Someone on the Japanese Baseball Card Discord group was showing off their recent card acquisitions a few weeks back and one of the cards they'd picked was Hideki Matsui's rookie card from the 1993 set. Another member of the group asked if it was an original card or a reprint and the poster confirmed that it was an original.
That got me thinking about what reprints exist for Matsui's rookie card. I only know of two "official" reprints - ones that were issued by BBM. The first was an insert from the 2000 BBM "flagship" set. To celebrate their tenth year of publishing baseball cards, BBM included 12 card insert set featuring reprints of one rookie card from each of the twelve teams. Matsui was the Giants representative.
The second card was included in the 2003 BBM "The Legend Of Hideki Matsui" set. It was part of the base set, along with reprints of his 1997 Diamond Heroes Jersey card (sans jersey) and one of his cards from the 1999 Yomiuri Shimbum Giants set.
I have both of these reprints along with the 1993 original so I thought I'd share them here. The 2000 reprint is pretty clearly marked on both the front and back as a reprint but the 2003* card is only marked as a reprint on the back. Despite BBM having adopted the standard 2 1/2" x 3 1/2" card size in 1995, both reprints are the original 2 2/8" x 3 3/8" size that BBM's used for their 1991-94 cards.
Here are the fronts and backs of all three cards:
* The set was released in early 2003 but the cards all have a 2002 copyright on them
 |
| 1993 BBM #423 |
 |
| 1993 BBM #423 |
 |
| 2000 BBM "Rookie Reprint" #R8 |
 |
| 2000 BBM "Rookie Reprint" #R8 |
 |
| 2003 BBM "The Legend Of Hideki Matsui" #52 |
 |
| 2003 BBM "The Legend Of Hideki Matsui" #52 |
I really the 1993 BBM card design. Reminds me of 1990 Pro Set hockey and football.
ReplyDeleteI remember seeing the 2000 reprint for what I first immediately thought was a silly price (maybe 2000 yen?) a while back. But the more I thought about it, the reprint is at this point almost as old and it couldn't have been printed nearly as much as the original.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the 2000 reprints are probably much more rate than the original. Gary Engel said in his old price guide that he figured that this "may be the only reprint set in card collecting history in which some of the reprints have more value at present than the original cards!"
DeleteThat is interesting about the 2000 reprints being scarcer than the original.
ReplyDeleteThe 2003 one is a real pain since a lot (not all, but a lot) of sellers on Yahoo Auctions only post pictures of the fronts of cards they are selling.