Earlier this year, BBM put out a
Giants Legend set that highlighted the players who played under Shigeo Nagashima's reign as manager. They've now followed that up with a similar set for the Tigers. Now obviously Nagashima never managed the Tigers so this set's theme is Tigers players from the 1980's, especially the 1985 Nippon Series championship team.
Like the earlier set for the Giants, this set is a pack based set featuring 99 cards in the base set. The design of the cards is the same as the cards in the Giants set, only with a grey-ish, blue-ish background rather than the lighter colored background on the Giants cards.
The first 88 cards in the set are for Tigers players and managers from the 1980's. The obvious players are here - Masayuki Kakefu, Randy Bass, Akinobu Mayumi, Akinobu Okada and Taira Fujita for example. Almost everyone who played on Hanshin's sole championship team in 1985 is in the set - as far as I can tell, only Koichi Hattori, Shinji Kawahara and Eijiyu Tsukiyama did not make the set and none of them actually played much for the 1985 team (or any other Tiger team). Can't think of anyone off hand who's missing - maybe Colonel Sanders? I was a little surprised that there were a bunch of black and white photos - maybe BBM just likes including them for variety.
Here's some examples:
 |
| #14 |
 |
| #60 |
 |
| #75 |
 |
| #66 (Don Blasingame if you didn't already know) |
There's a two card subset showing the 1985 championship celebrations for both the Central League pennant and the Nippon Series. The subset doubles as the checklists for the set as well.
 |
| #90 |
The last nine cards in the set is a subset called "The Successive Legends". BBM selected a significant Tiger for each era in their history. It starts with Tadashi (Bozo) Wakabayashi, followed by Masaru Kageura, Fumio Fujimura, Masaaki Koyama, Minoru Murayama, Yoshio Yoshida, Koichi Tabuchi, Tsuyoshi Shinjo and Tomoaki Kanemoto. Yoshida is the only one who also appears in the "regular" part of the set as he was manager of the Tigers in the mid 1980's.
 |
| #96 |
As always, you can see all the cards
here.
2 comments:
Have to admit not being familiar with the whole Don Blazer/Don Blasingame thing. Apart from Dingo/Dave Nilsson, are there any other examples of foreign players using other than their given names while playing in Japan (with corresponding cards)?
Greg Dunn
This is actually the first time I think I've seen a card for Blasingame labeled "Blazer".
There's a couple others that come to mind off hand but they are all variants on the name "Jay Jay" for JJ Furmaniak, "JP" for Jeremy Powell and "Alex" for Alex Ochoa.
I was just rereading Robert Whiting's first book "The Chrysanthemum And The Bat" last week and I think he talked about some of the late 1950's and early 1960's gaijin going by slightly different names but I can't find the section in the book just now. And they wouldn't necessarily show up on their cards like that.
There was also Harris McGalliard, the American playing in Japan in the 1930's under the name "Bucky Harris".
Post a Comment