2023 BBM Infinity

I just received my latest shipment of cards I had ordered from ZenMarket yesterdayFriday which contained three complete sets and I got a bunch of other cards in the mail todayyesterday so I'm currently awash in cards.  I hope to get posts done on everything before Christmas but I make no promises.  Two of the three sets in my ZenMarket order were not ones that I normally order but it seemed like a good idea at the time.  The first of those two is the 2023 BBM Infinity set.

Infinity is BBM's annual-ish* multi-sport set.  Since I'm pretty myopic when it comes to sports and I'm really only interested in baseball, it's typically not a set that I'm all that interested in.  Baseball players usually make up around a third of the set but since I already have a lot of cards of most of the baseball players, I don't have any great urge to get the set.  The baseball players aren't always NPB ones, though, so I've picked up the cards of three famous corporate league players from the 2017 set, Yuki Kawabata of the Japan Women's Baseball League (JWBL) from the 2018 set and a Tokyo University pitcher turned journalist from the 2022 set (well, I thought about getting that one before someone sent me it as a bonus card).  This year's set piqued my interest, however, due to the inclusion of Samurai Japan cards and ended up buying a complete set.

*In years ending in a '6' or a '1', the set is called "Masterpiece" and celebrates an anniversary of the founding of Baseball Magazine Sha, BBM's parent company in 1946.  Or at least that's been the case in 2016 and 2021.  Infinity was published in 2017-20 and 2022-present.

The base set has 94 cards, 30 of which feature baseball players.  Eleven of those 30 cards are for players (and the manager) from the Samurai Japan team for the 2023 World Baseball Classic.  Actually, that's not quite true so let me rephrase that - eleven of those 30 cards depict players in uniform from the Samurai Japan team.  The players are Ryoji Kuribayashi, Shugo Maki, Yuki Matsui, Hiroya Miyagi, Munetaka Murakami, Yuhei Nakamura, Roki Sasaki, Yuki Udagawa, Tetsuto Yamada and Yoshinobu Yamamoto along with manager Hideki Kuriyama.  They aren't "officially" WBC cards but they are the only non-Topps cards I'm aware of showing players from that team in uniform.  The set contains the only 2023 Samurai Japan cards of Kuriyama, Matsui, Miyagi, Nakamura and Udagawa other than the on demand team set available from Topps' Japanese website back in March.  I don't know if any of the photos are from the tournament as there's a couple that appear to be taken outside and all of Samurai Japan's tournament games were indoors (either in the Tokyo Dome or the Marlin's ballpark).  Here's a couple example cards:

#28

#22

#20

#23

I'm a bit confused at how BBM has the rights to do Samurai Japan baseball cards as it appears to me that Topps still has the rights (as their recent Topps Now cards for the Asian Professional Baseball Championship team will attest).  I'm more than happy for there to be more than one company making Samurai Japan cards though so I'm not complaining.  These are the first BBM cards for the Japanese National Team since their 2008 Beijing Olympic Team set.

Of the other 19 baseball cards, 17 of them are current or former NPB players.  Nine of them are still active in NPB, one is active in MLB and the other seven are retired.  They all seem to have been included due to some sort of connection to the World Baseball Classic and/or Samurai Japan (although a couple of the connections are somewhat tenuous).  Sadaharu Oh and Koji Yamamoto managed the 2006 and 2013 team respectively while Kazuyoshi Tatsunami was the batting coach for the 2013 squad.  Norichika Aoki, Yu Darvish, Kyuji Fujikawa, Ryosuke Kikuchi, Masahiro Tanaka, Takashi Toritani and Seichi Uchikawa all played in the WBC for Japan.  Takuya Ishikawa, Shogo Nakamura, Takashi Ogino, Yudai Ohno, and Yasutaka Shiomi all played for Samurai Japan either as an amateur or a professional (Ogino before the team was called Samurai Japan).  Keita Sano and Daisuke Yudai's connections are a bit of a stretch as the back of Sano's card says that Kuriyama was impressed with him last year and Yamai's card said that he was one of the last cuts for the 2013 team.

It's weird that Darvish was a member of the 2023 WBC team but his card shows him in a Fighters' uniform (and looking much younger than he does these days).  I'd hazard a guess that BBM only has the rights to do cards of current MLB players in their old NPB uniforms but I don't know that for sure.  I will say it's not the only weird Samurai Japan related thing about the set.  The "Starlight" insert cards include cards for Yamada, Sasaki, Yamamoto and Murakami but they show them in their NPB uniforms, not their Samurai Japan ones.  I've no idea why that is.

Here's a couple sample NPB cards:

#01

#09

#11

The final two baseball cards are neither Samurai Japan nor NPB cards.  The first one is a card of comedian Hiroyuki Takagishi, who successfully tried out for the Tochigi Golden Braves of the independent Baseball Challenge (BC) League.  Takagishi had played baseball in high school and he may have also played in college at Toyo University (the Google translation of his Japanese wikipedia page isn't clear) so it's not like this was just a stunt.  He had apparently considered going into professional baseball when in high school and had drawn some interest from Yakult but ultimately he went to college instead.  Takagishi has spent two seasons with Tochigi, appearing in eight games and starting four of them.  He's 0-3 with a 7.53 ERA which aren't great numbers but probably not bad for a 30-something who hasn't play baseball for 10+ years.  There are almost no baseball cards available for BC League teams so I'd have been picking up this card even if the set hadn't had the Samurai Japan cards.

#29

The second card is Yu Katoh, shown in uniform of Saitama Astraia of the JWBL.  Katoh had played four seasons for Saitama from 2016 to 2019, hitting over .300 her last two seasons and winning a Best 9 award in 2019.  She left the league as part of the mass resignation of players following the 2019 season and worked as a coach at the Baystars' baseball school.  She spent 2021 playing for the GOODJOB Women's Baseball Team and retired at the end of the season.  She appeared in both of Epoch's JWBL sets (2016 and 2018) and also had cards in the 2014 BBM Real Venus set.  Again, I would have still picked up this card even if I hadn't gotten the entire set.

#30

The remaining 64 cards are split among athletes from a variety of different sports.  By the numbers, the sports are track & field (6), judo (6), badminton (5), boxing (4), table tennis (3), gymnastics (3), skateboarding (3), pro-wrestling (3), basketball (2), rugby (2), swimming (2), archery (2), go (2), horse racing (2), volleyball (1), beach volleyball (1), tennis (1), wheelchair tennis (1), diving (1), canoe (1), surfing (1), BMX (1), dance (1), sport climbing (1), fencing (1), ski jumping (1), snowboarding (1), speed skating (1), karate (1), wrestling (non-pro) (1), bodybuilding (1), karuta (1) and motor sports (1).

I think that a lot of the athletes in the set have been included in previous Infinity (and Masterpiece) sets but I don't know how many.  I do know that some of them have appeared on "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards in BBM's 2nd Version and Fusion sets in recent years.  Pro-Wrestlers Hiroshi Tanahashi and Kazuchika Okada and Go player Sumire Nakamura were in the 2019 2nd Version set while table tennis player Mima Ito was in that year's Fusion set.  Wrestler Sairi Yoshida was in the 2020 2nd Version "Ceremonial First Pitch History" subset showing her throwing out the first pitch at a Dragons game in 2015.  The 2021 Fusion set included gymnast Daiki Hashimoto, skateboarder Momiji Nishiya, fencer Misaka Emura and judoka Hifumi Abe and the 2022 2nd Version set had snowboarder Sena Tomita.  Boxer Naoya Inoue has appeared on two "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards - one in the 2014 2nd Version set and the other in the 2019 Fusion set.  (And just to be complete - Kuriyama appeared in the 2023 2nd Version set and Takagishi appeared in the 2020 Fusion set as part of the comedy duo Timon D.)

Despite not being all that interested in the sports, I did find that a lot of the photographs used on the cards were quite good:

#33

#41

#53

#60

#67

#70

#87

As multi-sports sets go, this is a decent set but I don't expect to buy any future editions of it unless there's a bunch of Samurai Japan cards in it again.  I did consider just buying the Samurai Japan cards along with the Takagishi and Kato one but decided it'd be too much of a hassle.

As always, you can see all the cards (including inserts and parallels) over at Jambalaya.