2021 BBM Legendary Rookies set

BBM issued the "Legendary Rookies" set back at the end of November.  The set ostensibly celebrates great rookie seasons in NPB history although as usual it is skewed towards recent, living players who can sign autographs rather than giving some sort of definitive list of the best rookie seasons ever.

The base set has 90 cards, all of which are player cards - there are no subsets or checklist cards.  The players are split between retired players (52) and players who were active in 2021 in either NPB or MLB (38).  The checklist is ordered chronologically by each player's rookie season so the first card in the set is for the earliest rookie season (Futoshi Nakanishi in 1952) and the last cards are for 2021 rookies (Hiroya Miyagi*, Takumu Nakano, Ryoji Kuribayashi, Hiromi Itoh, Shugo Maki and Teruaki Sato).   The set is very much skewed towards recent players, a fact that was made pretty obvious to me when I opened up the package containing the set.  The set was split into three 30 card bags with the cards in order (so the first bag had cards 1-30, the second had 31-60, etc).  The time gap between card #1 and card #31 (Hideki Matsui in 1993) was 41 years, the gap between card #31 and #61 (Tetsuto Yamada in 2011) was 28 years and the gap between card #61 and the present obviously is 10 years.  This means that two thirds of the set are players who debuted in 1993 or later (actually it's slightly more than that because card #30 - Tomohito Itoh - also debuted in 1993).

*It's kind of funny - Nakano, Kuribayashi, Itoh, Maki and Sato were all drafted in 2020 so their cards in the set all have the "rookie" logo on them while Miyagi was drafted in 2019 so his card does not say "rookie" on it - even though by NPB standards he was a rookie in 2021 - in fact he was the 2021 Pacific League Rookie Of The Year

Besides the players I've mentioned above, the set contains OB players like Hall Of Famers like Shigeo Nagashima, Isao Harimoto, Hiroshi Gondoh, Tsuneo Horiuchi, Koichi Tabuchi, Koji Yamamoto, Tatsunori Hara, Tsunemi Tsuda and Kazuyoshi Tatsunami along with guys like Akinobu Okada, Michiyo Aritoh, Masayuki Kakefu, Shigetoshi Hasegawa, Koji Uehara and Kenshin Kawakami.  The active players include Kosuke Fukudome, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Tsuyoshi Wada, Yu Darvish, Masahiro Tanaka, Hayato Sakamoto, Kodai Senga, Tomoyuki Sugano, Takehiro Norimoto, Masataka Yoshida, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Munetaka Murakami, Koji Chikamoto and Masato Morishita.

The cards themselves have a pleasant design.  The photos on the cards appear to be from the player's rookie year or at least close to it.  Most of the photos on them are fairly generic but there's a handful of black and white photos which I don't think have been used on cards before.  Here's a few example cards:

#LR02

#LR03

#LR08

#LR15

#LR35

#LR47

#LR55

#LR58

#LR87

As BBM's OB sets go, this isn't a bad little set.  There's just nothing really outstanding about it.  As usual all the cards (including the insert cards) can be seen over at Jambalaya.