More New Stuff

A couple other upcoming releases of note:

- BBM is not doing their traditional "Historic Collection" set this year but they are still going to do an OB set.  It's called "Time Travel 1975" and as the name suggests, it's a set dedicated to 1975.  There will be 99 cards in the base set - 84 of these will be cards for players and managers from 1975.  There will be six players per team with the exception of Hankyu and Hiroshima (the two pennant winners that year) - there will be 12 cards per team for them.  There will be six cards that commemorate baseball highlights from 1975, six cards for current players who were born in 1975 (I'm guessing Hiroki Kuroda, Kazuya Fukuura, Kazuo Matsui and Koji Uehara will be four of these) and three cards for "1975 social situation".  There will be two nine card insert sets - one for Central League leaders and the other for Pacific League leaders and the usual cornucopia of autograph cards.  Epoch did a couple sets like this a few years back - one for 1977 and the other for 1987.  I'm hoping BBM's take on this theme is an improvement over those.  The set will be out in late December.

- The first 2017 set has been announced and it's another one from Sports Graphic Number.  I'm not entirely sure of the name of the set but it appears to be a set dedicated to Hiroki Kuroda's retirement.  The set has 72 cards in the base set along with 18 possible "special" cards which include autograph and memorabilia cards.  This is the third set that Sports Graphic Number has done involving Kuroda in the past year or so.  It will be released on January 21st.

- NPB on Reddit tweeted out something today about an interesting card set being released by an outfit called "Joy Box".  They've put a small vending machine in the Giants team store that dispenses cards that can be transformed into 3-D figurines of players.  Each card costs 100 yen.  There are six Giants available - Shinnosuke Abe, Hayato Sakamoto, Shuichi Murata, Tomoyuki Sugano, Yoshinobu Takahashi and Hisayoshi Chono.  Here's a video of the Murata figurine being assembled: