More New Stuff

The two sets that I mentioned last week are now listed on BBM's website:

- The Baystars 20th Anniversary set does not quite follow the "standard BBM team anniversary set" pattern.  There's only 81 cards in the base set (instead of the "standard" 99).  There are 57 cards for OB Baystars players, 18 cards for the current team, 3 cards highlighting former managers (not sure if they are only featuring three former managers or if they'll have all former Baystars managers on the three cards - there have been eight managers including two separate stints by Akihiko Ohya) and 3 "Baystars Scene" cards.  There's also a nine card "Dream Team" insert set and lots of memorabilia cards.  The set will be out in late June.

- The BBM Classic set will have 108 cards in its base set.  There will be 72 cards of current players (6 per team) that will use the design of the 1991 BBM set.  There will also be 36 cards of OB players that will use the design of the 2002 BBM All Time Heroes set.  There will be three insert sets that reuse the design from an earlier insert set.  There's a 24 cards "Rivals" insert set that looks like the one for the 1997 BBM set (two die cut cards per team that match up together), a 12 card "00's Best 9" set that uses the design of the "90's Best 9" insert set from the 2000 BBM set (the title of this set makes no sense at all - I assume it's one card per team and there's 12, not 9) and a 12 card "Above Average" set based on the insert set with the same name from the 1999 Diamond Heroes set (I assume again one card per team).  The memorabilia cards appear to be either jersey cards that use the 1997 Diamond Heroes jersey card design (the first jersey cards offered by BBM) or autographed cards.  I think the autograph cards are actual old BBM cards that they've had the player sign but I'm not positive.  The set will be out in late June.

- There's a new "OB Club" set being sold by the Japan Baseball Promotion Association (formerly the All Japan Baseball Foundation).   It's a 41 card box set featuring 40 "regular" cards and one autograph card.  The theme of this set is Rookies of the Year Award winners.  The award winners included go back as far as 1952 (Futoshi Nakanishi) and as recent as 1998 (Tatsuya Ozeki) and also include Shigeo Nagashima, Koichi Tabuchi, Akinobu Okada and Tatsunori Hara.  I think it will be interesting to see if the set features pictures of the players from their award winning season - there's a couple guys included from teams that were only known by that name for a couple years (Takeshi Yasuda of the Yakult Atoms and Satoshi Niimi of the Niitaku Home Flyers) so it'd be cool to see cards of those teams.  I think the set will be out on July 27.