Bowman & Chrome

I've been wanting to do a post about the Topps NPB issues from the last two months - Bowman, Topps Chrome and 206 - but it's been a busy couple of weeks.  I had gotten a bunch of cards from the sets two weeks ago from my friend Jason (who sells cards on Ebay as "JK's Card Shoppe") so it'll also be an opportunity to show off them.  I'm going to skip talking about the 206 set until next week though.

The Bowman NPB set was released in early November.  It's a 180 card set with the cards split up evenly between the 12 teams (as usual) whcih means there are 15 cards per team.  The base set cards are divided between 132 "regular" cards and 48 "prospect" cards (which are all labelled "1st Bowman Card").  I didn't do as deep of a dive into the checklist as I did last year but I'm pretty confident that (again) the "regular" cards include all 69 players who were taken in the regular part of last fall's draft while almost all of the "prospect" cards are players taken in the development player (ikusei) portion of that draft.

With 69 of the 132 players on the "regular" cards that only leaves 63 cards for veteran players which leads to some odd omissions.  It seems strange to me that a set that is supposed to be about up and coming players is missing both Chusei Mannami of the Fighters and Shoki Murakami, Central League MVP and Rookie Of The Year.  

There's some weirdness in the "prospect" cards as well.  47 of the 57 ikusei draftees appear in the set - only seven of the nine picks by the Giants and only six of the 14(!) picks by the Hawks are included.  What's weird or perhaps just annoying is that nine of the ikusei draft picks are no longer development players - Shinya Matsuyama (Dragons), Masanori Higuchi (Dragons), Takahiro Nakamura (Carp), Konosuke Tatsumi (Eagles), Hayao Matsui (Giants), Kyosuke Noguchi (Tigers), Hikaru Kimura (Hawks), Ryota Joko (Baystars) and Atsumasa Chano (Buffaloes).  Several of these players (Matsuyama, Nakamura and Chano off the top of my head) have already had cards in other sets that reflect them not being ikusei anymore.  Why does Bowman still have them as ikusei?  One of the things I've always liked about NPB sets is how up to date they are.  For example, BBM pulled cards for players in their 2021 Tigers and Marines sets when said players were traded and released respectively between the time the sets went to press and the sets were published.  There's really no excuse for Bowman not showing some if not all of these nines as 70 man roster players, especially Chano who was signed to an official contract in March before the season started.

The other weird thing about the "prospect" cards involves the one player included who was not a 2022 draftee,  The set also includes a card for Yukihiro Iwata of the Swallows who was a 2021 "ikusei" draft pick.  I have no idea why Bowman included him in this year's set but he's the only player who appeared on a "prospect" card in both the 2022 and 2023 Bowman sets.  And, yes, that means he has two cards labeled "1st Bowman" card - #BP-29 last year and #BP-2 this year.

OK, enough nit picking the set,  Here's the cards that Jason sent me:

#BP-17

#100

#35

#111

When I wrote about the Bowman cards that Kenny sent me a few weeks ago,  Nick Vossbrink left a comment wondering if the backs were still showed "minimal effort".  I think the answer is yes, the backs still pretty much suck but at least there's less white space on these:

The Bowman set also has an insert set featuring players on cards using the 1989 Bowman format.  I picked up one of these cards off of Ebay (but not from Jason).  Here's the front and back of it:

#89B-14

You can see all the Bowman cards over at Jambalaya.

I was pleasantly surprised in October when I discovered that this year's edition of Epoch's NPB Luxury Collection was not just an ugly parallel version of their NPB set but instead an interesting set in its own right.  Despite this, I still expected that the Topps Chrome set would be the usual ugly parallel version of Topps' NPB set from last May which I had MANY issues with.  Imagine my surprise when I took a look at the set over at Jambalaya when it came out in late November.

Topps updated the set.

Among my myriad complaints about the original set was that all the photos were taken last season, so uniforms were out of date, players who had switched teams in the off season weren't in the set, a player who had defected from Cuba and wouldn't be pitching in NPB WAS in the set.  Ultimately I had seven complaints about the set and I'm pleased (and astonished) to report that Topps pretty much fixed four of them.  The photos appear to be from this year, there's "action" photos of most of the rookies and new managers, there's a handful of players in the set who changed teams over last winter (Kensuke Kondoh, Tomoya Mori and Nobuhiro Matsuda) and Yariel Rodriguez is NOT in the set.  Now granted, I still find the "Chrome" finish on the cards to be very ugly but the rest of the set is a huge improvement over the earlier set.  I just wish they had put this effort into the original set.  Here's an example showing Takuya Nakamura's cards from both the original and Chrome sets:

Topps NPB #52 (left), Topps Chrome NPB #166 (right)

Jason had sent me the Chrome Nakamura along with a couple other cards:

#23

#99

The backs still suck though:

Jason also sent me a "green" parallel card of Akinobu Okada that's #'d to 99:

#69

Topps actually fixed one more of my complaints about the original set - the "2001" inserts use green borders now like the original cards rather than the white borders that the earlier set used.  I don't have any of the Chrome "2001" cards though so I can't show it here.

Like the Chrome set, all of the Chrome NPB cards can be seen at Jambalaya.