BBM Jersey Cards

2017 BBM Genesis

I'd been asked a couple times over the years about BBM's "authentic" jersey cards.  The usual question is about whether the swatch on the card was "game worn" or just "player worn" with "player worn" implying that the player might have worn the item in question but possibly only for a very short period of time.  Until recently I didn't have a good answer for this but I've learned some things over the last few weeks that kind of explain things but also raise some new questions.

The first thing I came across was this tweet.  The author of the tweet had reached out to BBM and asked them about how the acquired the items that were used for the memorabilia cards.  BBM responded that some of the items were possibly game worn but others had been "worn at events" (I'm quoting the Google translation of the response so it may not be accurate).  Ultimately BBM was unable to determine which was the case as the jerseys were being provided to them from the teams and the teams weren't providing any details.

2010 BBM Touch The Game #P12

Shortly after I saw that tweet, I got an email from @FreddyFind who has a YouTube channel about card collecting.  He was interested in picking up an Ohtani jersey card from the 2013 BBM Rookie Edition Premium set but was a little nervous about the details of the card.  He reached out to BBM to ask about it and got a similar answer to the author of the tweet:  "The card contains clothing provided by the team, but we don't know any further details."  

Freddy went a little further and contacted the Fighters to see if they had any information about the jersey used on the Ohtani card.  He and I were a bit surprised that he actually got a response from the team:  "Unfortunately BBM is a separate company from the Fighters so we don't have any information about products that BBM sold. Because it is a very old product, we are unable to research it. Please understand that we cannot answer your questions."

2009 BBM 2nd Version #M08

To recap - BBM says they don't know if a given jersey is game worn or not because the teams don't tell them when they give them the jerseys.  The teams (ok, A team) say they don't know anything about what BBM does.  So basically a lot of buck passing.

I guess I'm a little disappointed by this but, personally, it doesn't really make that much of difference to me.  I usually only pick up memorabilia cards if I can get them super cheap.  I can see, however, that if you're looking to spend the amount of money that a memorabilia card of Ohtani from his NPB rookie year is going to cost, you might want to have some confidence that Ohtani actually touched the jersey at some point.

It might be instructive to contact each team and ask about the jerseys that they currently provide to BBM and Epoch rather than an eleven year old one but I'm not sure if I'm going to a chance to do that any time soon.