Bowman Silliness

I've ranted a couple of times about how silly I think the "1st Bowman" cards are in the Bowman NPB sets.  To briefly recap, the two Bowman NPB sets have each included 180 cards which are split evenly among the 12 teams so each team has 15 cards.  All of the players from the "regular" phase of the previous year's draft are included in the set along with a large subset of the players from the "development" (or "ikusei") portion of the draft.  The cards of the ikusei players are all labeled "1st Bowman".  I should also mention that while all the "1st Bowman" cards are ikusei players, not all of them were drafted in the previous year's draft.

I find this while thing kind of stupid for a couple reasons.  Firstly, these really aren't the first cards of any of these players.  BBM has been including all the development player draftees in their annual Rookie Editon sets for about 15 years now.  They also show up occasionally in Epoch's team sets although it's pretty hit or miss about whether they're included.  So while these may be the "1st Bowman" cards, they are certainly not the first cards for the players.

My second issue is that Bowman* is issuing ikusei cards for players who are no longer ikusei.  By the time the 2022 set was released, three players from the 2021 development player draft had been registered to their team's 70 man roster.  Only one of those three was included in the set as a non-ikusei player.  The other two were still ikusei players.  This year was even worse - there were NINE players who basically got promoted and Bowman had every one of them as ikusei.  Meanwhile there were cards of these players as 70 man roster players included in several BBM and Epoch sets that came out BEFORE the Bowman sets.  Which means that Bowman is releasing sets that are essentially out-of-date.  This may be normal for MLB but is practically unheard of in Japan. 

*I really don't know why I keep acting like "Bowman" is somehow distinct from "Topps" when they really haven't been for almost 70 years.  I mean, I'm old but I'm not THAT old.

But I wanted to point out what I felt were probably the silliest uses of the "1st Bowman" label.  First up is this card of Shota Fukushima of the Dragons:

2022 Bowman NPB #BP-5

Fukushima's one of the development players I mentioned earlier who weren't part of the previous year's ikusei draft.  He was drafted in the fourth round of the 2020 draft.  He got injured during his rookie season and the Dragons released him and then resigned him as a development player for the 2022 season to do his injury rehabilitation.  He moved back onto the 70 man roster last season.  The Dragons didn't draft any ikusei players in the 2021 draft so I think Bowman included him in their set to make sure Chunichi had at least one ikusei player in the set.  What I find silly about this is that not only did Fukushima have cards have at least SEVEN cards prior to 2022 (including a 2020 Epoch One card and 2021 cards in the BBM Rookie Edition, 1st Version and Dragons sets and the Epoch NPB and Dragons Rookies & Stars sets), he appeared in both the Topps NPB and NPB Chrome sets in 2021.  So his "1st Bowman" card isn't even his first Topps card!

2021 Topps NPB #95

I mentioned this other example a few weeks back.  Yukihiro Iwata was the Swallows only ikusei pick in the 2021 development draft so he had a "1st Bowman" card in the 2022 set.  For some reason, Bowman also included him in the 2023 set - I can only imagine that they decided they needed two Swallows ikusei players and Yakult had only drafted one in 2021.  And, of course, this card is also labeled "1st Bowman".  So Iwata has two "1st Bowman" cards.

I bought both of these recently from my friend Jason.  Here's Iwata's first "1st Bowman" card:

2022 Bowman NPB #BP-29

And here's his second "1st Bowman" card:

2023 Bowman NPB #BP-2

I don't necessarily think including the ikusei players is a bad idea, but I guess I don't see the point in labeling them "1st Bowman" card since they've already had other cards.