Japanese Baseball Cards

1995 BBM set

2012-01-29T22:22:00.000-05:00

Started this post a couple weeks ago, but between my work schedule and trying to catch up on all the new imports, it's been hard to find the time to get back to it. But I have a package waiting at the post office that I'm going to pick up tomorrow that I think contains five sets from last fall, so if I don't get this done now, it might be a while...

We're getting into the couple years that I don't have a whole lot of BBM cards from. I'll do the best I can extrapolating but I might not be completely accurate here. (Yeah, yeah, I know - what makes this different than any other post...)

1995 BBM Set Summary

Size: 651 cards
Cards Per Team: 42 (team card, manager + 40 players)
Team Card Theme: Mascots and Team Logos (for the teams without mascots?)
Number Of Leader Cards: 31
Checklists: 13
Subsets: Unbreakable Records (10 cards); Then And Now (10? cards), Ichiro Puzzle (9 cards), Hideki Matsui puzzle (9 cards), Hideki Irabu puzzle (9 cards), Combination Cards (7 cards featuring two or three players on each card);
Inserts: All Around Players
Parallels: 130 cards had gold signature versions
Notable Rookies: Kenji Johjima, Tomohiro Kuroki, Saburo Ohmura, Atsunori Inaba, Kazuo Fukumori, Ken Takahashi, Shigenobu Shima, Ryoji Aikawa
Late Series: Chiba Lotte Marines (cards 604-645 replaced cards 216-235, 464-467, 469-477, 516, 565-571 and 600) plus five additional players (cards 649 and 650 replaced cards 144 and 161).

Notes:

This was the first BBM set with the cards being the standard (2 1/2 x 3 1/2) size.

Instead of a "Nostalgic Stars" subset like in the previous four editions, this year BBM featured OB (and one current) players in the "Untouchable Records" subset. The subset commemorates a number of NBP record holders - Sadaharu Oh (2 cards), Yutaka Fukumoto, Katsuya Nomura, Sachio Kinugasa, Isao Harimoto, Ichiro, Masaichi Kaneda (2 cards) and Hideo Fujimoto. (Ichiro's "unbreakable" record was for most hits in a season - it was broken last year by Matt Murton.)

#324

The "Then And Now" subset featured a number of players (not quite sure how many) who had recently changed teams (maybe prior to the 94 season?). I think some of the players included are Norihiro Komada, Hiromitsu Ochiai, Koji Akiyama and Makoto Suzuki.

#348

There were three nine card puzzle subsets - one each for Ichiro, Hideki Matsui and Hideki Irabu. The fronts of the cards featured a sequence of photos of the player while the backs made up the puzzle.

#413

#413 back

There were seven "combination" cards featuring multiple players - including for the first time two that had three players on them. The cards were again labeled with somewhat whimsical titles such as "Fan Favorites" or "Pacific Punch"

#588

For the first time, some of the team checklists featured a photo of the team's mascot rather than simply the team's logo. For a couple teams (the Marines and the Buffaloes), the team logo was still used - I'm guessing that neither team had a mascot at the time)

#598

#645

For the first time, BBM issued a parallel series with cards featuring gold facsimile signatures. Only 130 of the cards had the parallel issue.

#49

For the Late Series, BBM replaced the cards for the Chiba Lotte Marines to celebrate them getting new uniforms. (10 of the cards had gold signature parallel versions) In addition, there were five completely new player cards added - three for Americans who signed after the season started (Rich Monteleone, Terry Bross and Kevin Mitchell) and two for Japanese players who had been traded during the season (Masato Yoshii and Tatsuji Noshimura). There was also a checklist card added for the Late Series cards.

#637

Same additional sample cards:

#13

#542

#248

#73

Another New Dragons box set

2012-01-29T21:35:00.000-05:00

A couple of months back, BBM released a box set called Neo Dragons that featured 12 young Chunichi Dragons players. Last week, they announced on their website another new box set for the Dragons - the Veteran Dragons set. This set features 28 cards - 27 "regular" cards and an insert card. The 27 "regular" cards only include nine players total, but each player has three different cards in the set. The players include the older players on the Dragons - Masahiro Yamamoto, Motonobu Tanishige, and Kazuhiro Wada for example. I'm not sure, but I think the only insert cards available are autograph cards. The set will be out in late February.

AmiAmi added a listing last week with information on the 2012 BBM 1st Version set. As always, this set will be released in mid-April. It looks like this set might be slightly larger than last years - AmiAmi's claiming the set will have 479 cards while they claimed last year's would have 458. (The actual total for last year's set was 460 - 418 regular cards, 36 inserts and 6 memorabilia cards.) The bad news is (if their listing is accurate) that the number of cards in a pack has been slashed from 8 to 6.

Card Of The Week January 29

2012-01-29T18:48:00.000-05:00

One of the big stories in MLB last week was Prince Fielder signing with one of his father's old teams, the Detroit Tigers. Made me wonder if he had considered his father's OTHER old team called the Tigers, the Hanshin ones. Probably not.

Here's the elder Fielder with Hanshin in 1989, from the Tiger's Takara set that year:

Norichika Aoki of the Milwaukee Brewers

2012-01-29T18:15:00.000-05:00

Former Swallows outfielder Norichika Aoli signed a contract with the Milwaukee Brewers last week. Aoki has a draft pick card in the 2004 BBM Rookie Edition set (#61) and his BBM rookie card is in the 2004 1st Version set (#308). He did not have a card in the 2004 BBM 2nd Version set, but he's appeared in all the 1st and 2nd Version sets since then. He appears in every BBM All Star set from 2005 to 2011. Since the Swallows have not made the Nippon Series since 2001, he doesn't appear in any Nippon Series sets. He does, however, appear in the 2008 BBM Japan National Team set as well as several of the Topps & Bowman sets for the 2009 World Baseball Classic. His first Calbee card is #125 in the 2005 set.

Here's some sample cards (I don't have either of the 2004 BBM cards):

2005 BBM 1st Version #320

2006 BBM 1st Version #446

2006 BBM All Stars #A62

2008 BBM Japan National Team #JPN25

2008 BBM Swallows #S91

2009 BBM Back To The 80's #108

Yoshihiro Doi of the Baltimore Orioles

2012-01-24T22:21:00.000-05:00

Former Lions and BayStars pitcher Yoshihiro Doi signed a minor league contract with the Orioles two weeks ago. The Orioles apparently are attempting to stockpile former NBP pitchers having recently signed Tsuyoshi Wada and Wei-Yin Chen.

Doi has relatively few Japanese cards. His rookie card is #409 from the 1998 BBM set. He shows up only sporadically in BBM's main sets for the next few years - he's in the 2000 and 2001 sets, but not the 1999 or 2002 ones. Starting in 2003, he's in either the 1st or 2nd Version (or both) sets for each year until 2009. He's never made an All Star roster so he doesn't appear in any of the BBM All Star sets, but he does appear in the 2002 BBM Nippon Series set. His first Calbee card isn't until the 2005 set (#226) and he only appears in two other of their sets (2006 & 2007).

Here's some of his cards:

1998 BBM #409

2002 BBM Nippon Series #S34

2006 Konami Baseball Heroes 2 Black Edition #B06B168

2009 BBM 1st Version #012

Wei-Yin Chen of the Baltimore Orioles

2012-01-23T09:30:00.001-05:00

Former Chunichi Dragons pitcher Wei-Yin Chen signed a contract with the Orioles recently. Chen is from Taiwan originally, but he never played professionally in his home country (although he did pitch for Taiwan in the 2004 and 2008 Olympics). He signed with the Dragons in 2004 at age 18.

Chen pretty much only played for the ni-gun Dragons from 2004 to 2007, only making appearances with the big club in 2005. He finally made the ichi-gun squad to stay in 2008, so he really only has four years of experience at the top level of NBP.

Due to his odd career path, he's got an odd set of baseball cards. His first card is #D34 from the 2004 BBM Dragons set. His first appearance in BBM's main set was card #295 in the 2009 1st Version set. He does not appear in any BBM All Star sets, but he is in both the 2010 and 2011 Nippon Series sets. I think his first Calbee card was #078 in the 2009 set.

Looking up his cards in SportsCardForum is kind of problematic as BBM has referred to him as "Wei-Yin Chen", "Wei Yin Chen" and even "Weiyin Chen", so you need to either do multiple searches to find all his cards or search for "Chen" and pick out the relevant cards (some of which are listed as "Wei Ying Chen").

2005 BBM Dragons #D18

2009 BBM 1st Version #295

2010 BBM 2nd Version #534

2011 BBM Nippon Series #S31

Card Of The Week January 22

2012-01-22T23:13:00.000-05:00

I was working out on Wednesday afternoon when the news broke about Yu Darvish signing his contract with the Rangers. I started wondering if there would be someone new who there would constantly be rumors that he was about to ask to be posted, so that every single year we could have the same idiotic articles and tweets and insider reports by Ken Rosenthal saying that really, this is the off season when so-and-so will be coming to the US. And I wondered who that player might be.

Well, I think I've got an answer. Probably before the ink was dry on Darvish's contract, there was a comment to this post on NBP Tracker asking when (and if) Masahiro Tanaka (of the Eagles) would be posted.

So just in case he does come, here's what his first baseball card (2007 BBM Rookie Edition #40) looks like, in case you want to start stocking up now:

2011 BBM Nippon Series Set

2012-01-20T22:59:00.000-05:00

BBM's 2011 season comes to a close with the annual Nippon Series box set. The set contains 63 cards this season - cards for every player who appeared in the Series between the Hawks (25) and the Dragons (30) along the team's managers. There are also cards for the winners of the major awards - MVP (Hiroki Kokubo), Fighting Spirit (Kazuki Yoshimi) and Outstanding Player (Brian Falkenborg, Toshiya Susiuchi and Kazuhiro Wada). There's also a card showing the Hawks celebrating (#S63 shown above).

I guess I shouldn't be surprised since this year's BBM 1st Version set was so small, but there's an unusually large number of players who appear in this set who do not appear in either the 1st or 2nd Version sets. There are 11 Dragons (Takehiro Donoue, Atsushi Fujii, Nobumasa Fukuda, Ryosuke Hirata, Yuichi Hisamoto, Junichi Kawahara, Masato Kobayashi, Masaaki Koike, Hidenori Kuramoto, Keiji Oyama and Yoshihiro Suzuki) and five Hawks (Kenji Akashi, Kenta Imamiya, Takehito Kanazawa, Ryuma Kodokoro, Hiroki Yamada) did not make the earlier sets.

As always, BBM's photography is outstanding. The photos were all taken during the Series, although I think there's only one card (the Dragons' Ryosuke Hirata) that shows a player from the other team in the background. Here's some sample cards:

#S44

#S55

#S45

#S05

#S13

#S14

The complete set of cards can be viewed here.

2012 Hall Of Fame Class

2012-01-20T22:27:00.001-05:00

The 2012 inductees for the Japanese Baseball Hall Of Fame were announced last week and both players elected from the Player's Division were former Hiroshima Toyo Carp pitchers - Manabu Kitabeppu and Tsunemi Tsuda.

Kitabeppu pitched for the Carp for 19 seasons from 1976 to 1994, winning 213 games. ~~He and Kimiyasu Kudoh are the last two pitchers in NBP to reach 200 wins.~~ He won the Sawamura Award in 1982 and 1986 and was also Central League MVP in 1986.

1989 Lotte #82

2008 BBM Hiroshima Memorial Set #19 - this commemorates Kitabeppu
getting his 198th victory, passing Ryohei Hasegawa (shown with him)
for most career wins by a Carp pitcher.

Tsuda pitched for the Carp from 1982 to 1991, although health issues limited him to only six games total in his last two seasons. He was Rookie Of The Year in 1982. After a couple of seasons as a starter, he converted to relief and became the team's closer from 1986-1989. He passed away from a brain tumor in 1993.

1984 Takara Carp #15

2008 BBM Hiroshima Memorial Set #22 - this picture was not taken on
July 20, 1993 - that was the day Tsuda passed away, 12 days short of his
33rd birthday

NOTE - I realized a couple of days after posting this that Masahiro Yamamoto had reached 200 wins also since Kitabeppu did, so I thought I should retract the comment altogether in case I missed someone else.

Yu Darvish Of The Texas Rangers

2012-01-19T21:48:00.001-05:00

Between a rash of recent signings and my crazy work schedule last week, I've really gotten behind on the new imports. I'll start getting caught up with the big one...

This week, after years of speculation about when and if he was going to come to the US, we finally have an answer. Yu Darvish will be pitching for the Texas Rangers in 2012 (and 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17). I'd actually done a post on Darvish cards a few years back, but that was almost 4 years ago, so there's a lot more to talk about now. (There's a wide variety of Darvish cards showing up on eBay. I'm kind of surprised that I'm only seeing one out-and-out bogus card - although it seems like I'm seeing it every other auction. Guess the guy printed up a boatload of them.)

Darvish's first card is in the 2005 BBM Rookie Edition set (#12). His BBM Rookie card is #116 in the 2005 1st Version set. He doesn't really have a card in the 2005 2nd Version set but there's a card showing him pitching in an interleague game against the Carp (#760) that SportsCardForum is treating as a Darvish card. He's been in every 1st and 2nd Version BBM set starting with the 2006 editions. He also been in the BBM All Star sets from 2007-11 and the Nippon Series sets in 2006, 2007 and 2009. He was on the Japanese Olympic team in 2008 and appears in the BBM set for the team.

His first Calbee card was #037 in the 2006 set. He pitched for Japan in the 2009 World Baseball Classic and appears in many of the card sets Topps put out in conjunction with the event. (He had seven different "base" WBC cards with Topps - more than any other Japanese player and I think more than any other player - Derek Jeter and Ichiro both only had six.)

As always, this is just some of the highlights. Check SportsCardForum for a more complete list.

Here's a selection of cards (I don't have the 2005 Rookie Edition, so I can't show it):

2005 BBM 1st Version #116

2005 BBM 2nd Version #760

2005 Konami Baseball Heroes New Black Edition #C05B051

2006 BBM Fighters # F85

2009 Topps WBC Redemption #7

2009 BBM Nippon Series #S30

2009 BBM All Stars # A04

2011 Calbee #096

New BBM sets

2012-01-17T17:39:00.000-05:00

BBM released information about a couple of sets last week:

- The Orix Buffaloes PEDIGREE set is a 37 card box set highlighting the Orix Buffaloes throwback series last year - one where they wore old Hankyu Braves uniforms and one where they wore old Kintetsu Buffaloes uniforms. It's similar to the Lions Classic sets from 2008 & 2009 except that there are no OB players in the set. There are 36 "regular" cards in the set plus one "premium" card which may be an autograph or memorabilia card. Of the 36 "regular" cards, it looks like there are 12 for each team uniform (including the "normal" Orix uniform). 11 of these 12 are player/manager cards and one is a team card of some sort. In looking at the on-line checklist, I think that there are 10 people who appear in all three uniforms, one player (Hayato Terahara) who is only in two uniforms and one (Chihiro Kaneko) who is only shown in one uniform. The set will be released on January 26.

- BBM is highlighting the players who retired last year with the "Farewell" set. This used to be a subset in the 1st or 2nd Version set until last season when they released the first of these sets (but never mentioned it on their website). This is a 28 card box set containing 27 "regular" cards and 1 "special" card - looks like some sort of autograph card. Kimiyasu Kudoh, Masahide Kobayashi and Kiyoshi Toyoda are some of the players to expect in the set - I think there may be multiple cards of some of the players so there may be less than 27 players represented. It will be released in late January.

- This year's edition of the Rookie Edition set will be released on February 16. This is a pack based set featuring the players who were taken in last October's draft (since it's for players who will begin their careers in 2012, it is called the 2012 draft even though it takes place in 2011). There are 111 cards in the set - 97 cards for the drafted players, 2 cards for "2011 Draft Picks" (I'm betting an excuse to print another card of Yuki Saitoh) and 12 "active player" cards (I'm betting one active player from each team). There are also two insert sets available - a 24 card "Next Generation" set (probably 2 guys from each team) and a 2 card "Rookie Of The Year" set (probably the 2011 Rookie Of The Years - Kazuhisa Makita and Hirokazu Sawamura). There are also autograph cards of OB players available - the website shows cards of Yasushi Tao, Koji Uehara, Akio Saitoh, Shigetoshi Hasegawa and Daijiro Ohishi.

Card Of The Week January 15

2012-01-17T17:09:00.001-05:00

Sorry about being late this week - spent last week in Software Integration Hell and I'm just now recovering.

A couple of months ago, I mentioned that True Stories of Korean Baseball had part 1 and part 2 of an interview with Masaichi Kaneda. They've recently published part 3 and part 4. Very interesting stuff.

Here's a card of Kaneda from his playing days - 1964 Fujiya Gum:

I was amused to discover recently that Kaneda was born one day after my father was. (In fact, taking time zones into account, they could have actually been born on the same day.)

Card Of The Week January 8

2012-01-08T21:16:00.000-05:00

Hiroyuki Nakajima and the Yankees failed to settle on a contract last week for Nakajima will be returning to the Lions this coming season. I've heard rumors that the Rangers-Darvish negotiations aren't going well either and the fact that the Brewers are making Norichika Aoki work out for them isn't a real positive sign. Last year was the first time that a posted player had failed to reach an agreement with the team that had won the bidding. It could potentially happen three times this year. It's probably time to reevaluate the posting system.

In the meantime, here's Nakajima's rookie card (if you hadn't already seen it on eBay) - #426 from the 2001 BBM set:

Hisashi Iwakuma of the Seattle Mariners

2012-01-08T21:08:00.000-05:00

Last week Hisashi Iwakuma signed a one year deal with the Mariners. Iwakuma's rookie card was #388 in the 2000 BBM set when he was a member of the Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes. His next "regular' issue BBM card was in the 2002 1st Version set (#191) and he's appeared in all the 1st and 2nd Version sets since then. When Kintetsu merged with Orix following the 2004 season, he decided to join the new Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles instead of staying in Osaka with Orix. He didn't have a Calbee card until the 2003 set (#054). His only 2001 card commemorated his appearance in that year's Nippon Series for the Buffaloes against the Swallows - this is also his only appearance in a BBM Nippon Series set. For someone who's been as successful as he has, it's kind of surprising that he's only made the All Star team three times (2003, 2004 and 2008) and thus only appears in three BBM All Star sets. He played for the Japanese World Baseball Classic team in 2009 (and should have been MVP instead of Daisuke Matsuzaka) and made four appearances on the various Topps WBC card sets.

This is not a complete list, merely some of the highlights. Check SportCardForum's Inventory Manager for a more comprehensive list.

A smattering of Iwakuma cards:

2000 BBM #388

2001 BBM Nippon Series #S38

2003 Calbee # 054

2005 BBM Eagles Box Set #E11

2007 BBM Eagles #E108

2008 BBM All Stars #A42

2009 Allen & Ginters World Baseball Classic Highlights #CB5

Card Of The Week January 1

2012-01-01T18:55:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year!

(2008 BBM Lotte 40th Anniversary #04)

1994 BBM set

2011-12-31T19:36:00.001-05:00

I'm going to do away with the box around the set summary because it didn't seem to work right with different browsers. You may have noticed this before I did :-)

1994 BBM Set Summary

Size: 608 cards
Cards Per Team: 42 (team card, manager + 40 players)
Team Card Theme: Team logos
Number Of Leader Cards: 33
Checklists: 11
Subsets: Nostalgic Stars (10 cards featuring gaijin); Combination Cards (8 cards featuring two players on each card);
Inserts: Player Holograms, Sluggers
Notable Rookies: Kazuo Matsui, Hideki Okajima, Hiroki Kokubo, Tomoaki Kanemoto, Takanori Suzuki, Tomokazu Ohka, Keiichi Yabu, Kazuya Fuukura
Late Series: Yakult Swallows (Cards 567-608 replaced cards 1-42)

Notes:

For the first time, there are no gaps in the card numbering to account for the hologram inserts.

The player hologram cards were unnumbered with blank backs. There are 12 (one from each team) and feature the player's image superimposed over his home ballpark. What's kind of odd is that the ballpark image is oriented horizontally while the player's image is oriented vertically.

Koji Noda Hologram

The Slugger insert set featured 24 cards depicting two hitters from each team.

#SL1

The Nostalgic Stars subset featured 10 foreign players from the 1950's to the 1990's - Gene Bacque, Chico Barbon, Don Blasingame, Warren Cromartie, Leon Lee, Leron Lee, John Sipin, Daryl Spencer, Joe Stanka and Boomer Wells. Wells is an interesting inclusion considering that he appeared in both the 1991 and 1992 BBM sets - he's the only one of the 40 players featured in the Nostaglic Stars subsets from 1991 through 1994 whose career ended after BBM started making sets.

#536

For the first time, the Combination Cards included pairings of players from different teams. Like the 1992 edition, each card had its own title - Hama Heroes, Swallows Swingers, Fighting Fighters, Former Teammates, etc.

#548

For the 1994 season, the Swallows changed their hat logo from the monochrome "YS" insignia they had used since they changed their name from the Yakult Atoms for the 1974 season to the two-tone insignia that they continue to use today. They also made a slight uniform change, removing a red cuff at the end of the jersey sleeve. BBM used this as the excuse to replace the Swallows cards 1-42 with a "Late Series" edition (Cards 567-608) showing the players all wearing the new cap and uniform.

Original #16 (left) and Late Series #582 (right)

The 1994 set was the last time BBM had a card of "Ichiro Suzuki". Starting with the 1994 All Star set, he has simply been "Ichiro".

#403

Some additional sample cards:

#271

#608

#493

#248

#403

#189

Kimiyasu Kudoh

2011-12-30T16:54:00.000-05:00

It is with heavy heart that I write this post. After not pitching for the 2011 season, Kimiyasu Kudoh, the last NBP player older than me, announced his retirement a few weeks ago after a discussion with DeNA, the new owners of the Baystars, about possibly becoming their manager (they ultimately went in a different direction with Kiyoshi Nakahata). As Jamie Moyer didn't pitch in the majors in 2011 either, it's possible that I am now older than every MLB and NBP player. At least until Julio Franco makes a comeback...

Anyway, this post is about Kudoh and not me. Kudoh was drafted by the Seibu Lions in November of 1981 and debuted with them the following season. It would be a very good time to be a Seibu Lion - they would make the Japan Series 11 of the 13 seasons that Kudoh spent in Saitama (through 1994), winning 8 of them. Following the 1994 season, he left as a free agent to join the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks (reuniting with former Lion teammate Koji Akiyama who had joined the Hawks the previous year). He spent the next five seasons with them, winning another Japan Series in his final season in a Hawks uniform, 1999. He then joined the Yomiuri Giants (his favorite team growing up), reuniting with yet another former Lions teammate Kazuhiro Kiyohara. He won two more Japan Series with the Giants - 2000 (against the Hawks team he had just left) and 2002 (against his other former team the Lions). He remained with the Giants until the 2007 season when he joined the Yokohama Baystars. After three years with the Baystars he returned to the Lions for what turned out to be his final season in 2010.

Here's cards of Kudoh with each of his teams over the years:

1983 Calbee #580

1995 BBM #189

2001 Upper Deck #70

2007 BBM 2nd Version #674

2010 BBM 1st Version #339

Kudoh finished his career with a record of 224-142. Although he never won the Sawamura Award, he was named Pacific League MVP twice - in 1993 and 1999 and Best Pitcher in 2000. He also won three Gold Gloves (1994, 1995, 2000) and made three Best 9 teams (1987, 1993, 2000).

1994 BBM Leaders MVP #265

I was kind of surprised that in a 29 year career, he only made the All Star team 10 times - 1986-1987, 1991, 1993, 1995, 1997, 1999-2000, 2004-2005.

2005 BBM All Stars # A51

He ultimately ended up pitching in 14 Nippon Series with three different teams, winning 11 times. He was the MVP of the Series in 1986 and 1987. He also won an "Outstanding Player" award in the 1991 and 1999 Series.

2000 BBM Nippon Series #S12

In 2009, he broke Katsuya Nomura's record by appearing in his 28th NBP season and extended that record in 2010 to 29 seasons.

2010 BBM 20th Anniversary # 252

Yoshitaka Katori

2011-12-30T16:02:00.000-05:00

Once again, I was going through some old minor league cards of mine the other day and discovered a former NBP player. It turns out that one of the coaches for the 2001 Vero Beach Dodgers was former Giants and Lions pitcher Yoshitaka Katori. Katori is listed on the Multi-Ad Sports team set for Vero Beach as "Yoshi Katori":

Katori pitched for 19 years in Japan - 11 for the Giants (1979-1989) and 8 for Seibu (1990-1997). According to the back of the Vero Beach card, he was pitching coach for the Giants from 1998 to 2000. (Ironically, I think Jim Allen and Michael Westbay mentioned him in this week's Japan Baseball Weekly podcast.) Here's a couple cards of his: 1987 Calbee (#372) and 1997 BBM (#120):

Card Of The Week December 25

2011-12-26T23:00:00.001-05:00

A little late this week due to the holiday. Hope everyone who celebrates Christmas had a merry one and everyone else had a good day as well.

As an early Christmas present to myself, I picked up a large lot of old Calbee cards off of eBay last week. Most of them were from the 1974/75 and 1980 sets. There were a lot of really cool cards in the group. I'll probably be blogging about some of them over the next few months, but for starters, I wanted to point out this card of Kenichi Yazawa (1975/76 #367):

My first thought when I looked at this card was that it was a game action shot, but the more I looked at, the more I realized it wasn't. The guy who I originally took to be the third base coach is wearing a jacket and he's standing on third base. It looks like there's another Dragon's player or coach wearing a jacket in the outfield. And it looks kind of like some of the fans in the outfield are holding pieces of paper down towards the field for autographs. So I'm guessing this is spring training or something like it.

Munenori Kawasaki of the Seattle Mariners

2011-12-18T13:43:00.000-05:00

Another Hawk has flown away from Fukuoka as infielder Munenori Kawasaki signed a minor league deal with the Seattle Mariners last week. Kawasaki's rookie card is #291 from the 2000 BBM set. He didn't appear again in another of the main BBM sets until the 2003 1st Version set (#267). Since then, he's been included in each of the main BBM (1st & 2nd Version) sets. His first Calbee card was a 2003 "Jump Up To The Star" insert card (#J09) but his first "regular" Calbee card wasn't until 2004 (#006). He appears in the BBM All Star sets from 2004-2011 and the Nippon Series sets from 2003 and 2011. He played on the Japanese National Team for the 2006 and 2009 World Baseball Classics so he has a couple Upper Deck memorabilia cards from the 2006 team and a "Bowman Draft Picks WBC Prospects" card and associated parallel cards from the 2009 team. He also appears in the 2008 BBM Japan National Team set for the 2008 Olympic team. As usual, this is not a complete list, merely some of the highlight. Check SportCardForum's Inventory Manager for a more comprehensive list.

Some sample cards:

2000 BBM #291

2002 BBM Hawks Brightest Hope subset #080

2003 Calbee "Jump Up To The Star" subset #J-09

2007 BBM All Stars #A21

2009 Bowman Draft Picks WBC Prospects #BDPW11

Tsuyoshi Wada of the Baltimore Orioles

2011-12-18T12:57:00.001-05:00

Last week former Fukuoka Softbank Hawk pitcher Tsuyoshi Wada signed a contract with the Baltimore Orioles. He had a draft pick card (#63) in the 2003 BBM Rookie Edition set. His BBM rookie card is #273 from the 2003 1st Version set. His Calbee rookie card is #146 from the 2003 set. He's pretty much been in each BBM 1st and 2nd Version set since 2003. He appears in the BBM All Star sets from 2003, 2004, 2010 and 2011 and the Nippon Series sets from 2003 and 2011 (I'm assuming). He played for Team Japan in the 2003 Asia Games and the 2008 Olympics so he appears in both BBM box sets for those teams. He did not take part in either World Baseball Classic so there are no Upper Deck or Topps cards for him. As always, this is not a comprehensive list, just some of the highlights. For a much more comprehensive list, check SportsCardForum's Inventory Manager and take advantage of all the hard work Jason's done in adding Japanese cards to their database.

Here's a couple sample cards:

2003 BBM Rookie Edition #63

2003 BBM 1st Version #273

2003 Calbee #146

2008 BBM Japan National Team #JPN12

2010 BBM All Stars #A42

Card Of The Week December 18

2011-12-18T09:59:00.001-05:00

I'd been meaning to do a post about the Japanese players playing in foreign winter leagues this off-season but I simply haven't had time to do the research. And since most of them are returning home before the end of the year, I probably won't bother now.

I do want to point out, though, that the Australian Baseball League is having their first ever All Star Game this Wednesday. It will pit a team of Australian players against a team of international players, including several NPB players - Hiroshi Katayama of the Eagles; Kenta Imamiya, Ayatsugu Yamashita and Yohei Yanagawa of the Hawks; and Yusei Kikuchi and Fumikazu Kimura of the Lions. The rosters of the two teams also include former NBP players Chris Oxspring and Dae-Sung Koo (who I thought had retired).

The game will be shown here in the States on the MLB Network Wednesday at 1 PM EST.

I thought I'd show a card of Yusei Kikuchi this week. It's kind of odd - he was the hot rookie of 2010 but he didn't have any cards in the major BBM sets for 2011 (although he was in the Calbee, Konami and Owner's League issues - thanks Jason!). I'm pretty sure the only BBM set he appeared in was the Lions team set. Here's his 2010 Calbee rookie card (#078):

Card Of The Week December 11

2011-12-11T20:21:00.000-05:00

It was announced this past week that Takeshi Yamasaki, who was released by the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles at the end of the season, has signed a one year contract with his old team: the Chunichi Dragons. Here's his BBM 1st Version card (#136) from 2002, his last year of his previous stint with the Dragons:

Darvish cards on eBay

2011-12-11T08:21:00.000-05:00

As you might expect, with Yu Darvish's decision to be posted last week there has been a veritable cornucopia of Darvish cards put up on eBay. Among the usual BBM and Calbee suspects, I saw this card being offered a lot:

I'm probably stating the obvious here, but this quasi-1982 Topps card is not a legitimate issue but someone's home-brew card. I especially like the addition of the other two pitchers to make it seem like this is a real "Top Prospect" card. Not that the other two "prospects" have actual names, just the names of their teams - I'm guessing high school. (Maybe I'm wrong and it's normal to have the player's name on the FRONT of the uniform.) I'd be interested in what the back of the card looks like - although not interested enough to actually waste money on one.

1993 BBM Set

2011-12-07T22:20:00.004-05:00

1993 In A Box

Size: 498 cards
Cards Per Team: 35 (team card, manager + 33 players)
Team Card Theme: Team logos
Number Of Leader Cards: 27
Checklists: 8
Subsets: Affluent Nineteen (19 highest paid players?), Nostalgic Stars (10 cards featuring players from the 1970's); Nagashima Special (5 cards celebrating Shigeo Nagashima's return as Giants manager); Combination Cards (5 cards featuring two players on each card); Murakami Memories (4 cards detailing Masanori Murakami's career)
Inserts: Team logo holograms.
Notable Rookies: Ichiro Suzuki, Hideki Matsui, Tsuyoshi Shinjyo, Shigeki Noguchi, Takuro Ishii, ~~Takeshi Yamasaki~~
Late Series: None

Notes:

This was the last of the BBM sets to be issued as a factory set. It was also the first to feature full color backs including a head shot of the player.

Although the set was not issued in two series, there are two numbers in the set reserved for the team logo holograms - #237 and #500. There is no indication on the holograms what their card number is however.

I'm not sure what the "Affluent Nineteen" subset is commemorating. My first thought was that 19 cards meant it was a "Best 9" kind of group - maybe the highest paid player at each position in both leagues (including DH in the Pacific League). But there's six pitchers included, so that doesn't work. So I suspect that it's simply the highest paid 19 players, but that could be wrong too. The players in the subset are Koji Akiyama, Katsuya Furuta, Tatsunori Hara, Ken Hirano, Katsumi Hirosawa, Takehiro Ikeyama, Hiromichi Ishige, Tsutomu Itoh, Taigen Kaku, Yoshitaka Katori, Manabu Kitabeppu, Kazuhiro Kiyohara, Norihiro Komada, Hideo Nomo, Hiromitsu Ochiai, Daijiro Ohishi, Masaki Saitoh, Hatsuhiko Tsuji and Hisanobu Watanabe.

#450

The "Nostalgic Stars" subset features players from the 1970's and 1980's. They are Michiyo Arito, Taira Fujita, Yutaka Fukumoto, Masaji Hiramatsu, Senichi Hoshino, Choji Murata, Katuo Ohsugi, Koichi Tabuchi, Shigeru Takada and Hisashi Yamada.

#461

Instead of having a "Combination Card" for each team like they did in 1992, the 1993 set only has five of these cards altogether. Two of them are for the Tigers and then one each for the Swallows, Marines and Giants. The cards don't have names like "Young Tigers" like the 1992 cards did either.

#473

The four "Murakami Memories" cards depict Masanori Murakami with each of his four teams - the Nankai Hawks, the San Francisco Giants, the Hanshin Tigers and the Nippon Ham Fighters. I believe that this is the only BBM card that depicts someone in an MLB uniform, but I could be wrong.

#477

The 1993 set might not have a lot of notable rookies, but it makes up for that by having by far the two biggest ones - Ichiro and Hideki Matsui. Both Takuro Ishii and Tsuyoshi Shinjyo appeared in the 1992 Calbee set (and Shinjyo is on one of the Tigers "Combination Cards"). In fact, of the ~~six~~ five guys I have listed as significant, only Matsui and Noguchi's cards are actually marked as "Rookie".

#157

Some other sample cards:

#97

#130

#469

#490

UPDATE: After doing a little research on Takeshi Yamasaki last week, I realized that his first BBM card was also in the 1993 set. I've updated the post to reflect this.

UPDATE AGAIN: After doing a little MORE research on Takeshi Yamasaki, I need to correct the correction. Yamasaki's first BBM card was in the 1991 set, but his last name was spelled "Yamazaki" so my database had him in the wrong spot. The first card with his name spelled "Yamasaki" was his 1993 card. I've re-updated the post.

New sets

2011-12-06T20:10:00.001-05:00

BBM is behind on updating their website again, but AmiAmi and Discount Niki are listing a couple new sets that BBM hasn't gotten around to listing yet:

- Neo Dragons - a 37 card box set featuring 36 "regular" cards and one insert/memorabilia card. The set features three cards each for 12 Dragons players. It will be in stores on December 13.

- Orix Buffaloes Pedigree - another 37 card box set featuring 36 "regular" cards and one insert/memorabilia card. I think there are three 12 card subsets, one showing the players in their Orix Buffaloes uniforms, one showing them in their retro Kintetsu Buffaloes uniforms and one showing them in their retro Hankyu Braves uniforms. What I'm not sure about is whether or not it's the same 12 players (well, 11 players plus manager Akinobu Okada) in each subset. The set will be released in late January.

- 2011 Nippon Series - this year's edition of the annual box set commemorating the Nippon Series. It will be released in mid December.

- "Player Farewell Ball" - a 28 card box set featuring 27 "regular" cards and one insert/memorabilia card. This set commemorates the retirement of "significant" players at the end of last season such as Kiyoshi Toyoda and Masahide Kobayashi. BBM published a similar set last year although it never appeared on their website. It replaces a subset that was included in BBM's 1st and/or 2nd Version sets from 2002 until 2010. It will be released in late January.

In addition to the new BBM sets, there's been a new set announced by All Japan Baseball Foundation. The new set commemorates famous sluggers from NBP. I think it's a 60 card box set containing 59 "regular" cards and one autograph card. The player selection is typical of the other AJBF sets in that most of the players were active from the 1960's on: Sadaharu Oh, Shigeo Nagashima, Koji Yamamoto, Sachio Kinugasa, Koichi Tabuchi, etc. As usual, there's no Katsuya Nomura. It will be released at the end of December.

UPDATE: Apparently I shamed BBM into action as information appeared on their website today on the Nippon Series and Neo Dragons sets. The only really new information about the sets is that there will be 63 cards in the Nippon Series set - 2 cards for the managers, 55 for the players for the two teams, five cards for the award winners and one card for the Champion Hawks.

Card Of The Week December 4

2011-12-06T19:40:00.000-05:00

Last week, the Red Sox made it official and hired former Chiba Lotte Marine (and Rangers and Mets) manager Bobby Valentine as their new manager. Valentine and current Mets manager Terry Collins are two of only three major league managers to have ever managed in Japan (the other being former Royals and Fighters manager Trey Hillman).

There was an interesting article on Valentine in the New York Times last week. As a Red Sox fan, I'm not sure what I think about all this. I was very sorry to see Terry Francona go, despite the epic September collapse, so I view any change with trepidation. On the other hand, it won't be a boring season with Valentine as manager. We'll see how it goes.

In honor of his hiring, I thought I'd show my favorite Japanese Bobby Valentine card (well, besides this one anyway):

Whoops, that's the front of the card (2006 BBM Marines #M90). Bobby's on the back:

I remember there being some sort of Cha-Cha contest at Chiba Marine Stadium that spring that Bobby took part in but I can't find any video of it. I did however find this:

I suspect that this is what made the Red Sox pick him over Gene Lamont. I'm hoping that they play this between innings occasionally at Fenway.

2011 Award Winners

2011-12-01T22:10:00.000-05:00

This week NBP announced that Seiichi Uchikawa of the Hawks and Takuya Asao of the Dragons were this year's MVPs. They also announced that Kazuhisa Makita of the Lions and Hirokazu Sawamura of the Giants were the Rookie Of The Year award winners.

And just to round out the major awards, a few weeks back Masahiro Tanaka of the Eagles was named the Sawamura Award winner.

Here's the 2011 BBM 1st Version cards of all the award winners:

#020

#171

#050

#240

#138

Card Of The Week November 27

2011-11-27T21:58:00.000-05:00

This is (I think) the oldest card I have in my collection. It's an uncatalogued bromide card of Chubu Nippon Dragons player Hideo Shimizu. The uniform he's wearing is the one the Dragons wore in 1948, so I'm assuming that that's how old the card is.

1992 BBM set

2011-11-25T22:16:00.001-05:00

1992 In A Box

Size: 498 cards
Cards Per Team: 35 (team card, manager + 33 players)
Team Card Theme: Team logos
Number Of Leader Cards: 28
Checklists: 8
Subsets: Nostalgic Stars (10 cards featuring players and managers from the 1930's through 1950's); Stadiums (11 cards featuring the primary home parks in the league); Combination Cards (12 cards - one for each team - featuring two players on each card); ON Special (4 cards featuring Sadaharu Oh and Shigeo Nagashima); plus three cards for the commissioner and league presidents
Inserts: Player holograms.
Notable Rookies: So Taguchi, Kazuhisa Ishii, Takashi Saitoh, Kenichi Wakatabe, Atsushi Kataoka, Katsuyuki Dobashi
Late Series: None

Notes:

This is the only set that BBM ever issued in two series of 249 cards each. The cards were numbered 1-249,251-499. The player hologram inserts for Series One were assigned number 250. The ones for Series Two were assigned number 500.

The Nostalgic Stars subset featured Takehiko Bessho, Kaoru Betto, Shigeru Chiba, Tetsuharu Kawakami, Osamu Mihara, Shigeru Mizuhara, Hiroshi Ohshita, Eiji Sawamura, Victor Starffin, Shigeru Sugishita, Kazuto Tsuruoka and Wally Yonamine.

The Stadium subset depicted all eleven primary ballparks used in 1992 (the Giants and Fighters still shared the Tokyo Dome at this time). Five of the stadiums shown - Nagoya, Heiwadai (in Fukuoka), Hisoshima, Kobe and Fujiidera (in Osaka) - either are no longer standing or no longer in regular use by the ichi-gun teams. Another stadium - Seibu Lions Stadium - had a dome built over it in the late 90's, leaving only five of the ballparks shown still in use and pretty much looking the same as now.

Here's some sample cards:

#114

#60

#404

#146

#449

#15

#35

#109

#244

#477

#478

#490

According to Gary Engel's "Japanese Baseball Card Checklist and Price Guide", "each [insert] card is a metallic silver hologram of the player's regular issue 1992 BBM card". If that's meant to imply that the picture on a player's regular 1992 card and his 1992 hologram are the same, then it's inaccurate as the Hiromistu Ochiai cards will demonstrate:

#500

#315

RIP Yukio Nishimoto

2011-11-25T21:00:00.000-05:00

Hall Of Fame manager Yukio Nishimoto has passed away at age 91. Nishimoto managed for 20 years in NBP with three different Pacific League teams - the Daimai Orions (1960), the Hankyu Braves (1963-1973) and the Kintetsu Buffaloes (1974-1981). He won eight Pacific League pennants - one with Daimai, five with Hankyu and two with Kintetsu - but never won a Nippon Series. The Orions were swept in the 1960 Series by Osamu Mihara's Whales. His Hankyu pennant winners (1967, 1968, 1969, 1971 and 1972) were fodder for the V9 Giants and his Buffalo pennent winners were defeated in 1978 and 1979 by the "Red Helmet" era Hiroshima Toyo Carp led by Koji Yamamoto and Sachio Kinugasa. Sometimes it's not enough to be good - you need a little luck as well.

I am curious as to why he only managed Daimai the one season. None of the biographical information I've seen has an explanation.

Here's a couple recent cards of his:

2011 All Japan Baseball Foundation Managers #26

2011 BBM Legend Of The Bs #52

Some years ago, I picked up a batch of postcards off of eBay that had black and white photos of a number of Japanese players and managers. I've got written down in my notes that the postcards were made in 1966 by Mel Bailey, a US serviceman stationed in Japan who had imported the 1967 Kabaya-Leaf set to the US. I don't recall now how or why I made that connection - it's certainly possible that the pictures were made into postcards much more recently than 1966 by someone other than Mel Bailey. The relevance to this post is that one of the postcards depicts Yukio Nishimoto:

Osamu Mihara

2011-11-21T22:42:00.001-05:00

Today marks the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of legendary manager Osamu Mihara. Born on Shikoku Island, he attended Waseda University and played on the Japanese All Star team that went up against the US All Stars in 1934. He was the first player ever signed by the Giants, which I think makes him the first professional player in Japan. He only played three seasons with the team, however, before going into the Army for the next eight years.

His first managerial job was with the Giants, starting in 1947. He managed them for three years, winning the final "one league system" championship in 1949. Despite that championship, however, he was replaced as Giants manager by his long time rival, fellow Shikoku native Shigeru Mizuhara.

Mihara took over the newly created Nishitetsu Lions in 1951 (the Lions were formed as a merger of the Nishitetsu Clippers and Nishi-Nippon Pirates) and led them to much success on the field. He won Pacific League pennants with them in 1954, 1956, 1957 and 1958. The Lions lost to the Dragons in the 1954 Nippon Series, but beat Mizuhara's Giants in three straight Nippon Series from 1956 to 1958.

In 1960, Mihara became the manager of the Taiyo Whales and led them to their first ever Nippon Series championship (over the Daimai Orions). The Whales had finished last the previous six seasons, but under Mihara, the Whales finished 4.5 games ahead the Giants in Mizuhara's final season as their manager.

At this point, he had six first place finishes and four Nippon Series championships in 13 years of managing. Although he would manage another 13 years, this was the high point of his managerial career.

He remained manager of the Whales until 1967, finishing second twice to the Tigers in 1962 and 1964. He moved to the Kintetsu Buffaloes from 1968 to 1970, finishing second to the Hankyu Braves in 1969. His final three seasons managing were with the Yakult Atoms from 1970 to 1973, finishing in the second division all three years. (He was in fact the final manager of the Yakult Atoms - Yakult returned to the name Swallows in 1974.)

He is the all time leader in games managed in Japan with 3248, 40 or so more than Katsuya Nomura. He is second all time in managerial wins with 1687, more than 100 more than Mizuhara (although in almost 500 more games). I think he's first all time in managerial losses with 1453 (Japan Baseball Daily's numbers are inconsistent between the listing for his managerial record and the list of all time managerial records). He was elected to the Hall Of Fame in 1983, one year before he passed away.

I don't have any cards of Mihara from when he was an active manager, but he's shown up with some regularity in the recent OB sets, including the 2004 Giants 70th Anniversary set, both the Buffaloes 2009 Memorial set and this year's "Legend Of The Bs" sets and a number of the recent sets for the Lions. For whatever reason, he did not show up in the 2009 Yakult 40th Anniversary set. Here's some sample cards:

1978 NST #74

2008 BBM Lions Classic #01

2006 BBM Nostalgic Baseball #041

2009 BBM Kintetsu Memorial #20

It's not clear from the uniform if the picture on the NST card was from his playing days with the Giants (1936-38) or his managerial days (1947-49).

I think that the Lions were highlighting the fact that this would be the Mihara's centennial during the Lions Classic games last summer.

Sources for this post include the always useful Japan Baseball Daily's Data Warehouse along with Gary Engel and Rob Fitts' "Japanese Baseball Superstars".

UPDATE: I don't know why I didn't think to look when I was writing this, but Baseball Reference's Bullpen has an excellent biography of Mihara.

Card Of The Week November 20

2011-11-20T19:31:00.000-05:00

The 62nd Nippon Series wrapped up today in Fukuoka with the Hawks beating the Dragons 3-0 and winning the Series 4 games to 3. 40 year old Hiroki Kokubo was named MVP of the Series, becoming the oldest player ever to be named MVP. He beat out his manager, Koji Akiyama, for that honor. Akiyama had been named MVP of the 1999 Series at age 37. That Series also matched the Dragons against the Hawks, who included a then 28 year old Kokubo. Here's his card from the 1999 BBM Nippon Series set (#S19):

Banzai Babe Ruth

2011-11-16T05:47:00.000-05:00

Rob Fitts' latest book about the 1934 US All Stars Tour of Japan, Banzai Babe Ruth, will be published on March 1, 2012. You can pre-order the book from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

(The card shown is #92 from the 1992 Megacards Babe Ruth set.)

Card Of The Week November 13

2011-11-13T21:41:00.001-05:00

Bit of a rough start in the Nippon Series for Hawks reliever Takahiro Mahara - he was the losing pitcher in both Game 1 and Game 2, giving up the winning run in the top of the 10th inning in both games. Here's his card from the 2004 BBM Hawks set's "New Power" subset (#H69) back when the Hawks were owned by Daiei instead of Softbank:

More New BBM Sets

2011-11-10T22:09:00.000-05:00

BBM has announced a couple of new sets in the last week or so:

- There's a new box set entitled "Young Carp" being released in late November. It contains 38 cards - 36 regular cards plus 2 insert cards. I think that the 36 "regular" cards feature 3 cards each of 12 different players. The insert cards include autograph and memorabilia cards.

- There's another new box set being released in late November that features Tigers reliever Kyuji Fujikawa. It contains 27 "regular" cards plus some sort of memorabilia card - jersey, cap, undershirt, ball or autograph.

- I'm not sure of the release date, but BBM will probably be releasing the 2012 edition of their annual "Historic Edition" set this month. As always, it's a pack-based set containing 144 "regular" cards - 72 active players and 72 OB players along with 12 insert cards ("Rival Contemporaries"), 24 "photo cards" and an unspecified number of autograph cards. This year's theme is being translated as "Legend Of The Strongest Generation". It looks like it's highlighting players either born in a specific year or drafted in a specific year - it may also include players who debuted in a specific year.

- I'm pretty excited about this next set because I called it a few months back. The "Legends Of The Tokyo Big Six" set will be a pack based set that will be released in December containing former Tokyo Big Six players who went on to play in NBP. It will contain 108 "regular" cards - 81 retired players (including Shigeo Nagashima), 18 active NBP players (including Yuki Saitoh) and a nine card "Legendary Records" subset. There is also an 18 card insert set called "Super Best 9" which I'm guessing has a Best 9 for both the retired and active players. There will also be autograph and photo cards.

Card Of The Week November 6

2011-11-08T12:05:00.000-05:00

I finally started watching NPB games on Justin.TV when the Climax Series started. Since I usually get up around 5 AM, the schedule worked out really well for the evening games. Should have been doing this a long time ago.

I'm amazed at the lack of commercials during the broadcasts. Lots of times it seems that there's none at all during the breaks between innings or pitching changes. One of the commercials that I do keep seeing though is one that I remember Yakyu Baka mentioning a few months back - Randy Bass for Owner's League baseball cards. Here's a card of Bass from the 2009 BBM Premium Malts set with a very large can of beer (#10):

Here's something a little obscure about Randy Bass - he played for the Orlando Juice in the short-lived Senior Professional Baseball Association in their inaugural season 1989-90. He joined the team about a month into the season and hit .393 with 5 home runs in 29 games. He actually parlayed this performance into a non-roster invitation to spring training with the Baltimore Orioles for the 1990 season but IIRC he retired before actually appearing in any exhibition games with them.

There were four companies that produced cards for the first (of two) seasons of the SPBA. Because he joined the team late, Bass only appears in two of the sets - the one from Topps and the one from a company called Elite (who put out a kind of Upper Deck-esque set). Here's his Elite card (#49):

1991 BBM set

2011-10-30T17:45:00.000-04:00

OK, at the risk of starting yet another series of posts that takes forever to complete, I decided that I wanted to do a series of posts on the "regular" BBM set for each year. It would be similar to the "Set Comments" posts I do for the new sets (and in fact I probably will stop this series with the 2007 sets since I've already talked about the later ones).

So here goes nothing...

1991 In A Box

Size: 399 cards
Cards Per Team: 30 (manager + 29 players)
Team Card Theme: No team cards
Number Of Leader Cards: 23
Checklists: 6
Subsets: Nostalgic Stars (10 cards featuring players from 50's & 60's)
Inserts: Team logo holograms.
Notable Rookies: Hideo Nomo, Atsuya Furuta, Akihiro Yano, Akira Etoh, Shigeki Sano, Shigetoshi Hasegawa, Takahito Nomura, Shingo Takatsu, Kazuhiro Sasaki
Late Series: None

Notes:

Since it's the first BBM set, deciding rookie card status was a little dicey. I mean, it's the first BBM card for Hiromitsu Ochiai, right? So it's his rookie card, right? Basically I decided that if they were in their first or second season, I'd consider it a rookie card.

The cards are numbered 1-239, 241-400. The 12 team logo hologram insert cards all have the number 240.

The Nostalgic Stars are Isao Harimoto, Kazuhisa Inao, Masaaki Koyama, Minoru Murayama, Shigeo Nagashima, Futoshi Nakanishi, Sadaharu Oh, Tadashi Sugiura, Tetsuya Yoneda and Yoshio Yoshida.

Some sample cards:

#352

#288

#379

#348

#220

#232

Kiyoshi Toyoda

2011-10-30T17:05:00.000-04:00

Carp pitcher Kiyoshi Toyoda announced his retirement last week. Toyoda began his career as a starting pitcher for the Seibu Lions in the mid-90's, then converted to relief in 2001, becoming one of the dominant relievers in the Pacific League for a couple years. He moved to the Giants as a free agent for the 2006 season, then moved to the Carp for this season. He retires in tenth place on the all time list for saves in NPB with 157.

He was drafted by the Lions in the third round of the 1993 (fall 1992) draft. His BBM rookie card was in the 1993 set (#392):

He made his first All Star team as a starting pitcher in 1997. He would make the team four times as a relief pitcher from 2001 to 2004. Here's his card from the 1997 BBM All Star set (#A20):

2001 Upper Deck #159:

He pitched in five Nippon Series overall - three for Seibu (1998, 2002 and 2004) and two for Yomiuri (2008 and 2009). Here's his card from the BBM Nippon Series set for the one of the three that the Lions won with him - 2004 (#08):

Newcomer subset card from the 2006 BBM Giants set (#G079):

2011 BBM 1st Version card showing him with the Carp (#275):

Card Of The Week October 30

2011-10-30T15:52:00.000-04:00

I was going to write something about the surprising victory of the Lions over the Fighters in the First Stage of the Pacific League playoffs and how maybe they're following the lead of last year's Marines and this years's Cardinals - sneak into the playoffs on the last day of the season, then win the hole thing. But then I started thinking that since tomorrow was Halloween, I should do something about a Giant, since black and orange are appropriate colors.

Luckiliy, I remembered reading something interesting last week on Yakyu Baka last week - Giants outfielder Hisayoshi Chono is only the third Giant to ever lead the league in batting in his second season. The first two were Tetsuharu Kawakami in 1939 and Shigeo Nagashima in 1959. He's also the first right handed Giant to win the batting crown in 40 years (Nagashima in 1971). Pretty elite company. (Don't think there will be a lot of sympathy for him if he feels a lot of pressure living up to that company - he's the one who insisted on being a Giant.)

Anyway, here's his 2010 BBM Rookie Edition card (#001):

2012 NPB Draft

2011-10-27T22:05:00.001-04:00

The 2012 NPB draft was held today and as usual Deanna and YakyuBaka are all over it. Deanna live blogged it and had a photopost preview of the some of the players that were available in the draft. Gen also live blogged it and has the results for both the Central and Pacific League teams up. So I'll do my usual list of the cards that are available for today's drafted players.

I think that the two collegiate National team sets (2008 Upper Deck jersey cards for the 2007 team and the 2008 BBM set) are old enough now that none of the players who appear in those sets is in this year's draft. So the only possible cards are for guys from the Tokyo Big Six league. There are six players from that league that were drafted today (well, seven if you count a softball player from Waseda named Takumi Oshima who was taken by the Fighters), but only four of them have actually had cards. Here's the list (all the sets listed are BBM Tokyo Big Six sets, regular cards only - I don't have a complete list of the inserts):

Shohei Habu, Waseda (Carp #4)

2009 Autumn Version #11 (shown)
2010 Spring Version #23
2010 Autumn Version #11
2011 Spring Version #05
2011 Autumn Version #29

Hayata Itoh, Keio (Tigers #1)

2009 Autumn Version #23
2010 Spring Version #11 (shown)
2010 Autumn Version #05
2011 Spring Version #11
2011 Autumn Version #05

Yusuke Nomura, Meiji (Carp #1)

2008 Autumn Version #03 (shown)
2009 Spring Version #20
2009 Autumn Version #13
2010 Spring Version #02
2010 Autumn Version #14 (see below)
2011 Spring Version #19
2011 Autumn Version #19
(Nomura has a card in every Tokyo Big Six set BBM has done except the first one, 2008 Spring Version.)

Hiroaki Shimauchi, Meiji (Eagles #6)

2011 Autumn Version #22 (shown)

I did not see any obvious former Tokyo Big Six players (or National team members for that matter) that had done to the industral leagues before making themselves available for the draft, but I could easily have missed someone.

One last card - I was amused that Deanna pointed out how consistent Yusuke Nomura's mechanics were by showing two photos she had taken of his form that looked almost identical (well, except for the uniform and background) - she also pointed out that she had many pictures that looked like that. Well, here's another one:

UPDATE: Deanna mentioned in a comment that former Meiji player Yuki Egarashi had been drafted from Toshiba of the industrial leagues. Egarashi had a card in the 2008 BBM Tokyo Big Six Autumn Version set (#02).

News And Notes

2011-10-25T16:36:00.000-04:00

A couple of things I've been meaning to get to...

- BBM has announced this year's Rookie Edition Premium set. It's a 48 card box set featuring 36 "regular" cards (three rookies for each team) plus 12 "subset" cards (one for each team). Each box set also contains two "premium" cards - possible memorabilia, autograph, photo or film cards. The set will be out in late October.

- Discount Niki and AmiAmi have had listings for a couple forthcoming BBM box sets - one features young Carp players and the other (I think) is for Tigers pitcher Kyuji Fujikawa. There also looks like there's a box set coming out for Shinjiro Hiyama of the Tigers from a company called Movic.

- A couple of weeks ago, Jason told me about a really cool Japanese baseball card blog that he'd come across while looking for the 1994 Chiba Lotte Marines menko set. It's in Japanese, but the guy posts a lot of scans of old menko and bromide cards (as well as a lot of vintage bobbleheads) so its worth checking out even if (like me) you can't speak the language. (I have to say that I really haven't explored the Japanese language baseball card blogs much - it would probably be a great source of information.) Anyway, I'm adding the blog to the list of links on the right.

Card Of The Week October 23

2011-10-24T22:47:00.000-04:00

Sorry about being late this week - I spent the weekend running from zombies. The Pacific League wrapped up its schedule last week and Takeya Nakamura of the Lions lead the league in home runs with 48. This turned out to be two more than the entire defending Nippon Series Champion Marines team hit this season. It was the first time since 1954 that a single player out-homered a team. Actually in 1954, two Pacific League players out-homered the Kintetsu Pearls (27 home runs) - Futoshi Nakanishi of the Lions (31) and Kazuhiro Yamauchi of the Orions (28).

Here's Namakura's 2006 Konami "Baseball Heroes 2 Black Edition" card (#B06B055):

Now Pitching For Subaru....

2011-10-17T20:26:00.000-04:00

A couple of months ago, I picked up a kind of obscure book on Japanese baseball - Robert Obojski's "The Rise of Japanese Baseball Power". published in 1975. Among the interesting things I learned in the book was that Masaichi Kaneda had filmed a commercial for Subaru for the American market in the mid-70's. I figured that this had to be on-line somewhere, so I went looking through You-Tube to see what I could find.

Unfortunately, I struck out. I couldn't find the video anywhere. I did, however, find a couple Subaru print ads featuring Kaneda on eBay. I've swiped the images here:

Since Kaneda was managing the Lotte Orions at the time, he's wearing that uniform in the ads, even though he never pitched for them. And I think that middle picture might actually be from the 1974 Nippon Series - those look like Dragons in the background.

Card Of The Week October 16

2011-10-16T08:00:00.005-04:00

Matt Murton of the Hanshin Tigers had his hitting streak ended at 30 games this past week. That was good enough to set the Hanshin team record (passing Shinjiro Hiyama), the foreign player record (passing Glenn Braggs) and tying Hall Of Famers Isao Harimoto and Yutaka Fukumoto for fourth on the all time list. Here's Murton's 2010 BBM Tigers 75th Anniversary set card (#90):

I got the information on his streak from a couple of posts over at Yakyu Baka.

2009 BBM Legend Players

2011-10-10T22:22:00.000-04:00

The current two league system in Japan was introduced in 1950. I was kind of expecting to see BBM to do some sort of set to commemorate the 60th Anniversary of this a few years ago - after all, they had done a box set (albeit a horrible box set) to commemorate the 70th Anniversary of professional baseball in 2004 - but I never saw anything announced.

A couple of months ago, however, while looking through the Yahoo Japan auctions for stuff to bid on through kuboTEN, I discovered that BBM had done a set. They just had never listed in on their website. The set, which I think is called Legend Players, was released in late 2009 and contains 100 cards of players whose careers span the 60 years. The player selection is outstanding. The set contains both OB and active players (including a few like Ichiro and Hideki Matsui who were active in the US at the time). The OB players include the obvious like Sadaharu Oh, Shigeo Nagashima, Koji Yamamoto, etc but also a couple players who for whatever reason rarely appear in an OB set - Katsuya Nomura, Masaichi Kaneda and Choji Murata. The set also includes a number of foreign players like Randy Bass, Tuffy Rhodes and Boomer Wells. The active players include Norichicka Aoki, Yu Darvish, Hisashi Iwakuma and Masa Yamamoto. I really think that if you were looking for one set to represent NPB history, this would be the set. There's a couple guys missing (Wally Yonamine, Hideo Nomo, the Lee brothers, Warren Cromartie) but for the most part I think this is the most complete set of Japanese stars that BBM has ever done (with the possible exception of the 2000 20th Century Best 9 set).

Here's some sample cards:

#100 - Yu Darvish

#028 - Isao Harimoto

#062 - Ichiro

#018 - Hiromitsu Ochiai

In addition to the 100 regular cards, there were also 8 "special cards". These cards feature new photos for eight players (Yutaka Enatsu, Isao Harimoto, Kazuhisa Inao, Hideki Matsui, Shigeo Nagashima, Sadaharu Oh, Tsutomu Wakamatsu and Koji Yamamoto) along with a gold facsimile autograph. Since I don't know how this set was sold, I don't know if these were inserts in packs or simply a small bonus set. Here's the Shigeo Nagashima card (#SP1):

Card Of The Week October 9

2011-10-10T21:54:00.000-04:00

A day late this week, but it works out. Today (October 10) is the 42nd anniversary of the 400th and final victory in the career of Masaichi Kaneda. Kaneda labored for 15 seasons with the Kokutetsu Swallows, running up a record of 353-267 for a team that finished in the bottom half of the standings every year but one (1961). He won 20 games in a season 14 straight years (including two 30 win seasons) and lost 20 games in a season six times). Imagine what kind of win totals he would have run up if he'd played for a good team all those years. In his first spring training after joining the Giants in 1965, he broke his hand. Not sure how much this affected him, but looking at his stats, he pitched a lot less in the five years he played for the Giants than he had for the Swallows. Some of that might be that the Giants actually had other useful pitchers, which was not the case for the Swallows.

The Giants retired his number (#34). Oddly enough, the Swallows did not, although that might be because Kokutetsu sold the team around the same time they traded him to Yomiuri. Sankei and later Yakult may not have felt any connection to him. Anyway, BBM did a subset for all retired numbers in their 2001 set and included a card of Kaneda (#534):

True Stories Of Korean Baseball had a translation of a Korean interview with Kaneda recently (Kaneda is actually Korean). Part one is here and part two is here.

"Tom" Uchiyama

2011-10-02T15:09:00.001-04:00

I was going through so of my old minor league team sets the other day and I came across this card of "Tom" Uchiyama in the 1998 Multi-Ad Reading Phillies team set (#26):

Other than that I was willing to be that his name wasn't "Tom", I didn't know anything about him. But a little quick looking around on the web filled in the details - his name is Tomoyuki Uchiyama and he played for Seibu and Daiei from 1992 until 1997 (the back of the Reading card lists his 1997 team as "Fukuoka Daiei") before signing with the Phillies organization for 1998.

Oddly enough, his card and Baseball-Reference list his birthplace as Kawasaki, but he was actually born in Gifu prefecture (JapanBaseballDaily says Minokamo, Wikipedia Japan says Kani). I don't know much about Japanese geography, but I don't think those places are that close together (Kawasaki and Kani that is - I think Minokamo and Kani are actually right next to each other).

Here's Uchiyama's final BBM card from the 1997 set (#239):

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the highlight of his career was pitching in the 1993 Nippon Series for the Lions in a losing effort against the Swallows. Here's his 1993 BBM Nippon Series set card (S39):

I'm not positive on this one, but I'd guess that another highlight of his career was being one of the players traded with Koji Akiyama (who played in the US for San Jose in 1982) to the Hawks following the 1993 season in a deal that involved Makoto Sasaki (who played in the US for the Sonoma County Crushers in 2001).

Card Of The Week October 2

2011-10-02T11:00:00.000-04:00

Last Wednesday night was an amazing night in MLB. There were four games that had a bearing on who made the playoffs and who didn't, and in three of them, the team that was leading going into the ninth inning ultimately ended up losing the game. The hero of one of those ninth innings, Dan Johnson of the Tampa Bay Rays (who played the Hal Smith/Bernie Carbo role to Evan Longoria's Bill Mazeroski/Carlton Fisk) had played the 2009 season in Japan for the Bay Stars. Here's his BBM 2nd Version card from that season (#733) where he looks almost as happy as he did Wednesday night:

2011 BBM Tokyo Big Six Autumn Version

2011-10-01T15:56:00.000-04:00

When I originally wrote about this year's Tokyo Big Six Autumn Version set from BBM, I said that the set would contain 38 cards - 36 regular cards and two insert cards. I also said the the 36 regular cards would break down to five player cards plus a team card for each of the six teams. Either I got it wrong (very possible) or BBM changed their plans for the set after the initial announcement (also possible).

So let me try this again - this year's edition of the Tokyo Big Six Autumn Version set is a boxed set containing 37 cards -36 regular cards along with one insert card. For the first time in their Tokyo Big Six sets, BBM has dispensed with the team cards, so instead of five players per team, this set features six players per team, the most since the 2009 Spring Version (which had nine per team).

As usual, the cards are very nice looking, even if I only know who a couple of these guys are. Here's some sample cards:

#26

#05

#20

There are two six card insert sets - "Tokyo Big Six Heroes" which features current players (one from each team) and "Tokyo Big Six Legends" which features former players (one from each team) who went on to fame in NBP (such as Shigeo Nagashima and Koichi Tabuchi). I got a Heroes card for Tomoya Mikami from Hosei (#SP03):

Jabalaya has all the cards here.

2011 BBM All Star Set

2011-10-01T15:35:00.000-04:00

BBM released their annual All Star box set about a month ago. This set contains cards for the players who made the All Star teams this season. Continuing what they started last year, BBM delayed the set so that they could use pictures from the actual All Star games. This year's set contains 73 cards - 64 cards for the players, 6 cards for the managers and coaches and three cards for the MVPs of each of the three games (Kazuhiro Hatakeyama, Takeya Nakamura, and Atsunori Ibaba).

In general, I've had mixed feelings towards the All Star sets. When I was first learning about Japanese baseball, the sets were very useful to me in getting some sense for who the better players were. But they don't really help me that much anymore (not that I'm not still learning) and (in my opinion) some of the recent sets have featured some of BBM's ugliest card designs. So I was starting to question whether I wanted to continue to get the set every year.

I have to say that this year's set is pretty nice. The card design has borderless photos with some reasonable simple decorations containing the player info. There's also a big "All Star" game logo superimposed on the photo as well. As they've been doing lately, there's also indicators on the front of the card if the player was elected by the fan vote and/or the player vote and also if the player is making his first All Star roster. In the case of Nobuhiko Matsuda, all three of these things were true, so he has all three indicators on his card (#A25):

NPB instituted an internet vote (called the "+1 Vote") this season to select the final player for each team's roster. BBM added an indicator to the cards for the two winners of this vote, Hirokazu Sawamura and Yuki Saitoh (#A35):

I've got the same complaint this year that I had last year - it's nice that the pictures were taken at the All Star games, but there's nothing in them that really makes it obvious that they were. No shots showing several players in different uniforms or anything like that. I do like this shot of Hiroyuki Nakajima though (#A27):

NBP held the Hall Of Fame induction ceremony for the 2011 inductees (Hiromitsu Ochiai and Mutsuo Minagawa) before the first All Star game. Since Ochiai was the Central League manager, he has a card in the set (#A36) and the photo for it was taken at the ceremony:

For the first time in years (since the mid-90's), the set does not contain a card for the top finisher in the fan vote (Norichika Aoki this year). I don't know if this is somehow related to the fact that there were three games instead of two this year so they needed three cards for the MVPs rather than two (and they were committed to a 73 card set rather than a 74 card set for some reason - in fairness to BBM, with the rosters going to 32 players from 29 last year and 28 the year before, this year's set is the largest All Star set ever). Anyway, here's the MVP card for Atsunori Inaba (#A73):

As always, you can see all the cards at Jambalaya.

2011 BBM 2nd Version

2011-09-26T14:29:00.001-04:00

BBM's 2nd Version set was released in early August. It contains 311 cards this year. 216 of those are the "regular" player cards - 18 per team. The cards feature BBM's usual high quality photography. Here's some sample cards:

#576

#499

#509

#594

#532

There are 25 26 players who appear on the "regular" 2nd Version set but did not appear in the 1st Version set: Yudai Kawai (Dragons), Koji Mise(Dragons), DJ Houlton (Hawks), Sho Iwasaki (Hawks), Randy Messenger (Tigers), Takahiro Aoki (Carp), Yoshihiro Maru (Carp), Keisuke Tanimoto (Fighters), Tomoya Yagi (Fighters), Makoto Moriyama (Buffaloes), Yuki Nishi (Buffaloes), Koji Yamasaki (Buffaloes), Hideto Asamura (Lions), Atsushi Okamoto (Lions), Ryo Sakata (Lions), Masato Nakamura (Eagles), Shinbtaro Ejiri (BayStars), Kazuya Fujita (BayStars), Takeshi Hosoyamada (BayStars), Tatsuhiko Kinjoh (BayStars), Hiroki Sanada (BayStars), Yuki Yoshimura (BayStars), Levi Romero (Giants), Takahiro Suzuki (Giants), Yasunari Takagi (Giants) and Kazunari Tsuruoka (Giants).

The set also features 36 (three for each team) 1st Version Update cards. Most of these cards feature guys who for whatever reason did not appear in the "regular" 1st Version set (although a couple - Takayuki Makka of the BayStars and Hiroki Yamada of the Hawks - appeared in the "Recommended Hope 2011" subset). One card, however, is of Shinji Takahashi of the Giants, who appeared in the 1st Version set with the Fighters before he was traded to Yomiuri. A couple of the Buffaloes cards show the players wearing retro Hankyu uniforms from one of the "Legend Of The Bs" games. The cards of Norihiro Nakamura of the BayStars and Hirotaka Egusa of the Lions look like they were taken at the press conference announcing their signing. Here's a couple sample cards:

#431

#454

Oddly enough, three of the players featured in the 1st Version Update have "regular" 2nd Version cards as well - Yoshihiro Maru, Yuki Nishi and Hideto Asamura. As always, I have no idea how BBM determines who gets an Update card and who gets a "regular" 2nd Version card.

There are three 12 card (1 player per team) subsets in the set. "Young Guns" features rookie (or near rookie) players (including Yuki Saitoh of the Fighters, of course). "2011 Opening Pitcher" features the Opening Day pitcher for each team. The "Impressive Scene" subset highlights a notable achievement for a player for each team (not sure what they are off hand). Here's an example from each subset:

#679

#683

#698

There are 12 team checklists, each showing some candid photo from the early part of the season. Here's the one for the Orix Buffaloes (#711) showing T-Okada (on the left) and someone else (a coach maybe?) in the retro Hankyu uniforms:

Since 2004, the 2nd Version set has featured a subset showing various celebrities throwing out the first pitch at a game. This year's edition contains anime character Konan Edogawa, comedian and Ibraki Golden Golds manager Kinichi Hagimoto, Sapporo Beer Image girl Mika Hazuki, Owarai comedian Yuki Himura, celebrity chef Tatsuya Kawagoe, former player Kazuhiro Kiyohara, voice actress Suzuko Mimori (dressed as the anime character she voices - Sherlock "Shery" Shellingford), model Akina Minami, sportswriter Hirotada Ototake, Hiromichi Sato (who I think is a TV host of some sort), and SKE48 singer Akane Takayanagi. Here's the Kiyohara card (#723) - I think the pinstriped suit makes him look like a businessman, but I'm not sure if he's a legitimate one or not:

All the cards in the set can be seen at Jambalaya's web site.

Card Of The Week September 25

2011-09-25T15:14:00.000-04:00

Bizarre news out of Nagoya this week: the Dragons will not re-up the contract of manager Hiromitsu Ochiai after the season and instead will bring back Morimichi Takagi for a third time (Takagi was interim manager in 1986 and also ran the team from 1992 to 1995). At 70, Takagi will be the second oldest manager in NBP history, following Katsuya Nomura.

Ochiai has managed the Dragons since 2004 and has taken them to the Series four times in the seven complete seasons, winning the Series in 2007 (Chunichi's first championship since 1954). He's finished second twice and third once in the other seasons and has the Dragons poised for the playoffs again this year. Chunichi has explained the move by saying that Ochiai has a high salary and the team hasn't been profitable during his time as manager. My take would be that if the Dragons haven't been profitable during the most successful (on the field) eight years in their history, someone in the marketing department needs to be fired, not the manager.

This is not to knock Takagi, who Chunichi pretty much admits is simply a bridge to their next "real" manager. Sort of like Jack McKeon with the Marlins this year. Here's a card of Takagi from the 2006 BBM Dragons 70th Anniversary set (#31):

Sources for this post were NBP Tracker and Yakyu Baka (this post and this post).

2011 All Japan Baseball Foundation Managers set

2011-09-24T18:02:00.000-04:00

The most recent set put out by the All Japan Baseball Foundation is a box set entitled something along the lines of "Biographies Of 20th Century Managers". The set contains exactly that - 45 cards featuring various managers, all of whom were active last century and only one of whom (Senichi Hoshino) is active now (although Morimichi Takagi will be active next season). As seems to be typical with OB sets both from AJBF and BBM, the set is heavy on managers from the 70's and 80's. The earliest manager is Shigeru Sugishita, who started in 1959. There's a handful of managers from the 60's - Tetsuharu Kawakami, Futoshi Nakanishi, Yukio Nishimoto, Akitoshi Kodama and Tsuguo Gotoh, but everyone else is later. The set includes a lot of guys you would expect like Shigeo Nagashima, Sadaharu Oh (with the Giants, not the Hawks), Koji Yamamoto (both of them) and Masaaki Mori, but there were a couple somewhat surprising omissions. Tatsuro Hirooka, who won a couple Japan Series with the Swallows and Lions, isn't in the set. Katusya Nomura and Masaichi Kaneda, who almost never appear in OB sets, aren't in this one either. There are no foreign managers either, so no Wally Yonamine or Don Blasingame. The set is also missing Kazuhisa Inao, Motoshi Fujita and Akira Ohgi.

I think the biggest omissions though are in the guys whose careers started a lot earlier. Kazuto Tsuruoka, the winningest manager ever in Japan, isn't in the set. Sadayoshi Fujimoto, who managed 3200 games in a career that lasted from 1936 until 1968, isn't in the set. Osamu Mihara and Shigeru Mizuhara, the legendary rivals from Shikoku, aren't in the set. Tsuruoka, Mihara and Mizuhara won nine of the ten Japan Series between 1951 and 1960 (along with 18 of the 20 league pennants).

The biggest problem that the set has though isn't the player (well, manager) selection. It's just that it's kind of a boring subject matter. There isn't really any way to get a really cool action shot of a manager, so most of the cards look like this one of Taira Fujita (#08):

The one exception is the card of Akitoshi Kodama, who was player-manager for the Buffaloes in 1967. His card (#41) at least shows him playing, rather than managing:

You can see the rest of the cards at Jambalaya's web site.

Almost forgot - I think the set also includes some sort of possible autograph or memorabilia card. I bought an opened box, so I didn't get one.

New BBM Baseball (sort of) Sets

2011-09-24T15:50:00.000-04:00

BBM released information last week on a couple baseball-related sets: one for mascots and one for cheerleader squads. The Mascot set is called something along the lines of "Our Friends" and is a box set containing 45 "regular" cards plus an autographed version of one of the 45 cards. The Cheerleader set is a pack based set containing 155 cards (along with autographed inserts). It features the cheerleader/dance teams for nine teams - the Hawks, Lions, Fighters, Buffaloes, Eagles, Dragons, Giants, Swallows and BayStars. Both sets will be out in late October.

In addition, AmiAmi and Discount Niki have information up on BBM's 2012 "Historic Collection" set. I'm not quite sure what the theme is - it looks like it's highlighting the drafts from several years but I could be mistaken.

Card Of The Week September 18

2011-09-18T22:06:00.000-04:00

Charlie Finley had a lot of interesting ideas when he owned the A's. Some of them were good ideas - like playing World Series games at night to increase ratings. Some were not good ideas - like the orange baseballs. One of his more famous failures is the hiring of a world class sprinter named Herb Washington to be a full time pinch runner. Washington was not a "real" baseball player in that he never played baseball either professionally or in college before signing with Oakland. His lack of baseball instincts were displayed to the world in Game 2 of the 1974 World Series, when he was picked off first base by Mike Marshall of the Dodgers while representing the tying run in the ninth inning.

It turns out that the idea of hiring a sprinter to be a full time pinch runner for a baseball team isn't original to Finley. From 1969 to 1971, the Lotte Orions had a former Olympic sprinter named Hideo Iijima on the team. Iijima appeared in both the 1964 and 1968 Summer Olympics and appeared in 117 games over three seasons for the Orions. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that his baseball skills beyond his raw speed were not much different from Washington's. Iijima scored 46 runs in those 117 games and stole 23 bases in 40 attempts (a 57.5% success rate). Washington scored 33 runs in 105 games and stole 31 bases in 48 attempts (a 64.6 % success rate).

According to this article at the Baseball Analysts, you needed to be stealing bases with a success rate somewhere in the high 70's during the 1970's in the US to be helping the team, so it looks like Washington was not helping the A's. I don't what the break-even point was in Japan but I suspect that it was somewhat lower - but probably not enough that Iijima was helping the Orions.

Anyway, this little experiment by the Orions was commemorated by BBM with the inclusion of a card of Iijima in the 2008 Lotte 40th Anniversary set (#19):

Given that there really wasn't anyone making cards when Iijima was playing, this may be the only card ever produced for him.

Card Of The Week September 11

2011-09-11T16:52:00.000-04:00

The big game in Japan yesterday was the first pro match up of Masahiro Tanaka of the Eagles and Yuki Saitoh of the Fighters, who last met in a memorable final of the 2006 Summer Koshien tournament. That game ended as a 1-1 tie that both pitchers went the distance in. Saitoh came back the next day and pitched another complete game for the victory and the championship.

Both pitchers threw complete games yesterday as well, but it only went nine (eight and a half actually) and this time Tanaka came out on top. Here's Ma-kun's Leader subset card from the 2008 BBM 1st Version set (#436) in honor of his winning of the Pacific League Rookie Of The Year award in 2007:

2011 Calbee Series 3

2011-09-08T21:16:00.000-04:00

This week, Calbee's website announced that this year's third series will be released on October 3. There are 72 "regular" cards in the set (6 per team) along with a couple insert/sub sets. There's a 25 card All Star set featuring players from the All Star Series including the MVPs of each game. There are four checklist cards and 24 Star cards (both numbered as continuations of the respective sets in the earlier series).

If you're thinking that this year's Calbee set seems smaller than last year's, you are correct. The total count of "regular" cards this year is 228, 60 fewer than last year. The number of subsets and insert sets is smaller this year also. I don't know if this is related to the earthquake or the economy, but BBM's 1st Version set is much smaller this year as well, so whatever the issue is, it may not be isolated to Calbee.

Speaking of BBM, AmiAmi and Discount Niki are listing two new sets - a box set called "Our Friends" or "Friends Of The Ballpark Fun" featuring team mascots both past and present and a pack-based set featuring the cheerleader/dance teams for each team.

Card Of The Week September 4

2011-09-04T18:06:00.000-04:00

Well, the Fighters apparently have had enough of Masataka Nashida and he most likely won't be returning as manager, even if Nippon Ham wins the Series. Reportedly, one of the candidates to replace is Tsuyoshi Shinjyo, which would be an...interesting choice. He certainly has a more colorful background than some of the other possible candidates - I've never seen Katsuya Nomura hanging out with Paris Hilton. Then there were some of the costumes he appeared on the field in:

He certainly makes a better Vader than Hideki Kuriyama, although I'm not sure that's one of the criteria for the managerial job.

Here's Shinjyo's 1995 Calbee card (#71):

I also want to mention that somebody once promised to smack anyone who suggested that Shinjyo become the Fighters' manager, so team owner Yoshinori Okoso should consider himself warned.

Menko T-Shirts

2011-09-03T13:34:00.000-04:00

Ebbets Field Flannels unveiled a group of six t-shirts in the past couple of weeks that use graphics from old menko cards on them. It looks like someone at the company got a copy of John Gall and Gary Engel's book "Sayonara Home Run" because five of the six images can be found in the book. The six shirts are:

- a 1948 Shonen Alps game card of Hiroshi Oshita of the Flyers (p. 121 of the book)
- a 1948/49 menko booklet of Sataro Sugiyama of the Dragons (p. 66)
- the back of an unidentified menko card from the late 40's (p. 57)
- the back of another 1948 menko card of Hiroshi Oshita which for some reason shows Noburo Aota (p. 32)
- the back of a 1963 Marusho card of Giants catcher Isao Ohashi (p. 175)
- some sort of Tigers flag - don't know where the image came from as I couldn't find it in the book.

While I'm on the subject of Japanese baseball related t-shirts, I should mention that there's an outfit called Red Jacket Clothing that sells a handful of NBP related t-shirts. It's a mixture of modern logos (Giants, Carp, Lions) and some older ones (Whales, Hanyku Braves, Osaka (Nankai) Hawks). It's one of the few options for those of us a little larger than the average Japanese person and probably a bit cheaper to boot.

RIP Ichiro Yoshikuni

2011-09-03T13:08:00.000-04:00

Former NBP Commissioner Ichiro Yoshikuni passed away yesterday at age 95. Yoshikuni held the post from 1989-98, the longest stretch of time that anyone has been in office.

In 1992, BBM included cards of the Yoshikuni along with the two league presidents in its regular set. Here's his card (#243):

I have to say it's a little amusing that each league has its own president. In the US, each league had a president because originally the American and National leagues were completely separate entities (which is why each league had its own set of umpires as well). It took years, but these anachronisms were finally phased out in the mid-1990's. The two leagues in NBP, however, were never separate entities (at least not in the sense that the AL and NL were originally) and it has probably never really made sense for the leagues to have their own offices as opposed to simply being run from the commissioner's office. (On the other hand, I will concede that the Pacific League historically has had challenges that the Central League has not, so it has probably served them better having someone whose job it was to look out for their interests solely rather than simply as part of NBP. Although that person signed off on having a split season from 1973 to 1982, so maybe I'm giving them too much credit...)

Card Of The Week August 28

2011-08-31T21:14:00.000-04:00

Sorry to be so late this week - my DSL has been messed up since last week. Nothing to do with the earthquake or hurricane Irene - just lousy service from Verizon.

Anyway, I went to a Wilmington Blue Rocks game last night and saw a guy wearing a Joe Dillon jersey from 1999. It reminded me that Dee Brown was not the only former Blue Rock to play in Japan - Dillon played for the Giants in 2006. Here's Dillon's BBM Giants card (#G044) from that year:

2011 BBM Legend Of Bs

2011-08-21T19:40:00.000-04:00

This season the Orix Buffaloes decided to celebrate the 1970s' versions of the two teams that merged in 2004 to form the current team - the Orix Blue Wave and the Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes. These teams were known as the Hankyu Braves and Kintetsu Buffaloes back in the '70s. Orix had a couple sets of games earlier this season in which they wore retro uniforms of each of the teams. There's an official website dedicated to these games and BBM put out a set in conjunction with it as well.

While BBM's website says that the set has 99 cards, it actually only has 96. There are 19 cards for the 2011 team (who are not shown wearing the retro uniforms since the set was released before the games, however it is the first set showing all the players in the new for 2011 Buffaloes uniforms), 30 cards for OB Hankyu players from the 70's, 27 (not the 30 listed on the website) cards for OB Kintetsu players from the 70's, two "Memorial Scene" cards and two nine card subsets entitled "Star Of Braves" and "Star Of Buffaloes" that also feature OB players.

The OB subsets feature the managers for each team during the 1970's. For the Braves, that's Yukio Nishimoto, Toshiharu Ueda and Takao Kajimoto. For the Buffaloes, that's Osamu Mihara, Takashi Iwamoto and Nishimoto again (so yes, he has two cards in the set). For the players themselves the set includes Yutaka Fukumoto, Bobby Marcano, Hideji Kato and Hisashi Yamada for the Braves and Keishi Suzuki, Masataka Nashida and Masahiro Doi for the Buffaloes. I don't know either team well enough to know if someone substantial is missing - the biggest name I can think of who isn't included in the set is Charlie Manuel for the Buffaloes.

The "Memorial Scene" cards feature a photo of a significant event for each team. For the Braves, it's the team marching around the field after winning the 1975 Nippon Series (the first ever for Hankyu and the first of three consecutive that they would win in the 1970's). For the Buffaloes, it's the team celebrating after defeating the Braves in the 1979 Pacific League playoffs, which propelled Kintetsu into the Series for the first time ever. If you look closely at the players in the picture, you can see Charlie Manuel - I think he's starting to hug Masataka Nashida.

The "Star Of Braves" and "Star Of Buffaloes" subsets are nine cards each, but they are not Best 9s. Instead, they're just a collection of players from each team - I guess they're meant to be the "biggest" stars for each team.

Here's some sample cards - you can see all the cards at Jambalaya's website.

#12

#35 - Shinji Nakazawa - that looks like a Yakult Swallow in the background, so I wonder if this is from the 1978 Series, where the Swallows beat the Braves

#21 - Toshiharu Ueda

#74 - Shigeru Kurihashi

#53 - Koichiro Sasaki

#78 - Buffaloes Memorial Scene

#87

#88

Card Of The Week August 21

2011-08-21T18:41:00.000-04:00

The Cal Ripken World Series wrapped up today with Team Japan defeating the Ohio Valley team 7-0 for their first ever championship. Japan dominated the tournament, going 8-0 while outscoring their opponents a whopping 97 to 9, including a 31-1 defeat of Canada and a 21-0 defeat of Australia. They had one tight game against Mexico, winning a squeaker 2-1. One of their pitchers, Kazuki Sakurai, struck out 28 in 11 2/3 innings, including eight of the nine batters he faced in championship game.

Unlike the last couple of years, I didn't attend any of the games this year. Mostly it was because I didn't have time, but it was also partially because the object of my stalking the last two years has a new job this year:

2011 BBM 1st Version #136

2011 Epoch All Japan Baseball Foundation 1987 set

2011-08-19T19:21:00.001-04:00

Following up the popularity of their 1977 set late last year, the All Japan Baseball Foundation released a set last spring celebrating the 1987 season. The set contained 59 "regular" cards - 48 player cards, 10 cards for highlights of 1987 and one checklist card.

I'm not sure what the criteria was for selecting the players for the set, but there seems to be some major omissions. Neither MVP (Kazuhiro Yamakura and Osamu Higashio) appears in the set and the CL Rookie Of The Year Yukio Arai does not either. Only the Sawamura (Masumi Kuwata) and the PL Rookie Of The Year (Hideyuki Awano) are in the set. Only four members of the CL Best 9 and five members of the PL Best 9 are in the set. Part of the problem is that (like the 1977 set) there are no gaijin included, so no Boomer Wells, Tony Brewer, Warren Cromartie, Bob Horner, Randy Bass, Rick Lancellotti or Carlos Ponce. No Kimyasu Kudoh, Tsutomu Itoh, or Hiromitsu Ochiai either. It's hard to do a comprehensive set for a season when you leave out half the significant players.

The set does include cards for Tatsunori Hara, Sachio Kinugasa, Koji Akiyama, Yutaka Ohno, Hiromi Matsunaga, Norifumi Nishimura, Hiromasa Arai, Hiromichi Ishige, Yukihiro Nishizaki and Hiromi Makihara. Here's a couple samples:

#33 Koji Akiyama

#31 Yoshio Mizukami (note that his uniform number in the picture differs from the one on the card - the picture is from no later than 1981, not 1987. I know, picky, picky, picky...)

The cards featuring highlights of 1987 include two cards celebrating Sachio Kinugasa breaking Lou Gehrig's consecutive game streak and one card each for Hideji Kato's 2000th hit, Toshio Shinozuka's CL batting championship, the Central League Champion Giants, the Pacific League Champion Lions and the Nippon Series Champion Lions. There's also cards for each of the pennant winning managers (Sadaharu Oh for the Giants and Masaaki Mori for the Lions) - the pictures on these two cards are repeated on the checklist card. There's also a card commemorating that 1987 was the final season for Korakuen Stadium in Tokyo - the picture shows the newly built Tokyo Dome visible outside the ballpark. Here's a couple examples:

#55 Korakuen Stadium Finale

#50 Kinugasa passes Gehrig

You can see all the cards here.

So I guess I'd have to say that I'm a little disappointed in this set. I really liked the 1977 set but this one isn't nearly as good.

Yet More New BBM Sets

2011-08-18T21:42:00.000-04:00

BBM listed a couple more new sets this week on their website. I think they're now caught up with everything that was listed on AmiAmi.

- This year's edition of the All Star set will be released in early September and for the first time in several years I don't think the design is completely hideous. As usual, this is a box set containing cards of every player who made the All Star roster as well as the manager and coaches for each league. In addition, there are cards for the MVP of each of the three games this year (Kazuhiro Hatakeyama, Takeya Nakamura and Atsunori Inaba) for a total of 73 cards altogether. If I'm reading the web page correctly, this will be the first time since the 1990's that there is not a card of the top vote getter in the fan balloting.

- The Tokyo Big Six Autumn Version set is a boxed set containing 38 cards - 36 "regular" cards (team card and five players per team) plus two insert cards - one "Heroes" card featuring an active Tokyo Big Six player and one "Legends" card featuring a former player. There are six possible cards in each insert set - one for each team. Unlike the Spring set, it looks like the "Legends" set contains OB NPB players rather than active NPB players - the sample cards include Shigeo Nagashima (Rikkio), Koichi Tabuchi (Hosei), Daisuke Yamashita (Keio), Katsumi Hirosawa (Meiji) and (I think) Akinobu Okada (Waseda). (I'll be curious to learn who the "Legend" from Tokyo is - the wikipedia page for the league lists a film director as the only "notable alumni" from Tokyo.) The set will be released in mid-September to coincide with the beginning of the Fall season.

- BBM is branching out in their collegiate sets this fall with the release of an 80th Anniversary set for the Tohto University Baseball League. This will be a pack-based set containing 99 "regular" cards - 45 cards of retired former players from the league, 45 cards of former players still active in professional baseball and nine cards for "Record Holders". There is also an 18 card insert set called "Super Best 9" and possible autograph and photo cards. What the set does not have is any currently active collegiate players from the league. The release date is not listed here, but AmiAmi's listing has it as late September.

Based on these two collegiate sets, I'm kind of hoping that BBM's going to do two things in the future. The first is that they do an OB set for the Tokyo Big Six league. I think 2012 will be the 85th Anniversary of the league (started in 1925, but shut down for a couple years during the war - Tohto started in 1930 so the 80th Anniversary only makes sense if you take into account the years they didn't play during the war), so that might be the perfect excuse to do the set. The second is that maybe they'll consider doing a regular set for the Tohto League. The main problem with doing the set is that BBM insists on having the same number of cards for each team and there's 21 teams in the league! Maybe the answer is to do a team card and two player cards for each team, so there'd be a total of 63 cards in the set.

More new BBM sets

2011-08-16T22:33:00.000-04:00

A couple new sets have been listed on BBM's website in the last week or so:

- I don't believe that he's officially retired yet, but BBM is releasing a box set devoted to Kimiyasu Kudoh. Entitled "Never Give Up", the set contains 28 cards - 27 "regular" cards along with 1 possible memorabilia card. It will be out in late August.

- Following the 1991 season, the Lotte Orions moved across Tokyo Bay from Kawasaki to Chiba and renamed themselves the Chiba Lotte Marines. To celebrate their 20th season in Chiba, BBM is issuing a 20th Anniversary Marines set in early September. This pack based set pretty much follows BBM's standard pattern for their Anniversary sets - it's a 99 card set containing 7 cards for "Marines History", 28 cards for the 2011 team, five cards for former managers, 45 cards for OB players (both retired and active ex-Marines), five cards for career leaders and nine cards for single season title holders. There's a nine card insert set called "Pride Of M's" (with additional possible foil parallel versions) as well as the usual suspects for memorabilia cards - autographs and jersey cards.

- Well, another year, another Lions OB set. This year's edition is entitled "Lions Classic 2008-11" and it commemorates the Lions Classic games (a number of games that the Lions play each year wearing retro uniforms) for the last four seasons (despite the fact that BBM has already issued sets commemorating these in 2008, 2009 and 2010). This is a pack based set containing 99 "regular" cards. It looks like there's a subset for each year's Classic. Each subset contains cards of active players in retro uniforms as well as OB players from the era represented. I'm not sure I'm reading the web page correctly, but it looks as if there's an 18 card (9 active player, 9 OB) subset for the 1951 era (2011 Classic), 24 cards (12 active, 12 OB) for the 1950's era (2008 Classic), 18 cards (9 active, 9 OB) for the Taiheiyo Club Lions from the 1970's (2010 Classic) and 27 cards (12 active, 15 OB) for the 1980's Lions (2009 Classic). There's also a 12 card subset containing some sort of combination card showing an active and OB player. There's a nine card inert set called "Classic Seed 9" featuring active players and various autograph and memorabilia cards. The set will be released in late September.

In addition to the sets on BBM's website, AmiAmi also lists two new college sets from BBM - the Autumn Version of the Tokyo Big Six set and an 80th Anniversary set for the Tohto University Baseball League.

Card Of The Week August 14

2011-08-16T21:48:00.001-04:00

I've always liked it when I can identify what game the photo on a particular baseball card was taken at, although I usually have a hard time with Japanese cards. But this card of Hayato Sakamoto (2011 BBM 1st Version #231) had some major clues - Sakamoto looks pretty happy and there's a pitcher (Hisashi Takeda of the Fighters) who looks like he's walking off the field. A little searching on NPB's English language website reveals that on June 4 last year, Sakamoto hit a two run sayonora home run off Takeda to lead the Giants to a 7-6 victory.

UPDATE: I should have checked this before, but Deanna was at this game and posted about it.

2011 BBM 1st Version

2011-08-12T22:20:00.001-04:00

I'm getting slower and slower in getting around to writing about sets this summer. BBM's 1st Version set came out in late April and it's taken me four months to get around to writing about it. (In my defense - I just got my set a couple weeks ago.) But just in case everyone doesn't already have the set, I'll still do a quick write-up on it.

At 418 cards, this year's set is much smaller than those of the last couple years. BBM has also changed things up a little by making the standard insert sets for Best 9 and Golden Gloves be subsets in the regular set instead.

The set contains only 27 (as opposed to 36 last year) "regular" cards for the manager and players for each of the 12 teams. This year's design features a white border on the bottom of the card. While most of the cards feature the usual high quality photos that BBM uses, I was surprised by a couple of cards that feature "studio" pictures as opposed to action pictures. The cards both feature rookies, so I wonder if BBM was simply unable to get a picture of them in camp in time for publication because of the earthquake. Although the earthquake is no excuse for BBM using yet another shot of Jose Ortiz with both hands above his head as he crosses home plate - their cards of him in both the 1st and 2nd Version sets last year used a similar shot. Here's some sample cards:

#308

#146

#047

#020

#204

BBM didn't cut back on their usual Leader subset. This year's version features 34 cards for last year's statistical leaders and award winners. As always, several players have multiple cards in the subset for multiple honors - Kenta Maeda has five in all. Here's the one that commemorates his "Pitcher Of The Year" award:

#355

As I mentioned before, the two standard BBM insert sets - Best 9 and Golden Glove - are subsets in this year's set. The Best 9 subset has 19 cards - 1 player at each position in each league plus a DH in the Pacific League. The Golden Glove subset has 17 cards - again 1 player at each position in each league, but no First Baseman in the Central League. What's nice about the Golden Glove subset is the card for Masato Akamatsu shows him making that incredible catch last season. Here's a sample card from each subset:

#364

#394

There's a 12 card subset featuring young players (1 per team) called "Recommended Hope 2011". Seven of the players in this subset do not have "regular" cards in the set, including Ryoji Nakata:

#401

For the third year in a row, the Team Checklists feature the mascots for each team. I'm thinking they could change this theme anytime now, although at least they got a shot of Doala in a retro uniform:

#413

I have to say that I'm kind of disappointed with this set. While I'm happy that the Best 9 and Golden Glove sets are part of the regular set, I'm not happy that they dropped nine players for each team. I don't have any sort of comprehensive list of who's missing, but I was surprised there was no Yusei Kikuchi card - especially since he was almost as hyped last year as Yu-Chan is this year. Not that there's really a choice if you want a big Japanese set - Calbee's got fewer cards and the Konami and Owner's League sets are hard to come by.

UPDATE: I forgot to include a link to the page on Jabalaya's website that shows scans of all the cards (including some of the inserts and parallel issues).

Card Of The Week August 7

2011-08-07T11:23:00.000-04:00

OK, quick - what foreign player has gotten the most hits in NPB?

Leron Lee? Good guess but wrong.

Warren Cromartie? Nope.

Bobby Rose? Wally Yonamine? Leon Lee? Boomer Wells? No, no, no and no.

Tuffy Rhodes? If I had asked this last week, then yes. But this week, no.

On Friday, Alex Ramirez of the Giants got two hits against the Carp to pass Rhodes as the all time foreign player NPB hit king. Here's his card from the 2001 BBM Nippon Series set, from Ramirez's first year in Japan when his Swallows defeated Rhodes' Buffaloes (#S22):

2011 BBM Touch The Game

2011-08-03T21:30:00.000-04:00

BBM's website released information about this year's edition of the high-end Touch The Game set a couple weeks back. The set will contain 120 "regular" cards - 108 regular player cards (9 per team) and 12 rookie cards (1 per team). As usual, there's a boatload of memorabilia cards available - ball, jersey, patch, autograph, etc. BBM is making a big deal about this being the 10th Anniversary of Touch The Game, so I think some of the memorabilia cards are from previous editions. The translation of the web page uses the word "FINAL" a couple times, so I wonder if that means that BBM is discontinuing this set in the future. The set will be out in late September.

In addition to what's on BBM's website, AmiAmi has a listing for the annual BBM All Star set as well as a box set for Kimiyasu Kudoh (also from BBM).

New Resources

2011-08-03T21:19:00.001-04:00

Jason has brought a couple interesting on-line resources to my attention lately. I mentioned the first yesterday - Yahoo Japan Store called Jambalaya that no only lists all the cards for a set, but shows scans of most of them as well. So far they only have BBM, Calbee and All Japan Baseball Foundation sets from 2011 up. Great place to browse and see who's in a set and what the cards look like (especially since I'm pretty slow in getting cards in most of the time).

The second resource is one that Jason himself is primarily responsible for - he's been entering a lot of Japanese sets into the Inventory Manager at the Sports Card Forum (SCF). He's done all the Calbee sets from 1986 to the present, all the BBM base sets 1991 to the present and all the other BBM sets up to 2004. There are some other sets included as well that may have been done by someone other than Jason - Takara, Upper Deck, Konami, 1987 Play Ball, 1990 Lotte (but not 1989), 1979 TCMA. There's some listings from earlier Calbee sets but the ones I looked at from the mid-70's only include the Sadaharu Oh and Shigeo Nagashima cards. Jason kept telling me he'd been working on this, but until today, I had never been able to find the listings. Turns out that you must register and log in with SCF to be able to search these listings. I can't find anyway to simply browse a set's checklist but you can search for a player by name and get a listing of their cards (and from that listing you can click on a card from a particular set to get a checklist for the set).

So thanks to Jason's hard work, there's a way to get a list of all the cards of a Japanese player. Thanks Jason!

(And just taking a little look around, it looks like the 1999 and 2000 Teleca KBO cards are included in the listings as well as some of the Futera ABL cards.)

2011 Calbee Series 2 Box Break

2011-08-02T21:45:00.002-04:00

After I was so happy with ordering the Fighters Future Icon set from Rakuten Global Market a few weeks ago, I decided to order a box of Calbee Series 2 from them. The good news was that the box was about $22. The bad news was that since the box contained 24 bags of potato chips (each with a pack of two cards attached), it weighed between 3 and 4 pounds, so EMS shipping (the only choice from Rakuten) to the US was over $40! Yow! I hadn't realized how bad it would be until I had already placed the order (it isn't entirely clear how much shipping is when you place your order). I don't think I'll be doing that again.

On the plus side, however, I was very happy with the cards themselves. I got an amazing 47 unique cards out of the 48 cards in the box. I got 35 "regular" player cards (plus the double of Tadashi Settsu), 5 "Opening Game" cards, 6 "Star" cards (including a gold signature parallel card for Takahiro Iwamoto) and one checklist card.

The design of the cards is pretty much typical of Calbee over the last 15 years or so - full bleed, borderless fronts with the team name and logo and the player's name (first initial and last name) and number. It's a design that I admire a lot, along with the photography. Here's some sample cards:

Matt Murton (#124)

Michihiro Ogasawara (#129)

Yuta Naitoh Opening Game (OP-12) Naitoh had a game winning
pinch hit in the bottom of the ninth in the opener on April 12

Takahiro Iwamoto Gold Signature Star Card (#S-22)

Checklist (#C-7)

UPDATE: Almost forgot - Jason had sent me a link to a store website that shows scans for all the cards in a bunch of this year's sets. The Calbee Series 2 cards can be found here.

Card Of The Week July 31

2011-07-31T08:00:00.005-04:00

Kosuke Fukudome was traded on Thursday from the Cubs to the Indians. Here's one of his cards from his days as a Dragon - 2000 Upper Deck Victory #31:

RIP Hideki Irabu

2011-07-28T21:44:00.000-04:00

Stunning news tonight - former Lotte and Hanshin pitcher Hideki Irabu was found dead at his home in Los Angeles. He apparently committed suicide.

I had done a retrospective on Irabu a couple of years ago, so I'll just post one more card here, his 1992 BBM card (#230):

Very sad.

Card Of The Week July 24

2011-07-25T21:29:00.000-04:00

Yakyu Baka had a link the other day to an article in the New York Times about former Hanshin Tiger and current Yankee farmhand Kei Igawa. Igawa signed with the Yankees prior to the 2007 season after Hanshin posted him and the Yankees paid $26 million for his rights. This was just after the Red Sox had blown everyone away by bidding over $50 million for the rights for Daisuke Matsuzaka and apparently the Yankees felt that they were losing the Japanese arms race. Which isn't to imply that signing Igawa was a bad idea at the time, but, as the article explains, it really didn't work out well and the Yankees eventually buried him in the farm system. (While Matsuzaka has been immensly frustrating to watch the past couple years for the Red Sox, they did win a World Series with him in the rotation in 2007 and as a lifelong Red Sox fan who suffered until 2004, to me that $100 million of John Henry's money it took to get Matsuzaka was worth every penny.)

Anyway, Igawa's departure from the Tigers was commemorated by a three card "Good Luck" subset in the 2007 BBM Tigers set. Here's card #T117:

Hideki Matsui

2011-07-21T22:37:00.000-04:00

I have felt that I have neglected Hideki Matsui on my blog over the years. I think that this has mostly been due to the fact that he first played for my least favorite NPB team, then for my least favorite MLB team, before moving last year to a team I'm not particularly fond of (the Angels) until finally this year he ended up with a team that I like (the A's).

It's particularly ironic that I haven't shown many cards of him over the years in that he's one of the players that I have the most cards of (right around 100). So in honor of him getting his 500th home run between NPB and MLB last night, here's a batch of Hideki Matsui cards:

1993 BBM Rookie Card (#423)

1994 BBM (#431)

1997 BBM "Nickname" subset (#559)

1999 Calbee (#095)

2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 (#479)

2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 Combination Insert (#T-10)

2001 Upper Deck (#66)

2002 Calbee (#105)

2002 Calbee "Be Excited" subset (#EX-9) showing him hitting home run #300

2002 BBM Central League Champion Giants (#YG38)

Prestige Collectibles Auction #40

2011-07-18T15:48:00.000-04:00

The latest Prestige Collectibles Auction is running until July 26. Details are here.

1997 BBM Box Break

2011-07-18T14:18:00.000-04:00

Another recent eBay pickup for me was this 1997 BBM box. The box contained 30 packs of 10 cards each, so there were 300 cards in all. The 1997 set only had two insert sets (and no memorabilia cards) so I wasn't terribly surprised that I only got four insert cards in the box (two Rivals cards of Motoyuki Akahari and Yasuyuki Kawamoto and two Best 9 cards of Luis Lopez and Takeshi Yamasaki). There were also two subsets in the regular set that were short printed - a nine card "Nostalgic Stars" subset and a nine card "KK" subset that celebrated the reunion of high school teammates Masumi Kuwata and Kazuhiro Kiyohara on the Giants. I got two of the "KK" cards in the box but no "Nostalgic Stars" cards.

So that leaves 294 "regular" cards. I have to say that I was expecting a lot of doubles in the box. While opening the packs, I noticed that two were nearly identical. Not only did the two packs share six cards but they did it in almost the same sequence of cards. The top card in each pack was Yasuyuki Yamauchi, followed by Hiromitsu Ochiai and Jason Thompson. The next three cards were not the same between the two packs, but then the next two in both packs were Yu Sugimoto and a Troy Neel leader card. Then once again the next card was different between the two packs but the final card in each was a Hawks checklist. Despite this, however, I was surprised to discover that the box had only 37 doubles in it, meaning that there were 257 unique "regular" cards in the box. Even better than the box of 2000 BBM I opened last month. (And even better for me - 120 of them were ones that I didn't already have).

The one things that I came away with after going through these cards is how many big name rookie cards are in this set. Yoshitomo Tani, Michihiro Ogasawara, Kazuhiro Wada, Tadahito Iguchi, Nobuhiko Matsunaka, Hiroki Kuroda, Akinori Iwamura and Makoto Imaoka all have rookie cards in the set, along with future US imports Shinji Mori, Akinori Ohtsuka, Kats Maeda and Yusaka Iriki. I haven't studied this at all so I don't know but it seems like this might be one of the more impressive rookie crops (and that's not even taking into account anyone who's first card is in the set but is not labelled "Rookie".

New BBM releases

2011-07-18T10:51:00.000-04:00

Been a little slow in getting to these but over the last couple weeks BBM has announced a couple new sets including the final three team sets for 2011.

The Orix Buffaloes team set may already be out as it was scheduled to be released in early July. It's a packed based set with 99 "regular" cards plus a nine card insert set and various autographed or memorabilia cards. There are 72 cards for the players and manager, a checklist card, a two card "KOREAN TREASURE" subset (which I assume features Chan Ho Park and Seung Yeop Lee), a three card "Trio Relief" subset, a three card subset that translates as "First Thing Cards" (no idea what this is), a nine card puzzle subset and a nine card subset called "BACK TO THE HANKYU BRAVES" which I'm guessing either show the current players in their Hankyu throwback uniforms from earlier this season or show OB players from the Braves. The insert set is called "THE GREAT HORNS" - since it's nine cards I would assume it's a Best 9 of some sort but I don't know if it features current or OB players.

The Fukuoka Softbank Hawks team set will be released on July 28. It's also a 99 card pack based set that features a whopping 87 cards for the players, coaches and manager, three cards for a "Promising Young Player" subset, eight "Combination Cards" and a checklist card. There's a nine card insert set called "HAWKS HEROES" and a bunch of memorabilia cards. There's also a couple different autograph parallel sets for the player cards (I think they're facsimile autographs but there may be some real ones as well). Not sure if this has been done by BBM for a team set before, but they are issuing this set in "Light Packs" (6 cards instead of 7) as well. These packs contain the same regular cards (with only one possible parallel autograph set) but no "HAWKS HEROES" insert cards and only a single memorabilia card (Seiichi Uchikawa jersey) available. I think the Uchikawa jersey card is only available in the "Light Packs" (which I think are only available in Kyushu).

The Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters team set is listed as being released in late July. Like the others, it is a 99 card pack based set featuring 70 cards for the players and manager, two checklist cards, six cards for "2010 Title Holders", a three card (!) subset commemorating Yuki Saitoh's first career victory, nine "Combination Cards" and a nine card subset called "Fighters Emotion". There's a nine card insert set called "Shine Of Gold", a couple memorabilia cards (jersey cards of Yu Darvish and Ryo Sakakibara both singly and in combination - amazingly no Yuki Saitoh cards!) and autograph cards.

BBM is also releasing a box set for the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles in late July. This set contains 28 cards - 18 "regular" cards, 9 "subset" cards (that's what the website says - no further details) and either an autographed card or a memorabilia card.

In addition to what's on BBM's website, AmiAmi has listings for this year's Touch The Game set and a new OB set commemorating the 20th Anniversary of the Lotte Orions moving from Kawasaki to Chiba and becoming the Chiba Lotte Marines.

Card Of The Week July 17

2011-07-17T22:29:00.000-04:00

I learned something interesting last week from NBP Tracker - Ryan Vogelsong was the third non-Japanese player with NPB experience to play in an MLB All Star game, following Cecil Fielder and Alfonso Soriano. Vogelsong played in Japan for three years - two with Hanshin (2007-08) and one with Orix (2009). Here's his 2009 BBM 1st Version card (#039):

Just for the record - I do not believe that any cards of Soriano with the Carp exist - he only appeared in nine games with them in 1997.

And speaking of Cecil Fielder, how weird is it that he hasn't appeared in any OB sets? You'd have thought he'd have made one of the two Tiger Anniversary sets that have come out in the past six years.

BBM Future Icon

2011-07-15T09:53:00.000-04:00

I've mentioned before that BBM seems to be going out of their way this season to showcase Yuki Saitoh of the Fighters. There's the "Platinum Age" set featuring players born in 1988, various insert and memorabilia sets with the 1st and 2nd Version sets and the Fighters Mega Energy set. This week, I picked up yet another set that BBM had done that features Yu-Chan: the Future Icon boxed set.

I haven't seen anything about this set on BBM's website and the box is labelled "Kamagaya Stadium Edition" which makes we wonder if it was either a stadium giveaway or simple something only available for sale at the Fighter's ni-gun team's ballpark in Kamagaya.

The set contains 18 cards. The fronts of cards 1-16 are essentially reprints of cards of various Fighter rookies from this season's Rookie Edition, "Platinum Age" and 1st Version sets, with a "Future Icon" logo added. (The Rookie Edition subset includes all six Fighter cards from the original set.) Card 17 (of Yuki Saitoh) does not reprint an existing card, so it's labelled "Original design card". Card 18 is for the ni-gun Fighter's mascot Cubby.

Of the 17 cards showing players, there are actually only seven players who are depicted. Yuki Saitoh is on five of the cards (Rookie Edition, Platinum Age, Platinum Age Printed Autographed Card, 1st Version and Original design card). The other six players have two cards each. The remaining five players (other than Yu-chan) who had appeared in the Rookie Edition

set have their Rookie Edition and 1st Version reprints in the set: Haruki Nishikawa, Masahiro Inui, Yodai Enoshita, Yuya Taniguchi and Masaru Saitoh. The other player is Mitsuo Yoshikawa, who's Platinum Age and Platinum Age Printed Autographed Card are reproduced.

Here's some sample cards. From top to bottom, the Yuki Saitoh Rookie Edition card (#01), the Mitsuo Yoshikawa "Platinum Age" card (#08), the Haruki Nishikawa 1st Version card (#12) and the Yuki Saitoh "Original design card" (#17):

The backs of the cards are not reproductions of the backs of the original cards. The backs of cards 01-09 form a picture when they are all aligned together properly:

The backs of cards 10-16 features the biographical data (birthday, height, weight, etc) for each player (Yu-chan's blood type is A, in case you were wondering). (Card 10 is one of the cards for Yoshikawa and cards 11-16 are the 1st Version cards, so the bio on the back is for the player on the front). The back of card 17 repeats the biographical data for Yu-Chan and the back of card 18 is a checklist for the set. (And this may be the most in depth I've ever gone in describing a set.)

I picked this set up via an avenue that I had not previous tried before - the Rakuten Global Market. I was browsing through their baseball cards, saw the set and decided to see how easy it was to order. The set was around 1100 yen and shipping was 1200, so the total ended up being a little shy of $30. I was amazed, however, at how fast I got the set. I ordered the set this past Monday afternoon (Eastern US time, middle of the night in Japan) and I got it yesterday (Thursday)! Wow! The only thing I was uncomfortable about was that the confirmation emails I got were in Japanese. I ran them through Google Translate to see if there was anything they were actually asking me or if it was just automated messages about the order. I was pretty sure it was the latter but I wasn't completely sure until the cards showed up. I'm definitely going to order through them again, possibly get some of this year's Calbee cards.

Update: just looked again at the listing for the set at Rakuten. I think it's saying that there's a possibility of getting an autographed (not sure if it's a real autograph or a printed one) version of cards 17 & 18 - Yuki Saitoh or Cubby. (Man, that's a good news-bad new situation: the good news is that you got a really rare autographed card; the bad news is it's the mascot...) More importantly, it looks like the set was supposed to be sold at Kamagaya on March 16 but I'm pretty sure than since that was five days after the earthquake, that game was never played.

Card Of The Week July 10

2011-07-10T21:54:00.000-04:00

Via NPB Tracker, Marines shortstop Masato Watanabe hit an inside the park home run against Yu Darvish the other day. Here's the video of it and here's Watanabe's "New Wave" subset card from the 2002 BBM 2nd Version set (#822):

2006 BBM Giants Box Break

2011-07-04T18:14:00.000-04:00

I don't usually go out of my way to collect the BBM team sets, but every so often I get a good deal on an unopened box and I can't resist. I recently picked up a box of the 2006 Giants set, so I thought I'd do a box break on it:

The box contained 20 packs of six cards each for a total of 120 cards. I got six insert cards (and no memorabilia cards), so I got 114 "regular" cards. The set only contains 108 cards so I was expecting quite a lot of doubles. However, I ended up getting only 22 doubles, so I actually got 92 unique cards (about 85% of the set). (Of course, like the 2000 BBM set, I had already opened a box of this set, so I ended up with only 16 cards I didn't already have - one short of completing my set.)

The insert cards that I got were all from the "Giant Step" (Engel calls it "Great Numbers") set - each card shows a Giants player and their career total (as of 2005 obviously) in some category. For example, Kimiyasu Kudoh's card shows he has 215 wins, Hiroki Kokubo's card shows 313 home runs, etc. It includes retired players as well, such as Tatsunori Hara (382 home runs), although none of the more major retired Giants - Oh, Nagashima, Harimoto, Kaneda, etc. One of the six insert cards I got was actually from a parallel issue to the "Giants Steps" set - for each of the inserts there is a parallel issue that is serially numbered up to the number on the card. So there's 215 Kudoh parallel cards numbered 1 to 215. This is kind of like those stupid Topps Home Run inserts for (I think) Mantle and Bonds where they just re-used the same picture for each card and changed the number.

The parallel issue I got was #144 for Masaaki Saitoh's 180 wins. I also got the normal Saitoh card (#GN02) so I can show both of them here:

I mentioned earlier that I had opened another box for this set previously. The breakdown of insert cards to regular cards was the same - 5 "Giant Step" cards and 1 parallel issue "Giant Step" card.

Card Of The Week July 3

2011-07-04T17:07:00.000-04:00

Last week I showed a card of Seiichi Uchikawa in honor of him being named MVP for interleague play. Then I listened to the Japan Baseball Weekly podcast where the hosts had a discussion of whether or not Uchikawa should have won the award. Their feeling was that Nobuhiro Matsuda, also of the Hawks, was the more deserving player. (Michael Westbay wrote up a comparision of the two players here.) So in fairness, I thought I'd show this 2008 BBM Hawks 70th Anniversary "Turn Back The Clock" card (#94) of Matsuda wearing a Nankai Hawks throwback uniform:

Card Of The Week June 26

2011-06-26T20:54:00.000-04:00

Interleague play wrapped up last week in Japan with Hawks outfielder Seiichi Uchikawa being named Inter-League MVP for this year. Since I don't have any 2011 cards of Uchikawa with his new team yet, I thought I'd show a card with him on his old team - the Bay Stars. Here's his 2010 Calbee Star Card (#S11):

New sets

2011-06-24T18:49:00.000-04:00

Some new sets have been announced in the last week or so:

-BBM has released information about this year's 2nd Version set. The set will contain over 300 cards (exact number is not on the web site) consisting of 36 (3 for each team) 1st Version updates, 216 "regular" player cards (18 per team), 12 each of subsets that are translating as "break players", "season pitching" and "team topics" (one of each subset per team), a currently unknown number of 1st Pitch Ceremony cards and 12 team checklists. There will be two insert sets - "Leading Players" (1 per team) and "Twin Gems" (1 card per team featuring two players). As usual, there are memorabilia cards - each team will have a Jersey card for a rookie available (hmm, wonder who they picked for the Fighters....no suspense here - it's on the website) as well as there being some sort of multi-player jersey cards as well. I think there's also some sort of parallel facsimile signature issue for the 216 "regular" cards, but I'm not positive. The set will be out in early August.

- Calbee has announced that Series 2 will be out on July 25. As usual, they have put their checklist on line. There are 84 "regular" player cards (7 per team) along with a couple subset/insert sets. One of these sets is a single card commemorating a charity game (I assume for the earthquake/tsunami victims) between the BayStars and the Tigers. There's also a 12 card set (OP) featuring a player from each team's Opening Day line up and a 24 card "Star Card" set (S) featuring two players from each team (I think it's a pitcher and a position player but I didn't verify that). Lastly, there are four checklist cards.

- The All Japan Baseball Foundation has announced their fifth set - "Biographies Of The 20th Century Coach" This is a 45 card set (plus autographed inserts) apparently featuring NPB managers from last century. Haven't attempted to translate the checklist on the website, but from the picture it looks like the set include Sadaharu Oh, Shigeo Nagashima, Masaaki Mori and Hiroshi Gondoh. It'd be nice if the set included some managers from the early days of pro ball in Japan, but I'd bet that the set is mostly guys from the 70's through the 90's. It will be released in early July. (I want to point out here that it is not clear to me if this is a boxed or pack based set).

Summer 2011 Swapmeet

2011-06-24T18:05:00.001-04:00

Well, a year ago, I had this great idea to have a series of posts where people post the things that they were looking for and what they had available for sale or trade. My intent was to do one each month, but after doing one in August, I kind of forgot about it. So I thought I'd try it again, maybe quarterly this time and see how it goes.

If you've got cards to sell or trade and/or there are cards you're looking for, add a comment to this post saying what you've got, what you want and how to contact you.

Here's what I'm looking for:

A handful of cards from the 1995-2000 BBM sets
A bunch of cards from the 2003-06 BBM 1st Version sets
10 or so cards from the 2000 BBM 20th Century Best 9 set
Recent (post-2003) Calbee singles
2009 Konami WBC cards (but only at a decent price - the current auction on eBay at $760 is way more than I want to pay)

What I've got for sale or trade:

BBM cards from 1992-2006
1993 Tomy cards
Calbee cards from the 70's and 80's
Yamakatsu cards from the late 1970's
Upper Deck Victory and Ovation cards from 2000-01

I can be reached at npbcardguy@gmail.com.

Card Of The Week June 19

2011-06-20T11:36:00.000-04:00

Last week Hitoki Iwase of the Dragons saved his 287th game, which put him past Shingo Takatsu for most saves in NPB history. Of course, Iwase's biggest save isn't counted in that total - it was the perfect inning he pitched in Game 5 of the 2007 Series, completing a perfect game started by Daisuke Yamai and - oh, yeah - clinching the Dragon's first Series win in 53 years. Here's his rookie card from the 1999 BBM set (#311):

2000 BBM box break

2011-06-18T20:36:00.001-04:00

I picked up a sealed box of 2000 BBM on eBay recently, so I thought that I'd do a box break on it. The box contained 30 packs of 10 cards each for 300 cards total. Of those, I ended up getting 7 insert cards - three Best 9 (Takuro Ishii, Norihiro Nakamura and Koji Uehara), two Golden Glove ((Ichiro and Michihiro Ogasawara) and two New Face (Satoru Komiyama and Hiroo Ishii), so obviously then I had 293 "regular" cards. Of those cards, 251 of them were unique. I ended up with 41 doubles and 1 triple (Masaaki Daitoh). (Well, 41 doubles and 1 triple in context of the box itself - I already had a bunch of 2000 BBM so I only got 75 new cards out of the box -which actually isn't bad compared to some of my previous experiences with BBM).

The expected rate for the insert cards is 1 per 15 packs for the New Face and the Golden Glove cards and 1 per 10 packs for the Best 9 cards, so I pretty much nailed the expected number of inserts. I was kind of disappointed (although not terribly surprised) that I didn't get any of the more rare inserts - the '90's Best Nine cards (1 per 60 packs or 1 per two boxes) and the Rookie Reprints (1 per 90 packs or 1 per three boxes) or the Jersey cards for the 1999 MVPs Kimiyasu Kudoh or Shigeki Noguchi. This is actually the second 2000 BBM box that I've gotten (along with a bunch of packs) and oddly enough I've gotten the rarer insert (a Rookie Reprint card of Hideki Matsui), but not a 90's Best Nine card. Just the luck of the draw I guess.

There was one really odd thing that I noticed. This was a Late Series box, so it had updated cards for the Marines and Tigers along with corrections for the "Leader" cards (which were incorrectly labelled "Reader" in the original release of the set). But I noticed when I was figuring out which cards that I didn't already have that there are two different versions of Seigo Fujishima's card (#360). Here's the original version:

Here's the Late Series version:

The backs of the cards appear to be identical (well, the background of the back is the picture from the front of the card - what I mean is that the text appears to be the same on both cards).

Gary Engel's "Japanese Baseball Card Checklist And Price Guide" does not mention this variant, so I can only speculate about why this happened. I guess the most likely reason is that maybe the original card shows someone other than Fujishima. It's kind of weird though - BBM appears to have not really had any error cards in their 20 year history other than the "Reader" cards in the 2000 set. And now it looks like there's another error in the set. Did they hire a new person for quality control in 2000 and the new guy didn't work out?

Card Of The Week June 12

2011-06-12T16:42:00.000-04:00

I showed a Taiwanese card of former Nippon Ham Fighter pitcher Tomokazu Iba yesterday. Here's a Japanese card for him, from the 2002 BBM 2nd Version set (#771):

Taiwanese Baseball Cards

2011-06-11T17:55:00.000-04:00

I've written in the past about baseball cards for the pro leagues in both Korea and Australia, but I've avoided saying much about cards for the league(s) in Taiwan for a very simple reason - while I have some cards from the CPBL (Chinese Professional Baseball League) - as opposed to the Taiwanese Major League (TML) , a rival league that was eventually absorbed by the CPBL - I know almost nothing about them. I'll show some sample cards and share what I know about them in hopes that maybe somebody can fill in the details.

I think the earliest cards I have are plastic ones. I think they are from the early 90's (the league didn't start until 1989) but I haven't been able to figure it out for sure. Here's one of them - no idea who the player is:

These two cards are from 1996. I think the league published the cards. According to the pack wrapper, the set was called VIP - Very Important Player card. The first card is #111 and I think is Bien Figueroa. The second card is #222 and might be Ron Jones.

A co-worker went to Taiwan in the spring of 1997 and brought back a pack of the following cards for me. They were made by a company called ProCard (not be confused with the US minor league card dealer). I'm pretty sure that this first card (#102) is Epy Guerrero, Jr. The second card is a Best 9 insert or subset card (#223) of Chung-Yi Huang.

Looks like ProCard also did a high end set in 1997. I got a bunch of these "Topps Finest"/Diamond Heroe-esque cards from eBay a few years ago. The first card is #62, the second is #52 - I have no idea who either player is.

Jason had let me know a couple months ago that the CPBL had produced cards for the league itself in 2009 and 2010. Apparently, they have posted images of the cards on the league's official blog. Now the cards that he's pointed out to me are from a set called "2010 CPBL Player Of The Year". I recently won the cards of a couple former Japanese players from someone on eBay. I think these are from the 2009 CPBL set. Mercifully for the Chinese impaired (like myself), the CPBL put the English names of the players on the cards. The first card is Ryokan Kobayashi (#085) and the second is former Nippon Ham Fighter Tomokazu Iba (#119):

New BBM sets

2011-06-11T17:35:00.000-04:00

BBM hadn't updated their website in over a month until last week, so I don't feel too bad about being a little slow and reporting on the two new sets that they've listed.

The first set is this year's edition of the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles team set. Like most of the other team sets, it's a 99 card pack based set. There's 77 cards for the players, coaches and manager (with a couple signature parallels available), a checklist card, and a series of subsets called (according to the Google translation) "Three Opener" (3 cards), "Bat Breaker Returns" (9 cards), "Wings Of Hope" (3 cards) and "Absolute Aces" (6 cards). I think the "Three Opener" cards commemorate the Eagles first game in Sendai on April 29 after the earthquake - there's a sample card on the web page showing a card depicting the pregame ceremonies. There is also a nine card insert set called "Play Ball" (which also has parallel versions) and various autograph cards. There's also some memorabilia cards available for Akinori Iwamura and Kazuo Matsui, including one card with jersey or patch from both of them. The set will be out in mid-June.

Someone asked me about the new Fighters "Mega Energy" set about a month ago, but BBM only posted information about it last week. It's a box set containing 28 cards - 27 "regular" cards plus a "special" card. The 27 "regular" cards consist of 18 player cards, eight "New Comer" cards (which I would assume would contain Yuki Saitoh) and a mascot card. The "special" cards include possible autograph or memorabilia cards, highlighted by a bunch of "Yu-Yu" cards featuring both Yu Darvish and Saitoh (Yu-Chan). I think some of them may be die-cut as well. The set will be released in late June. (And this set should not be confused with the Fighters team set, which will be a pack based set that will be released later in the season - assuming BBM continues what they've been doing the past few years.)

New Online Store

2011-06-11T17:23:00.000-04:00

In a comment for this post, a reader named Alex pointed out that Rakuten runs an English online store that will ship to the US (and other places) and sells baseball cards. It's apparently a collection of shops, so I've found multiple listings for some items. Unlike Ami Ami, they have more than just the most recent cards - I saw a box of the 2001 Upper Deck cards for sale. And they have a promotion going on this coming week - from 7 AM (EST) Monday (June 13) until 1 PM on Tuesday (June 14), they are offering free shipping to the US!

So thanks to Alex for the tip.