A word of warning before I start this post - I'm not entirely sure of what I'm talking about here. Well, that's probably the case with more of my posts than I'd care to admit but this one in particular I'm not real confident about but here goes...
A couple of months back Jason Coskrey tweeted out* something about Orix's female fans having voted on who the cutest/coolest players on the team were and that Hiroya Miyagi had placed fifth. If you read his entire thread you can see who the other players on the list were. Jason used the word "Orihime" to refer to the female fans but the Buffaloes tweet he retweeted used the word "orimen" (オリメン). While I'm not entirely sure what "orimen" is (UPDATE - Jason suggested that it may be a mashup of "orihime" and "ikemen"), the word rang a bell. Weren't there a couple subsets in some of BBM's team sets that were labeled "orimen"?
*I may be way too optimistic that this link will actually lead to anything, given what a mess Twitter has been today...
I did some quick research and found that I had kind of remembered correctly. There had been an "orimen" subset in ONE BBM team set - the 2019 Buffaloes set. It was the top three vote getters in what I'm guessing was a similar contest that year (or possibly 2018). Here's the three cards:
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| 2019 BBM Buffaloes #B79 |
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| 2019 BBM Buffaloes #B80 |
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| 2019 BBM Buffaloes #B81 |
Their fortunes have apparently faded - Yamaoka has dropped to third place behind Soichiro Yamazaki and Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Fukuda has dropped to sixth. Sachiya Yamasaki is in fourth, Miyagi as I mentioned above is in fifth and Yoshida is in Boston.
I wasn't completely wrong in thinking there had been subsets like this in other BBM team sets. While there weren't any more labeled "orimen", I found two labeled "ikemen" that appear to also reflect some sort of ranking of the players. "Ikemen" at least I've found has a Wikipedia entry - I guess to overly simplify the term it means "good looking men of Japanese pop culture".
The first "ikemen" subset was in the 2019 BBM Marines set and was actually labeled "Ikemen 5". Here's the cards:
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| 2019 BBM Marines #M77 |
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| 2019 BBM Marines #M78 |
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| 2019 BBM Marines #M79 |
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| 2019 BBM Marines #M80 |
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| 2019 BBM Marines #M81 |
The other subset was from the 2021 Swallows team set and was labeled "Swallows Ikemen Election":
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| 2021 BBM Swallows #S78 |
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| 2021 BBM Swallows #S79 |
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| 2021 BBM Swallows #S80 |
These are the only subsets like this that I found but I won't swear that there aren't any others out there.
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