Ichiro

As I'm sure everyone's already heard, Ichiro "retired" the other day -  he's moving into some sort of front office job that allows him to stay in uniform (although not in the dugout during games) and take batting practice every day.  He insists that he's not actually retiring but he doesn't want to play for anyone else but Seattle. 

I did a post for Ichiro when he got his 3000th MLB hit a few years back that showed all his "regular" BBM flagship cards.  Here's a bunch of other cards of him:

1993 Tomy #102

1994 Takara Orix BlueWave #51

1995 Calbee Choco #C36

1996 BBM Nippon Series #S63

1997 BBM All Stars #A10

1998 BBM #564

1999 Calbee #265 (Gold Signature Parallel)

2000 Upper Deck Victory #H1

2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 #117

By 1995 BBM was calling him "Ichiro" on all his card so I'm kind of amused that Calbee still had his full name on front of that Choco card.  What's odd is the back of the card has just his first name.

Ichiro led the Pacific League in Batting and On-Base-Percentage so his final BBM flagship cards were in the Leader subset in the 2001 set:

2001 BBM #4

As far as I can tell, Ichiro has had only three cards in any OB sets since 2001:

2007 BBM Draft Story #031

2009 BBM Orix 20th Anniversary #18

2009 BBM Legend Players #062

And it wouldn't be a player retrospective if I didn't include cards of him with the Japanese National Team.  He played for Team Japan in both the 2006 and 2009 World Baseball Classics:

2006 Upper Deck Inaugural Images #II-25

2009 Konami WBC Heroes #W09R113