Thursday, May 28, 2020

Broccoli Lions Cards

I mentioned in my post about the 2000 Japanese Olympic Baseball team that Daisuke Matsuzaka was extremely popular following his performance in the 1998 Summer Koshien tournament and his subsequent entering into professional baseball as the first round pick of the Seibu Lions.  How popular was Matsuzaka?  A company started publishing baseball cards just to be able to cash in on having cards of him.

The company was an outfit called "Broccoli" and I don't know much about them.  Luckily Ryan does so I'll quote his comment about them:
They don't make baseball cards anymore. The company is one of the big media companies here, and they make a bunch of merchandise for shows and comic books. They have a retail shop that's pretty popular too. I'm not sure if they still make any types of regular trading cards, but they do make trading card games, which remain amazingly popular here.
Broccoli issued three card sets that were dedicated only to the Seibu Lions.  Like the Kanebo cards, there's nothing actually on the cards that identifies the card company as "Broccoli".  Instead the cards have a line on the back identifying them as "Lions Official Cards Collection" which could lead to them being confused with the Lions' team issued/fan club card sets from the same years.

Their first set came out in 1999, Matsuzaka's rookie year.  It was sold in packs of 10 cards each.  There were 72 cards in the base set and here's where it starts to get a bit odd.  Those 72 cards represent only 29 players plus manager Osamu Higashio so there are multiple cards for many players - including a total of nine each for Fumiya Nishiguchi and Kazuo Matsui.  Everyone else has three or fewer cards.  Matsuzaka does not appear in the base set(!)  There are multiple card designs but I don't have enough cards from the set to make any sort of pronouncement about how many designs there are (although I'd guess there's nine total).  I only have five cards from the base set and they represent four different designs:

1999 Broccoli #002

1999 Broccoli #022 (Kiyoshi Toyoda)

1999 Broccoli #059 (Susumu Ohtomo)

1999 Broccoli #050 (Ken Suzuki)
The backs are all similar in that they repeat the photo from the front and there's no biographical information included (which doesn't mean there isn't a card design that has biographical information on it):


The set included three insert sets.  One of these was an 18 card set completely dedicated to Matsuzaka.  There was also an 18 card facsimile autograph insert set featuring 18 different Lions players (including Matsuzaka) and a 9 card "Special" insert set featuring 9 different Lions (and again including Matsuzaka).  There were four different versions of the "Special" cards - the most common had silver borders but there were blue, red and gold bordered ones that were more rare.  I don't have any of the Matsuzaka inserts but I have Tsutomo Itoh's cards from each of the other two inserts:

1999 Broccoli #R09

1999 Broccoli #SS8
The checklist for the set is available at TradingCardDB.com.

The 2000 set was again issued in 10 card packs.  The base set grew to 99 cards but it makes a little more sense.  The first 36 cards in the set are basically like a traditional team card set as they represent 36 different players and the backs of the cards have biographical and statistical information about each player.  Matsuzaka is included in these 36 cards.

2000 Broccoli #013


The next 54 cards (card numbers 37 to 90) are similar to the 1999 set - there are 13 different players represented with anywhere between one and six cards per player.  Matsuzaka is not one of the 13 players in this section.  I have representations of six different card designs which I suspect represent all the possible designs but I don't know that for sure:

2000 Broccoli #059

2000 Broccoli #042

2000 Broccoli #044 (Tetsuya Shiozaki)

2000 Broccoli #072

2000 Broccoli #073

2000 Broccoli #084
The backs of these cards again repeat the photo from the front:


Cards 91 to 98 are for the Lions' 2000 rookie class and card #99 is for manager Higashio.  The card backs are checklists for the set.

2000 Broccoli #095
Like the 1999 set there was an 18 card insert set dedicated to Daisuke Matsuzaka.  I have a couple cards from this set.  There's two different front designs on these cards - the first 9 cards have a border that resembles a film strip while the last 9 card have a gold frame:

2000 Broccoli #M09

2000 Broccoli #M12
There were two other 18 card insert sets - "Special" and "Facsimile Autograph".  The two sets had identical checklists and include Matsuzaka.  I only have a card from the "Facsimile Autograph" set:

2000 Broccoli #R10
There were memorabilia cards available in the packs - Matsuzaka jersey cards and Kazuo Matsui bat chip cards.

The checklist for this set is also available at TradingCardDB.com.

Broccolis final set in 2001 was again issued in 10 card packs.  The base set grew to 117 cards.  The first 68 cards in the set constituted a "comprehensive" team set for the Lions - all 67 players on the team's 2001 70 man roster plus manager Higashio (and including Matsuzaka):

2001 Broccoli #012


The next four cards (#69-72) were checklists (and I can't show them because I don't have any of them).  The final 45 cards are three cards each of 15 different players (which do not include either Matsuzaka or Matsui).  The three cards for each player each have a different design (which are repeated for each player):

2001 Broccoli #093

2001 Broccoli #095

2001 Broccoli #079
The backs of all these cards have the same design (except for the photo):


Instead of an 18 card insert set for Matsuzaka like the 1999 and 2000 sets had, the 2001 set instead had a Matsuzaka insert set with only 9 cards.  But they added a similar 9 card insert set dedicated to Kazuo Matsui:

2001 Broccoli #KM08
The set also had an 18 card "Special" insert set (which included both Matsuzaka and Matsui).  There's a "kira" parallel version of this set as well but I only have a card from the non-kira version:

2001 Broccoli #SP07
The 2001 set also had memorabilia cards available - jersey cards for Matsuzaka and Matsui.  Again the checklist for the set is available at TradingCardDB.com.

I've been constantly thinking of this old Dana Carvey sketch while I was writing this post:

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