June Releases

Here's some information on some upcoming releases:

- The next two of BBM's annual "comprehensive" team set releases are for the Tigers and Buffaloes.  As usual, the base set for each set contains 81 cards.  For the Tigers set those 81 cards break down into 69 "regular" cards (for the manager and players) and four three card subsets - "Newcomer", "Great Record", "Starting Pitcher" and "Rising Stars".  I don't know how the Buffaloes cards break down because BBM hasn't put the information for the set up on their website - all I have is what's on Discount Niki's website.  The Tigers set has 36 insert cards broken up into five sets - "Growing Up" (4 cards), "Friendly Competitors" (5 cards), "Tiger's Fang" (6 cards), "Building Trust" (3 cards) and "Phantom" (18 cards).  The Buffaloes set has 30 insert cards - 12 of which are "Phantom" cards.  Both sets have a bunch of autograph cards randomly inserted into packs.  The Tigers set will be out in mid-June and the Buffaloes set will be out in late June.

- Not to be outdone, Epoch is also releasing two "comprehensive" team sets in June and one of those is for the Tigers also.  The other is for the Baystars.  Both sets have a 90 card base set along with various insert and autograph cards.  The Baystars set will be out on June 9th and the Tigers set will be released two weeks later on the 23rd.

- Seiichi Uchikawa of the Hawks got his 2000th hit last week and Hits wasted no time in announcing they were doing a "Mini color paper" set for him.  The set will contain a total of 16 "cards" for him - 8 "normal" and 8 "gilded print signed".  The set will feature photos of him as both a Hawk and a Baystar.  It will be out in late June.

- Kenny (aka Zippy Zappy) gave me a heads up a few weeks back about a food issue in Japan being given away with some sort of popsicle from Meito.  Meito makes ice cream bars called "Home Run Bars" normally (you can see some of their commercials here) but the cards are only being given away with the "Central League Soda Float Homerun Bars".  There are 36 cards in total and as the name implies they are only for the six Central League teams.  I assume there are six cards per team but I don't know that for sure.  I don't think these cards are being issued by either BBM or Epoch but I could be wrong.  I don't know if they've actually in stores yet or not - I did a quick look on Yahoo! Japan Auctions and didn't see any cards from it.