More Than You Ever Wanted To Know About Bowman's NPB Set

Topps issued a Bowman set for NPB back in December.  It had 180 card base set and (of course) some crazy number of parallels.  I had considered picking the set up when it came out but decided against it since quite frankly I didn't need yet another 2022 NPB set.

But I had been curious about it.  I haven't paid a lot of attention to MLB cards for the past 20 years or so but I do know that Bowman in North America is heavy on the prospects and rookie cards.  My assumption was that Topps would try to do something similar with their NPB version but I wasn't sure how it was going to work.  The problem is that NPB teams don't have as deep a farm system as MLB teams do.  Each team has a 70 man roster containing all the players in the organization (except the development players who I'll get to in a minute).  Now with the Manfred Snap a few years back MLB teams have cut back a bit on their farm teams but I think each MLB team still has in the neighborhood of 150 players in their organization.  

Compounding the difficulty for Bowman, there are already cards being made for all the players who get drafted each year.  Not only do they all appear in BBM's annual draft pick set called Rookie Edition, all the drafted players will also appear in BBM's 1st Version set, BBM's "comprehensive" team sets for each team and the Epoch NPB set.  And this is regardless of whether or not the player will actually appear with the ichi-gun squad anytime soon.  So there's really no NPB equivalent of some guy in the lower minors who's never had a baseball card before (other than a minor league team set).

The one thing I thought they could do is include some of the development players.  Development players (also known as the ikusei) are players who an organization signs but are not on the 70 man roster.  They don't get paid as much as the "registered" players (the players on the 70 man roster) get and they can only play in farm team games.  There's a number of significant players who orginally signed as ikusei and later were moved to the 70 man roster with Kodai Senga being the biggest name.  Most teams only have a couple of these players but the Hawks and Giants have basically a full team's worth of them.  Most of these players are actually drafted - there's an ikusei portion of the draft - but some are foreign players trying to catch on.  Xavier Batista, Alejandro Mejia, Livan Moinelo and Oscar Colas all originally signed on as development players.  It also sometimes happens that a "registered" player ends up getting signed by a team as development player - this is usually if a player's been injured and the team wants to see if they're healthy or if they've just been playing poorly and the team wants to see if they can improve.

The one problem with Bowman including development players is that BBM has been including them (at least the ones that were drafted) in the Rookie Edition set each year so again there's really no situation where there's someone who's never had a card - unless they included some of the foreign ikusei players.

I'd looked at Jambalaya's listing for the set back when it came out but I hadn't really thought a whole lot more about it until a week or so ago when I ended up getting in a discussion on Twitter with Mike from Chiba's Collectibles.  He'd just gotten a box for the set and I asked him how it was.  We had a bit of a back and forth about it which prompted me to take a close look.  So here's what I found...

As I said, the base set had 180 cards which worked out to 15 cards per team.  But those 180 cards were actually split into two groups - 143 "regular" cards and 37 "prospect" cards.  The "regular" cards were numbered 1 to 143 while the "prospect" cards were numbered BP-1 to BP-37.  The fronts of the cards were similar except the "prospect" cards were kind of a mirror image of the "regular" cards - the Bowman logo was on the upper left instead of the upper right while the team logo was on the lower right instead of the lower left.  And the "prospect" cards were all had the label "1st Bowman" in the upper right.

In examining the 143 "regular" cards I discovered that 78 of them were labeled as "rookie" cards.  Now the standard for years for NPB sets is that the only cards labeled "rookie" are for players who were taken in the previous year's draft.  That's why Ichiro's 1993 BBM card is not labeled "rookie" even though it was his first card but Hideki Matsui's card from that set is - Ichiro was a 1991 draftee while Matsui was taken in the 1992 draft.  And sure enough, all the "rookies" in the set were 2021 draftees although there's a bit of a twist that I'll get to in a minute.

My guess that the Bowman set would include development players paid off with the "prospect" cards - all of them are development players.  Almost all of them were taken in the 2021 ikusei draft - the only one who wasn't was Dragons pitcher Shota Fukushima.  Fukushima had been drafted in the regular phase in 2020, injured his shoulder in 2021 and spent 2022 as an ikusei player while rehabbing.  He's back on the 70 man roster for 2023.  My bet is that he was included in the set because the Dragons didn't draft any development players in 2021.

What's kind of odd is that there were a total of 51 ikusei players taken in the 2021 draft but this set only has 36 of them.  Who's missing?  For starters the Hawks and Giants went very deep in the development player draft in 2021 with the Giants taking 10 players and the Hawks taking 14(!).  Topps decided to not do cards for the lower half for each team - so there's only five Giant and seven Hawk "prospects".  Lions fourth round pick Keishin Kawamura abruptly retired in June so he's not in the set and neither is Kazuhiro Abe of the Fighters.  That accounts for 14 of the missing players but where's the 15th?

I said there was a twist a couple paragraphs back about the "rookies" in the "regular" cards.  There were actually only 77 guys drafted in the regular phase of the 2021 draft but there's 78 "rookies" in the "regular" cards.  It turns out the answer to the question "who's the 78th rookie?" is the same as the answer to "who's the 15th missing ikusei player?" - it's Natsuo Takizawa, who was the Lions' 2nd pick in the development draft and was registered to the 70 man roster in the middle of May.

What's kind of odd about Takizawa having a "regular" card is there were two other 2021 ikusei draftees who moved up to the 70 man roster - Taiki Kikuchi of the Giants and Satoshi Miyamori of the Eagles.  Miyamori has a "prospect" card while Kikuchi doesn't appear in the set at all.  All three players appear as "registered" players in either BBM's 2nd Version set (out in August) or their Fusion set which came out in late November,  several weeks before this one did.  There's really no excuse for the other two not appearing in the "regular" cards in this set.

That brings me to another thing that I thought was odd about the set - the player selection is a little weird.  Now obviously the player selection's being dictated by two things - the inclusion of all these "rookies" and "prospects" (which are really also "rookies") and that each team is limited to only 15 cards.  So there's only 65 cards for non-rookies.  These slots aren't evenly distributed - the Fighters, Giants and Hawks each have only three non-rookie cards but there's nine non-rookie Swallows.  But I found it odd that the set does not include some pretty big names like Teruaki Sato, Hotoka Yamakawa, Shugo Maki, ShotaYudai Ohno, Yasutaka Shiomi or Yutaro Sugimoto.  There's also only one foreign player - Raidel Martinez of the Dragons.

I need to also take a minute here and mention how stupid it is that they've got cards labeled "1st Bowman" in this set.  This is the first ever NPB Bowman set so almost EVERY card in this set is a "1st Bowman" card.  As Mike pointed out to me, the only guys who've previously had Bowman cards are the guys who appeared who had 2017 "Paper Prospects" cards because they played in the WBC that year (Tetsuto Yamada, Tomoyuki Sugano and Takehiro Norimoto) and Masahiro Tanaka who spent seven years in MLB.

As I said, I didn't buy the set but I was interested in picking up a handful of cards from it so I bought some of Mike's doubles.  The six cards he sent me were a pretty good representation of the set:

#6

#11

#43

#46

#76

#BP-31

I think the Ohshima card has one of the best photos in the set.  There's several cards that feature mug shots like Higashide's card though.  The Aoyagi card is a Chrome parallel.

The card backs show that Topps Japan's commitment to not making any effort on the card backs continues:

I don't know if that's supposed to be some cybernetic eye in the upper right hand corner.

You can of course see all the cards (inlcuding parallels and inserts) over at Jambalaya.

Thanks for the cards, Mike!