Some 2014 BBM Box Sets

BBM put out three team based box sets last summer that included both active and OB players for the featured team.  Ryan tracked these down for me and included them with the stuff he sent me last week (and I have neglected to publicly thank Ryan for finding all this stuff for me so let me fix that now - Thanks Ryan!).

The first of these was a set that only contained pitchers for the Carp.  This set was called "Pitchers Spirits Of Carp" and featured 27 cards in the base set - 18 OB pitchers and 9 pitchers from the 2014 roster.  The OB players included retired greats like Ryohei Hasegawa, Manabu Kitabeppu, Yutaka Ohno, Shinji Sasaoka, Yoshiro Sotokoba and the late Tsunemi Tsuda as well as Hiroki Kuroda and Kan Ohtake who were active with other teams in 2014.  The active players include Kenta Maeda, Yusuke Nomura, Bryan Bullington, Kam Mickolio and 2014 rookies Aren Kuri and Daichi Ohsera.  It's kind of an odd little set but I like it.  For more information, check out Jambalaya's gallery for the set and Ryan's post on it.

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The name of the next set reminds me of some of the Front Runner sets - "Young Hawks - Futures And Legends".  This is a 36 cards set that features 27 "young" players for the 2014 Hawks and 9 "Legend" players from the 1970's era Nankai Hawks.  The active players include guys who were major contributors to the Hawks Nippon Series Championship last year like Shota Takeda and Yuki Yanagita along with guys who pretty much spent the season in ni-gun.  The backs of the cards show the p;ayer's 2014 ichi-gun stats up until May 18th.  One thing I like is that some of the players are shown wearing retro Nankai Hawks uniforms.  The nine "Legend" players include Katsuya Nomura, Yoshinori Hirose and Hiromitsu Kadota.  I don't know if there's a theme to why these OB players were selected to appear in this set.  Oddly enough there's an OB player included in this set (Sanshiro Nishioka) who is making his first BBM appearance despite BBM having done two Hawks Anniversary sets in the past 10 years.  This is an attractive set but probably my least favorite of these three sets.  Once again, check out Jambalaya and This Card Is Cool for more information.

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The final box set of this group was issued as a tie-in with the "Lions Classic" series of games that Seibu put on last season.  BBM has issued a couple sets like this in the past (like this one from 2009) and they typically show active players wearing this year's retro uniform along with OB players from the era that the retro uniform is from.  The retro uniform from 2014 was the all blue uniforms that the Lions wore in the 1980's.  This years set (which is named "Lions Classic - Impact Of Lionsblue") contains 27 cards - nine cards showing members of the 2014 Lions and 18 cards showing 1980's era Lions players.  The previous Lions Classic sets have shown the active players in action but this set actually uses posed shots for them instead.  The nine players selected for the set include Shogo Akiyama, Yusei Kikuchi, Kazuhisa Makita and Ginjiro Sumitani.  The OB players kind of surprisingly don't include the obvious guys - there's no Koji Akiyama, Tsutomu Itoh, Kimiyasu Kudoh or Kazuhiro Kiyohara.  The biggest names are Osamu Higashio, Hiromichi Ishige and Koichi Tabuchi.  My only real gripe with this set is that all the OB players except Higashio appeared in the Lions Legend set that came out last November so it's kind of redundant.  As usual, check out Jambalaya and Ryan's blog for more information.

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