Achievers

The last of the recent box sets I got from Ryan a week or so ago were the Achievement sets for the Hawks, Buffaloes and Whales.  The Achievement sets a new series of box sets from BBM that have a retro feel to them.  The sets have a matte finish rather than a glossy finish and the backs of the cards have a look that evokes old (pre-1992) Topps cards.  BBM issued sets for the Hankyu Braves and Nankai Hawks last October and the Kintetsu Buffaloes and Taiyo Whales in December.

I don't have a whole lot to add about these sets that I didn't already say about the Braves set so I'll keep this kind of short.  I do like these sets quite a bit - the photos are nice (even if some of them are black and white) and it's an interesting change of pace from BBM.

The Hawks set is only 29 cards while the other two are 30 cards.  The Hawks and Buffaloes sets feature primarily players from the 1970's and 80's which purely from a player selection standpoint make both sets a bit redundant as this era for both teams been featured in a number of OB team sets over the past several years.  Both sets feature the guys you'd expect (Katsuya Nomura, Hiromitsu Kadota, Yoshinori Hirose, Nobuyuki Kagawa for the Hawks, Keishi Suzuki, Masataka Nashida, Koji Ohta, Charlie Manuel, Ralph Bryant for the Buffaloes).  Here's some sample cards from the two sets:

2014 BBM Hawks Achievement #16 (Katsuya Nomura)

2014 BBM Hawks Achievement #23 (Shinsaku Katahira)

2015 BBM Buffaloes Achievement #20 (Yasanuga Makishi)

2015 BBM Buffaloes Achievement #25 (Charlie Manuel)

The Whales set on the other hand features players from the 1950's through the 1970's as it focuses on the team's time in Kawasaki before they moved a little further south to Yokohama in 1978.  This is an era previously untouched by BBM in any of their OB team sets for the Whales/Baystars franchise.  As a result, there's a number of players included in this set that I don't think have previously had BBM cards - Shigeyuki Takahashi, Katsuji Sakai and Isao Itoh are a couple of the names in this group.  There's a large number of players who are a bit more familiar as well - Akio Saitoh, Masaji Hiramatsu, Akihito and Kazuhiko Kondoh, Makoto Matsubara, Shinichi Etoh, Daisuke Yamashita, Tomio Tashiro and John Sipin.  This is the kind of OB team set I'd like to see BBM do more of.

2015 BBM Whales Achievement #04 (Shigekuni Mashiba)

2015 BBM Whales Achievement #13 (Isao Itoh)

2015 BBM Whales Achievement #30 (Kazuhiko Kondoh)

To see all the cards in the sets, check out Jambalaya's pages for the Hawks, Buffaloes and Whales sets.  Ryan has posts up on all the sets as well (Hawks, Buffaloes and Whales).