the Dragons  (30) along the team's managers.  There are also cards for the winners of the major awards - MVP (Hiroki Kokubo), Fighting Spirit (Kazuki Yoshimi) and Outstanding Player (Brian Falkenborg, Toshiya Susiuchi and Kazuhiro Wada).  There's also a card showing the Hawks celebrating (#S63 shown above).

I guess I shouldn't be surprised since this year's BBM 1st Version set was so small, but there's an unusually large number of players who appear in this set who do not appear in either the 1st or 2nd Version sets.  There are 11 Dragons (Takehiro Donoue, Atsushi Fujii, Nobumasa Fukuda, Ryosuke Hirata, Yuichi Hisamoto, Junichi Kawahara, Masato Kobayashi, Masaaki Koike, Hidenori Kuramoto, Keiji Oyama and Yoshihiro Suzuki) and five Hawks (Kenji Akashi, Kenta Imamiya, Takehito Kanazawa, Ryuma Kodokoro, Hiroki Yamada) did not make the earlier sets.


As always, BBM's photography is outstanding.  The photos were all taken during the Series, although I think there's only one card (the Dragons' Ryosuke Hirata) that shows a player from the other team in the background.  Here's some sample cards:


#S44

#S55

#S45

#S05

#S13

#S14

The complete set of cards can be viewed here.

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