Monday, January 18, 2021

Invoice And Goodwill

I didn't really intend to but it seems like lately I've been doing a series of posts on things I didn't know about NPB farm teams.  Today's installment is about the other team I just discovered had a stretch where their farm team did not share their name.  

To recap, the two teams I previously knew had had a separate name for their ni-gun team were the Orix BlueWave/Buffaloes and the Yokohama Baystars.  Orix's farm team was Kobe Surpass due to a naming rights agreement with a construction company and the Baystars' team was the Shonan SeaRex, so named as a marketing move by the team to build a separate identify for the farm team.  

The third team that I just discovered had done this was the Saitama Seibu Lions.  There was a three year stretch in the mid-00's where their farm team was renamed as part of the naming rights deal for their ballpark.  In 2005 and 2006 the team had made an agreement with a company called Invoice and the Seibu Dome was known as the "Invoice Seibu Dome".  The farm team uniforms had "Invoice" across the chest and the logo on the hat was Invoice's rather than the "Kimba The White Lion" logo that the Lions had been using for 25 years.

It turns out that I haven't been paying close enough attention to my baseball cards from those two years.  I've only found one appearance of an "Invoice" uniform in any BBM flagship sets:

2006 BBM 2nd Version #509

But I found several on the 2005 and 2006 BBM Lions team sets.  Keep in mind that I don't have more than a handful of cards from either set so this is not a comprehensive list of "Invoice" cards:

2005 BBM Lions #L008

2006 BBM Lions #L066

2006 BBM Lions #L050

2006 BBM Lions #L064

2006 BBM Lions #L024

After 2006 the Lions entered into a naming rights agreement with a company called Goodwill and the ballpark named changed to the "Goodwill Dome".  As with Invoice, "Goodwill" now appeared on the farm team uniforms.  The deal was supposed to last five years but Goodwill had some sort of scandal involving illegal behavior and they and the Lions scrapped the deal after just one year.

I do not know of any baseball cards showing the Goodwill uniforms.  There aren't any in the 2007 BBM flagship sets and I don't have any cards from the 2007 BBM Lions set (yet).  I can show this blurb from the mook Professional Baseball Uniforms Encyclopedia 1936-2013 that has both the Invoice and Goodwill uniforms:


I'm not sure why the text indicates that they wore the Goodwill uniform in 2008.

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