I wanted to do a quick post on the "Dream Team" insert set from the 1999 BBM set. I finished this set a few months back when I got my most recent box of cards from Ryan and have been meaning to post on it ever since.
The "Dream Team" was an insert set that purported to be the starting line up of the NPB team for the MLB All Star tour of Japan in the fall of 1998. The ten cards included one player for each position along with manager Shigeo Nagashima. The distinctive thing about this set is that all the cards were die cut, although in an unusual way. Instead of being cut into a different shape, the cards were still the standard 2 1/2 inch by 3 1/2 inch rectangles. But all the text on the front of them is actually cut out of the card rather than printed on them. This may make more sense if you see the cards so here's all ten:
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| #D1 |
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| #D2 |
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| #D3 |
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| #D4 |
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| #D5 |
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| #D6 |
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| #D7 |
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| #D8 |
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| #D9 |
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| #D10 |
I should mention that my scanner cut off the bottom of the card on several of the scans. All the edges of the cards are solid.
It's odd that half the set are from the Giants. In fact, it's even worse as a year later Akira Etoh would become a Giant too. There's also only two Pacific League players - Ichiro and Kazuo Matsui.
There's another version of these cards that were given away to winners of a contest that BBM conducted. These cards were not die cut so there's no text on the front of them at all. I picked up (well, Ryan picked up for me) Etoh's "contest winner" card a while back:
I'd love to get all ten of the "contest winner" versions too but the Etoh is the only one I've ever seen. And I suspect the Ichiro is pretty expensive.
There was a ten card "Dream Team" insert set in the 1998 set also but I found it less interesting because it wasn't die-cut and it didn't appear to be related to an MLB tour (since the one previous to 1998 would have been in 1996). Here's the only one of those cards I have:
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| #D5 |
UPDATE - since Nick Vossbrink left a comment asking what the backs look like, here's the back of Etoh's card - both the regular card and the "contest winner":
5 comments:
I’ve never seen those before, that is an interesting use of die cutting.
These look really cool
Serious 1970s Calbee vibes from the way those photos are printed and cropped. I'm also curious what the backs look like.
Updated the post to include the backs.
I wonder if the photos really were from the MLB All Star series and are cropped to ensure no MLB players appear on them. That might be Mike Hargrove's arm on Nagashima's card - he was the manager of the MLB team for the 1998 series. Or not - hard to say.
Thanks for the backs. Not particularly interesting except to people like me who like seeing how companies design (or not) around stuff like this.
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