2020 BBM Rookie Edition

Rookie Edition, BBM's annual set for all the players taken in the previous fall's NPB draft, was released about two weeks ago.  My copy of the set arrived at my house today - actually the post office attempted to deliver it on Tuesday but I was out of town for a few days on business.

I've remarked a number of times in the past that I've run out of interesting things to say about this set (assuming I had anything interesting to say about it in the first place).  This set is pretty much the same from year to year with only the players changing.  Which isn't to say it's bad set - it's not.  It's just the same thing every year.

The 2020 edition of the set has 120 cards in its base set.  There are 107 cards for the 2019 draftees/2020 rookie class, a single "draft pick list" card and 12 "Early Days" cards.

The 107 player cards include the players taken in both the regular and ikusei drafts last October.  Probably the biggest names (so far) in the set are Roki Sasaki of the Marines and Keito Mori of the Baystars.  Normally I'd say that this is the first baseball card for everyone in the set but there's seventeen eighteen exceptions this time around - there's four five players who were in Panini's Japanese Collegiate All Star inserts from the USA Baseball Stars & Stripes set from last spring plus all six of the Swallows picks and all seven of the Dragons picks were featured on Epoch One cards last December.  For the fifth year in a row the draft picks are framed in a geometric figure.  This year it's octagons (or at least the lower half of an octagon) after circles (2016), triangles (2017), pentagons (2018) and circles again (2019).

As usual the photos from the cards were taken at the press conferences that the teams hold in December to introduce the new draft picks so as usual they're a bunch of boring shots of players faking throws, swinging a bat or just making a "guts" pose.  I will say that there's a couple photos of catchers doing catcher-ish things (or at least squatting or holding a catcher's glove) that I don't remember seeing before.  There's a "secret" version of each team's first round pick - these are short printed photo variants that feature a different boring picture of the player.  I will make my annual comment that these cards would be much more interesting if they showed the players in their high school/college/corporate league/indy league uniforms.

Here's a bunch of examples:

#033

#071

#086

#054

#082

#030

The "draft pick list" card is simply a list of all the draft picks.  It theoretically could be a checklist for the set except that it doesn't have the card numbers for the players or list the "Early Days" subset.  I'm pretty much of the opinion that this card only exists to make the number of cards in the set divisible by three.  Last year's set also had 107 draft picks and so included a similar card to make the total card count divisible by three.  The set two years ago had 114 draft picks which is already divisible by three so there was no "draft pick list" card.  The 2016 edition has 115 draft picks and so had TWO "draft pick list" cards - one for each league - to get to a number divisible by three.  The next question would be why does BBM want the number of cards divisible by three - all I can think of is that they think it would look better in 9-pocket sheets that way.

#108

The "Early Days" subset features an active player from each of the 12 NPB teams.  There's what looks like a current picture of the player in the foreground along with a photo of him from his rookie player press conference in the background.  BBM has pretty much included a subset featuring active and/or OB players in every rendition of Rookie Edition - I think it's an excuse to put autograph cards of those players in the set.  This is the fourth year for the "Early Days" subset - the big names in it this time around include Hayato Sakamoto, Seiya Suzuki, Norichika Aoki and Nobuhiro Matsuda.  Here's Sakamoto's card:

#115

I complain and make fun of this set every year but I do feel that it's an essential set.  It's the first card of almost every player.  I just wish BBM did a better job with it.

As always, you can take a look at all the cards over at Jambalaya.