Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Nippon-Ham Home Run Sausage Cards

From 2016 to 2019, Nippon-Ham, the owners of the Fighters, teamed up with BBM to issue "Home Run Sausage" cards.  These cards only included players from the Fighters and were issued with either a pack of some foul tasting sausage or a not bad tasting mini-cheesecake.   The sets were essentially "comprehensive" team sets for the Fighters as I think all the players on the team's 70-man roster had cards in the set (at least at the time the sets were released) although there were separate series in each year so some players had multiple cards.

One of the things I like about these cards is that the four years they were issued coincided with the four years that the Fighters did early spring training in Arizona.  Many of the cards in the first series each year feature photos that were obviously taken there.  (I assume it's a coincidence that the cards were issued in the same time period that the team training in Arizona but who knows?)

There were a bunch of "Home Run Sausage" cards in that box from Ryan that I received last week.  I had asked him to pick up card lots for Haruki Nishikawa and Takuma Nakashima that both featured the Nippon-Ham cards as well as some team issued cards and some promos.  Additionally I asked him to pick up an 11 card lot from the 2018 set.

I'm going to show off all the cards from these sets that I got.  It'll be pretty obvious which lot was the source for the card.  First up is the sole 2016 card I got:

There was also only one 2017 card:

Between the 11 card lot and both player lots, I ended up with 13 cards from the 2018 set:













Actually make that 14 as these was also this "Premium" card of Nakashima from the 2018 set:


For 2019 we were back to only one card again:



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