2017 BBM Rookie Edition

BBM's annual Rookie Edition set, which features the players taken by the NPB teams in the previous fall's draft, hit the stores about 10 days ago.  Through the magic of Yahoo! Japan Auctions, Noppin and EMS, my set arrived at my door this afternoon.

The set contains 126 cards.  114 of these cards picture last October's draft class with the exception of Fighters sixth round draft pick Yujiro Yamaguchi, who did not sign with the team.  This includes hte players taken in both the regular draft and the ikusei draft.  Those taken in the regular draft will have cards in the upcoming 1st Version set and the appropriate team set.  Those taken in the ikusei draft may never appear on another baseball card.  The other 12 cards are a subset called "Early Days" and feature OB players (one for each team) when they either were drafted or in their rookie season.  The players don't appear to have been chosen for any reason other than they could sign autographs to be available as chase cards with the set.

I don't know much about any of the draftees other than three of them were with the Shikoku Island League All Star team that played in the Can-Am League last summer - Yusuke Kinoshita (Dragons, ikusei round 1), Shungo Fukunaga (Tigers, round 6) and Yusuke Matsuzawa (Giants, ikusei round 8).  Jen_Lei Liao (Giants, 7th round) spent two seasons in the Pittsburgh Pirates organization.

I have long ago run out of anything particularly interesting to say about BBM's Rookie Edition sets.  They pretty much are what they are.  I will make my annual comment that it would be a much more interesting set if the players were depicted in their high school/college/industrial league/indy minor league team uniforms rather than a posed shot wearing their drafting team's jersey.

Here's some sample cards:

#083

#040

#098

#060

#115

Ryan did a write up on this set the other day which goes into some details on the parallel, inserts and memorabilia cards available for it.  All the cards can be seen at Jambalaya.