2013 BBM All Star Memories 80's Set

No set from BBM for this year's All Stars but they did put out a historic set back in July highlighting the guys in the All Star games during the 1980's.  The set is called "All Star Memories 80's" and contains 90 cards - 81 cards of individual players, three cards for what I guess were classic pitcher/batter match-ups and six combination cards.

It looks to me that the pictures on the player cards were all taken during actual All Star games.  A number of them were obviously taken during the games as you can see several players in different uniforms in the shot.  There are some shots that could possibly have been taken during other games but I don't see any pictures that obviously were not taken at an All Star game (no shot of a batter with a catcher from the same league squatting behind him for instance).  Given that this was one of my complaints about the last couple All Star game sets where BBM made a big deal about the shots coming from the games but you not really being able to tell, I think this is great.  Although there may be a little too many shots of guys celebrating winning a game MVP award by sitting on the hood of a car and holding up a big key.

The players appearing in the set include a wide selection of Hall Of Famers and lesser stars - Sadaharu Oh, Katsuya Nomura, Sachio Kinugasa, Koji Yamamoto, Koji Akiyama, Kazuhiro Kiyohara, Masumi Kuwata, Hiromitsu Kadota, Randy Bass, Kimiyasu Kudoh, Keishi Suzuki, Tsutomu Wakamatsu, Tsutomu Itoh, Yutaka Fukumoto and Hisashi Yamada among many others.  The only big stars of the 1980's that I can think of off hand who aren't in the set are Warren Cromartie (who can be seen on Yoshiharu Wakana's card) and Hiromitsu Ochiai (who hasn't appeared in an OB set since the Dragons let him go after the 2011 season).

My only real gripe about the cards is that since a lot of the pictures were taken at night, they aren't the usual high quality photography that I expect from BBM.  But I think the content of the pictures more than makes up for the quality.  Here's a bunch of sample cards:

#79

#74

#59 

#20

#78

#65

#69

#42

There are two subsets in the set.  The first is a three card subset featuring what I assume are some sort of significant pitcher/batter match-up.  They show Kazuhiko Ushijima of the Dragons pitching to Nobuyuki Kagawa of the Hawks, Suguru Egawa of the Giants pitching to Daijiro Ohishi of the Buffaloes and Masumi Kuwata of the Giants pitching to Kazuhiro Kiyohara of the Lions.  I know that Kuwata and Kiyohara were high school teammates so maybe that's the reason the other two pairs are commemorated also.

#84

I really like the cards in the other subset, the six combination cards.  I just think it's really cool to see some of these guys on cards together, even though they're just standing there.  The combinations are Oh and Nomura; Masahiro Doi, Akinobu Mayumi, Mitsuo Motoi and Wakana; Tatsunori Hara and Hiromichi Ishige, Koji Yamamoto and Koichi Tabuchi; Randy Bass and Boomer Wells and Kazuhiro Kiyohara and Takahiro Ikeyama.  I couldn't decide which of these I liked the most so I'm showing half of them:

#86

#85

#88

As you might have guess, I really like this set.  I'm hoping that BBM does editions for other decades as well.

You can see all the cards at Jambalaya and Ryan did a post on the set last month also.