20 Years Of Rookie Edition

Every year since 2003 BBM has released the Rookie Edition set which contains all (or most) of the players taken in the NPB draft the previous fall*.  With the 2022 edition of the set being the 20th, I thought a post celebrating this milestone would be in order.

*Obviously only the players who sign with the team that drafted them are in the sets but it's relatively rare in Japan that a player doesn't sign.

While Topps included draft pick cards in their flagship set starting in 1989 and both Classic and Front Row put out draft pick sets in 1990, the first draft pick cards in NPB weren't until 1999.  Issue #13 of Sports Card Magazine (SCM), released in January of 1999, included a card of Koji Uehara, the Giants' first pick in the 1998 draft.  While this was just a one-off - there were no cards of any other draft picks in that issue - it established the pattern that pretty much all NPB draft pick cards would follow - it used a photo from the Giants' press conference to introduce the new draft class.  Each NPB team holds a press conference after they sign all their draft picks to formally introduce the new players and it is photos from this event that are used on NPB draft pick cards as opposed to MLB draft pick cards that might use a photo of the player in his amateur uniform or even his high school graduation photo.  The other thing that it did that all BBM draft pick cards would also do is it referred to the draft as the "1999 draft" when it was actually the 1998 draft - this confused me for YEARS.

1999 SCM #1

BBM issued a set later in 1999 called "Mr Giants '99" that was a biographical set for Shigeo Nagashima.  It included a nine card subset called something like "1st Draft Pick" and showed Nagashima with the first round pick of the Giants for some of the years that he was the team's manager - including his stint in the 1970's.  I don't have all these cards but most of the ones I do have feature photos taken at the introductory press conference each year.

1999 BBM Mr Giants '99 #G94

BBM included draft pick cards for the first round picks from the 1999 draft of all twelve teams in the 2000 Preview set.  This was the time that draftees from the most recent draft were available out of a pack.  BBM had to make a slight change with the 2001 Preview set - the BlueWave's top pick in the 2000 draft Tetsuya Utsumi had refused to sign with them as he wanted to be a Giant.  The 2001 Preview set includes the first round pick for the other eleven teams and the second round pick for Orix.  The 2001 draft presented another challenge for BBM - there was a "free acquisition" phase where a team could sign one or two amateur players directly without having to draft him - using this would cause a team to forfeit their first and third round picks for signing one player and their first, second and third round picks if they signed two players.  Five teams took advantage of this rule change so instead of labelling the cards "Draft No. 1 Pick" (or "Draft No. 2 Pick" in that one case) as they had for the 2000 and 2001 Preview sets, the 2002 Preview set labeled the draft pick cards "The Brightest Hope".

1999 BBM Preview #P128

2001 BBM Preview #P30

2002 BBM Preview #P10

BBM did away with the Preview set in 2003 and replaced it with a set that would expand the draft pick subset to include all the players taken in the 2002 NPB draft.  The first Rookie Edition set would contain 152 cards - 90 cards for the 2002 draft picks, 60 cards (5 per team) labeled "Regular" that showed current players in their rookie seasons and two checklist cards.  This established the pattern that all Rookie Edition sets would follow - all of the draft picks plus one or more subsets featuring established players.  With 62, that first set had the highest number of non-draft pick cards of any of the sets - for the past 12 years the sets have had only 12 to 14 non-draft pick cards.

I've prepared the following table which breaks down each set and lists some of the biggest names in each set (although my criteria was pretty arbitrary).  I'll just highlight a couple things:

- The 2005 set was the first set that was missing a player who had signed with the team that had drafted him.  Michael Nakamura had come to Japan after the 2004 season and tried out for both the Fighters and Marines.  He had decided to sign with the Marines but the team suggested that since he had mixed Australian and Japanese heritage he make himself eligible for the draft so he wouldn't count as a foreign player.  The Fighters surprised everyone though by drafting him instead.  I don't know for sure but I think Nakamura took a while to decide to sign with the Fighters and therefore wasn't able to be included in the set.  BBM issued a "bonus" Rookie Edition card of Nakamura in issue #50 of SCM in March that year.

- Following the 2005 season, NPB started allowing teams to sign "training" players who would not count against the team's 70 man roster.  These "ikusei" players could play in farm team (ni-gun) games but could not play in ichi-gun games unless they were signed to an official contract and placed on the 70 man roster.  NPB introduced a draft for ikusei players in 2005 but BBM did not include these players in the Rookie Edition set until the 2009 set (for the 2008 draft).  I suspect but again don't know for sure that they were inspired to include the ikusei players when Tetsuya Yamaguchi of the Giants won the Central League Rookie Of The Year award in 2008, becoming the first former ikusei player to ever win the award.  History repeated itself the following year when another former ikusei player for the Giants, Tetsuya Matsumoto, won the award.  There were other players taken in the ikusei drafts between 2005 and 2007 who eventually earned spots on 70 man rosters but Yamaguchi and Matsumoto are the most significant ones who Rookie Edition missed.

- In their first set with the drafted ikusei players, BBM also included two Chinese players that the Baystars had signed to ikusei contracts.  The players - Wang Jing-chao and Chen Wei - had both been on the 2009 WBC roster for China, although Chen didn't actually play in the tournament.  The pair spent two years with the Baystars but neither of them made the 70 man roster.  They were the first (and I think so far only) Chinese players to ever sign with an NPB team.  UPDATE - they actually were not the first Chinese players.  I think it was Xu An who was a development player for the Giants in 2006.

- The 2013 set is the only other Rookie Edition set to be missing a player who signed with his drafted team.  Makoto Aiuchi, the Lions' second round pick, was arrested in December of 2012 for speeding and driving without a proper license and didn't actually sign his contract with the Lions until late March, much too late to be included in the Rookie Edition set.  Unlike Nakamura, BBM never issued a "bonus" Rookie Edition card for him in SCM.  UPDATE - I forgot that Shota Ohmine missed the 2010 set due to his arrest for underage drinking delaying his signing with the Marines until after the set went to press.  BBM didn't issue a "bonus" card for him either.

- The 2013 set contains two cards of Shohei Ohtani, both numbered #42.  One shows him in a pitching pose while the other shows him holding a bat although both cards list his position as "pitcher".  Both cards are as common as any other cards in the set and the complete base set should contain both versions.

- BBM started including "secret versions" of the first round draft picks from the set starting with the 2018 edition.  In contrast to the 2013 Ohtani cards, these are short printed photo variations and are not considered part of the base set.  My feeling is they're kind of redundant since the variation is just a different photo from the introductory press conference.

- 2005 wasn't the only time there were "bonus" SCM cards for a Rookie Edition set although that was the only time the "bonus" card was a drafted player.  SCM #73 was published in January of 2009 and included three cards using the 2009 Rookie Edition design.  Two of these were for Sadaharu Oh and Kazuhiro Kiyohara and essentially functioned as promo cards for the biographical sets BBM had just published for each of them.  The third one was for Eri Yoshida, the then-16 year old female knuckleball pitcher who had been taken by the Kobe 9 Cruse in the Kansai Independent Baseball League.  A year later SCM #79 included nine or ten bonus cards that featured a player from the draft classes from 2000 to 2009 on a card using the 2010 Rookie Edition design (I'm not sure if the card for Yusei Kikuchi is a bonus card or just a promo version of his card in the 2010 set).  The cards all have numbers that continue the numbering of the set.  The issues of Sports Card Magazine issued in January each year from 2011 to 2017 included promo cards for each year's Rookie Edition set but these were simply color variants of the corresponding cards in the set.

Year	Size	Draft Picks	Regular	Ikusei	Significant Players	Missing Players	Other Cards
2003	152	90	90	0	Tsuyoshi Nishioka, Nagisa Arakaki, Tsuyoshi Wada, Mac Suzuki, Tomotaka Sakaguchi, Shohei Tateyama, Yuhei Takai, Shuichi Murata, Yuya Kubo		"Regular" (60), Checklist (2)
2004	121	71	71	0	Yoshihisa Naruse, Takashi Toritani, Yoshio Itoi, Norichika Aoki, Tetsuya Utsumi		"Regular" (36), Rookie Year Report (12), Checklist (2)
2005	119	81	81	0	Atsushi Nohmi, Yu Darvish, Chihiro Kaneko, Hideaki Wakui, Takehiro Ishikawa, Yoshiyuki Kamei	Michael Nakamura	"Regular" (36), New Managers (2)
2006	136	95	95	0	Ryosuke Hirata, Yuichi Honda, Nobuhiro Matsuda, Minoru Iwata, Yamato Maeda, Masaru Takeda, Chung-Shou Yang (Daikan Yoh), Yoshisa Hirano, Takahiro Okada (T-Okada), Ginjiro Sumitani, Ginji Akaminai, Shingo Kawabata, Shun Yamaguchi	Tetsuya Yamaguchi (ikusei)	"Regular" (36), New Managers (5)
2007	114	88	88	0	Katsuya Kakunaka, Takuya Asao, Yuya Hasegawa, Tsubasa Aizawa, Kenta Maeda, Takayuki Kishi, Motohiro Shima, Masahiro Tanaka, Takayuki Kajitani, Hayato Sakamoto	Tetsuya Matsumoto (ikusei)	New Age Performer (24), New Managers (2)
2008	100	73	73	0	Akira Nakamura, Yoshihiro Maru, Sho Nakata, Kazuhito Tadano, Toru Murata		"Regular" (24), New Managers (3)
2009	126	95	67	28	Tadashi Settsu, Hiroki Uemoto, Shota Ohno, Kenshi Sugiya, Yuki Nishi, Hideto Asamura, Yuhei Nakamura		"Regular" (24), New Managers (2), New Team (5) (plus two Baystars ikusei players from China)
2010	114	81	65	16	Takashi Ogino, Yohei Ohshima, Kenta Imamiya, Shota Dohbayashi, Yusei Kikuchi, Yoshitomo Tsutsugoh, Hisayoshi Chono,	Shota Ohmine	"Regular" (24), New Managers (5), New Team (4)
2011	109	97	68	29	Yudai Ohno, Takuya Kai, Kodai Senga, Yuki Yanagita, Haruki Nishikawa, Yuki Saitoh, Shogo Akiyama, Kazuhisa Makita, Manabu Mima, Tetsuto Yamada, Hirokazu Sawamura		"Regular" (12)
2012	111	97	71	26	Naoya Masuda, Daichi Suzuki, Shuhei Takahashi, Shota Takeda, Ryosuke Kikuchi, Yusuke Nomura, Kensuke Kondoh,		"Draft Picks" (2), "Regular" (12)
2013	96	82	69	13	Nao Higashihama, Shintaro Fujinami, Seiya Suzuki, Shohei Ohtani, Takahiro Norimoto, Yasuhiro Ogawa, Kazuki Mishima, Toshiro Miyazaki, Tomoyuki Sugano	Makoto Aiuchi	"Draft Picks" (1), Then & Now (12) (plus second card of Ohtani)
2014	102	89	76	13	Seiya Inoue, Ayumu Ishikawa, Yuito Mori, Ryutaro Umeno, Aren Kuri, Daichi Ohsera, Kosuke Tanaka, Tomoya Mori, Hotaka Yamakawa, Yuki Matsui, Seiji Kobayashi		"Draft Picks" (1), Then & Now (12)
2015	117	103	81	22	Shogo Nakamura, Kohei Arihara, Yuma Mune, Kona Takahashi, Shuta Tonosaki, Yasuaki Yamasaki, Kazuma Okamoto		"Draft Picks" (2), Then & Now (12)
2016	129	115	88	27	Shinnosuke Ogasawara, Koyo Aoyagi, Yutaro Sugimoto, Masataka Yoshida, Eigoro Mogi, Shota Imanga		"Draft Picks" (2), Then & Now (12)
2017	126	114	86	28	Chihaya Sasaki, Yota Kyoda, Yuya Yanagi, Yusuke Ohyama, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Sosuke Genda, Kazuki Tanaka, Haruhiro Hamaguchi, Keita Sano		Early Days (12)
2018	126	114	82	32	Yudai Fujioka, Ukyo Shuto, Rei Takahashi, Kotaro Kiyomiya, Daiki Tajima, Kaima Taira, Munetaka Murakami, Yasutaka Shiomi, Katsuki Azuma,		Early Days (12)
2019	117	104	83	21	Kyota Fujiwara, Akira Neo, Koji Chikamoto, Chusei Mannami, Taiga Kamichatani, Shosei Togoh		"Draft Picks" (1), Early Days (12)
2020	120	107	74	33	Roki Sasaki, Takaya Ishikawa, Junya Nishi, Masato Morishita, Hiroya Miyagi, Yasunobu Okugawa		"Draft Picks" (1), Early Days (12)
2021	135	123	74	49	Takumu Nakano, Teruaki Sato, Ryoji Kuribayashi, Hiromi Itoh, Takahisa Hayakawa, Shugo Maki		Early Days (12)
2022	141	128	77	51	Kou Matsukawa, Taisei Ota, Chihiro Sumida		"Draft Picks" (1), New Face (12)

Here's a representative card from each set. By no means did I pick the most significant player from each set - I just wanted an interesting mix of players and teams:

2003 BBM Rookie Edition #63

2004 BBM Rookie Edition #61

2005 BBM Rookie Edition #12

2006 BBM Rookie Edition #42

2007 BBM Rookie Edition #67

2008 BBM Rookie Edition #24

2009 BBM Rookie Edition #009

2010 BBM Rookie Edition #042

2011 BBM Rookie Edition #046

2012 BBM Rookie Edition #080

2013 BBM Rookie Edition #65

2014 BBM Rookie Edition #011

2015 BBM Rookie Edition #054

2016 BBM Rookie Edition #085

2017 BBM Rookie Edition #051

2018 BBM Rookie Edition #107

2019 BBM Rookie Edition #025

2020 BBM Rookie Edition #033

2021 BBM Rookie Edition #100

2022 BBM Rookie Edition #068