BBM's Upcoming Sets

So a couple days after I post this about a couple upcoming BBM sets, BBM finally gets around to putting information about three of the four sets I talked about up on their website.

- The Celebration of The Hawks set is a 28 card box set featuring the Hawks in their colorful uniforms that they have worn in the summer in the last seven seasons (including the "VV Green" uniforms that they have been wearing lately).  There will be 27 "regular" cards plus 1 "special card" (autograph, memorabilia or die-cut card).  Since the cards feature pictures from the 2006 season until the current season, there are cards of players no longer with the Hawks (Toshiya Sugiuchi for example) and a card of Sadaharu Oh from when he was managing the team.  The set will be out in late August.

- The three players to reach 2000 hits this season (Atsunori Inaba, Shinya Miyamoto and Hiroki Kokubo) are being honored in the 2000 Hits Club box set.  This set contains 29 cards - 27 "regular" cards (nine for each player) plus two "special" cards.  The "special" cards include possible jersey cards of the three players - some feature only one player, some feature all three.  They also include possible autograph cards of the three players plus other 2000 Hits Club members that are associated with their teams (Fighters, Swallows and Hawks) - Atsuya Furata, Koki Akiyama, Tsutomu Wakamatsu and Yukio Tanaka.  There are no other "special" cards listed on the webpage, but I don't know for sure if that means that each box will definitely contain jersey and/or autograph cards.  The set will be out in late August.

- BBM's first nostalgic set for the season (after the annual "Historic Edition" set that is) is the Nohitters set.  This is a pack based set that highlights nohitters thrown in Japanese professional baseball.  I don't know if every nohitter is covered, but the set does include Eiji Sawamura, who threw the first nohitter in Japan in 1936.  The set has 99 "regular" cards - 81 cards for pitchers who threw nohitters, 6 "combination" cards (this does not appear to highlight single nohitters thrown by a combination of pitchers like Daisuke Yamai and Hitoki Iwase's combination perfect game in the 2007 Nippon Series, but simply putting two pitchers on one card) and 12 "team nohitter" cards (I'm guessing that these will list all the nohitters for each of the 12 teams).  I will be curious to see if each of the 81 cards is for a particular nohitter or a pitcher who threw one or more nohitters.  There is also a 9 card "Great Nohitters" insert set and possible autograph and memorabilia cards.  The autographs are from pitchers who have thrown nohitters.  The memorabilia cards are for the two pitchers who threw nohitters this season - Kenta Maeda and Toshiya Sugiuchi.  Like the two box sets, the set will be released in late August.