Upcoming Releases

I've been putting off doing a post on upcoming sets because I've been waiting for BBM to put up information on the Dragons team set on their website.  They still haven't but I figure that I've waited long enough that if I wait much longer, the other sets will already be out...

- The second half of BBM's celebration of 80 years of professional baseball in Japan, the 80th Anniversary Batters Edition, will be released on August 23.  Like the Pitchers Edition, this will be a pack based set with 99 cards in the base set.  The 99 cards are split between 90 "regular" player cards and 9 "Leader" cards celebrating single season and career batting records (again like the Pitchers Edition).  I don't think there are any insert cards in the set (although there are parallels of all the base cards) but there's any number of autographed inserts included in the set.  Just eyeballing the checklist in the latest SCM, I don't think either Ichiro or Hiromitsu Ochiai are in the set,

- The aforementioned Dragons team set will be out in mid-August (Niki says August 21).  It's a pack based set with 90 cards in the base set.  Now I'm going by the print ad in SCM to determine what the names of the subsets are and (of course) they're all in Japanese (as opposed to the Giants team set where all the subsets are titled in English in the print ad), so I'm going to attempt to make a guess based on the sample cards in the ad.  There are 77 cards for the players, coaches and manager, four cards for "Fresh, Local Stars", three cards for veterans(?) and three three card "sequential card series".  There's a nine card insert set that I have absolutely no idea what the theme is and some number of autographed cards available. UPDATE - BBM finally put something up on their website for the set.

- I've been kind of expecting that at some point this year BBM's going to do an 80th Anniversary set for the Giants.  Maybe they still will, but I was kind of surprised to see that Front Runner is putting out a Giants Stars And Legends box set.  This is a 32 card set with 30 base cards plus one serially numbered insert card and one autographed card.  The 30 base cards are split between 12 cards of active players (including manager Tatsunori Hara) and 18 cards of OB players.  Unlike the Carp Stars and Legends set Front Runner did last year, it looks like Front Runner got most if not all the biggest OB names - Shigeo Nagashima, Sadaharu Oh, Isao Harimoto, Isao Shibata, Suguru Egawa and Masumi Kuwata.  Front Runner appears to be marketing this as an 80th Anniversary set but I'm still hoping BBM does a larger set before the end of the year.  This set will be released sometime in August.