Eagles Team Issued Sets

Here's a couple card sets for the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles.

I've got seven cards from a 2006 set that Jason has identified as the "Seat Holders Club" card set.  Here's the front and back of one of them:

Jason has a list of around 50 cards from this set over at his post on team issued sets that includes all seven of the cards I have.

I have four cards from the 2009 Seat Owners Club set, another set that Jason has an extensive checklist of (along with the 2007, 2008 and 2010 sets and partial checklists for the 2011 & 2012 sets).  Again, I'll just show the front and back of one of the cards I have:

Ryan picked up a card from what may be another 2009 Eagles issued team set a couple months back.

I also picked about nine cards from a 2013 Eagles issue:

What's nice about this set is that we actually know a lot about it.  For starters, Ryan picked up a pack of it a few years back, so we know it was sold in six(?) card packs.  Even better, however, is the fact that Jambalaya has the full set up at their site.  There are 74 player cards in the base set plus two "SS" subsets - one of 11 cards and one of three cards.  There are also 12 insert cards and (according to Ryan), three jersey cards and 34 autograph cards.

Jambalaya is located in Fukushima, Tokohu, so they've been selling the Eagles team issues the last few years.  Last year's set contained 69 player cards in the base set plus sixteen additional subset cards along with a 10 card insert set.  This year's set was apparently just released this week (in time for their home opener Tuesday?) and contains 76 player cards plus 17 subset cards in the base set along with another 10 insert cards.  Not sure of the details about memorabilia or autograph cards for either set but Jambalaya does have a couple autograph cards from the 2014 set for sale.

1991 BBM Box Break

I've had some correspondence lately with a reader named Jay who told me that he had recently picked up an unopened box of 1991 BBM off of Ebay.  I asked if he'd be willing to contribute information and photos for a "box break" and he graciously agreed.

The 1991 BBM set featured 399 cards in its base set plus 12 "team logo" hologram cards as the only chase cards.  The cards were sold in boxes of 30 10 card packs.  According to Engel, the hologram cards were inserted into the boxes at a rate of 2 per box.  The set was also available as a factory set which did not include any of the holograms.

Here's the photos Jay sent me:

Jay was very impressed by BBM's decollation - "The amazing thing was I got NO duplicates".  So out of 30 packs of 10 cards, he got 299 unique cards plus one team logo hologram (for the Fighters).  What's more, each pack contained the cards in numerical sequence - for example, the cards in a pack were numbered from first to last as "7, 28, 45, 77, 98, 130, 179, 230, 283, 321" while the next would be "6, 27, 44, 76, 97, 129, 178, 229, 282, 320".  I've opened boxes from 1992 and 1994 in the past and did not see this behavior (and I'm pretty sure I got duplicates) so I suspect it was only for 1991.  I would guess BBM realized pretty quick that something like that would make it possible for someone to predict what cards would be in unopened packs simply by opening the top pack in the stack of packs.  (This is assuming that I'm not misunderstanding what Jay sent me and the two example sequences he sent are actual pack sequences and not just something he put together for an example).

Besides the 10 cards, each pack also contained what I think is a promo for the 1991 set - it has a breakdown of the cards in the set (30 cards per team, 23 Leader cards, 10 Nostalgic Stars and the 12 team hologram logos) although it does not mention the 6 checklist cards.

Jay was understandably pretty pleased with his take - for $34.95 (plus free shipping), he picked up about three quarters of BBM's inaugural set.

Thanks for sharing the photos and the information Jay!

Sports Card Magazine #110

It's that time again - the latest issue of Sports Card Magazine (#110) hit the shelves in Japan on Saturday.  My copy showed up yesterday.  The cover price of this issue was 2110 yen, which is over 300 yen more than last issue and a whopping 1100 yen over what issue #102 cost (the last issue in 2013 before SCM went to 12 insert cards per issue).  I'm not exactly sure what caused the jump in price and I'm not positive that it will be permanent.

The cover story deals with Daisuke Matsuzaka and Hiroki Kuroda and their return to Japan.  It's kind of interesting even if I can't read the article - it shows a bunch of cards for both of them (all BBM of course) and has little head to head competitions between comparable cards - best rookie card (Matsuzaka's 1999 card over Kuroda's 1997 card), best autograph card (Kuroda's 2004 Carp Expert over Matsuzaka's 2003 Lions), best game used memorabilia card (Matsuzaka's 2002 1st Version Glove card over Kuroda's 2005 2nd Version Undershirt card), best insert card (Matsuzaka's 2002 Touch The Game All Star over Kuroda's 2007 Carp Shining Star), best parallel (Kuroda's 2007 1st Version "1 of 1" over Matsuzaka's 2006 2nd Version "hologram autograph") and best MLB memorabilia card (Kuroda's 2014 Topps Supreme autograph & patch card over Matsuzaka's 2013 Topps Five Stars Golden Graphs autograph card).

The color section also contains a two page article on BBM's first four team sets for 2015 (the Eagles, Swallows, Buffaloes and Hawks) which also contained a schedule for the release of all the team sets in 2015 (Carp, Fighters and Dragons will be out in late May, the Tigers will be out in early June, the Marines and Baystars in late June and the Lions and Giants in early July).  Most of the remainder of the color sections is ads for BBM's recent and upcoming releases - 1st Version (2 pages), Eagles, Swallows, Hawks, Buffaloes, Giant Step (half page), Fighters Horizon (half page), Icons - Aces and Tigers 80th Anniversary.  The most significant new piece of information out of these pages is that 1st Version will have team checklists and they will be the team mascots yet again.  The most interesting piece in the "newsprint" section is an article on all the new foreign players in NPB for 2015.  This article shows US cards for a number of the players including Topps, Bowman, Panini and even a Tennessee Smokies card of Marines pitcher Dae-Eun Rhee.

There are checklists for all the BBM issues shown in the color section and the revolving vintage checklist and price guide is for all of BBM's baseball cards (as predicted).

Their list of "Best Cards" for the issue is:

Best Card Of This Month:  Keisuke Honda autograph card from 2014-15 Japan National Team (soccer)
Best Item Of This Month:  BBM Rookie Edition
Hot Card Lists
Rookies:
1. 2015 BBM Rookie Edition Kazuma Okamoto (#54)
2. 2015 BBM Rookie Edition Kona Takahashi (#39)
3. 2015 BBM Rookie Edition Kohei Arihara (#23)
4. 2015 BBM Rookie Edition Takayoshi Noma (#67)
5. 2015 BBM Rookie Edition Sachiya Yamasaki (#14)
6. 2015 BBM Rookie Edition Tomohiro Anraku (#45)
7. 2015 BBM Rookie Edition Ryosuke Nomura (#76)
8. 2014 BBM 1st Version Daichi Ohsera (#239)
9. 2013 BBM 1st Version Shohei Ohtani (#183)
10. 2007 BBM 1st Version Masahiro Tanaka (#211)

Autograph & Memorabilia:
1. 2015 BBM Masters Of Insert Kazuhiro Kiyohara autograph card
2. 2014-15 Japan National Team Keisuke Honda autograph card
3. 2015 BBM Rookie Edition Kazuma Okamoto facsimile autograph parallel
4. 2015 BBM Rookie Edition Kona Takahashi facsimile autograph parallel
5. 2015 BBM Rookie Edition Kohei Arihara facsimile autograph parallel
6. 2015 V Premier League (Volleyball) Megumi Kurihara autograph card
7. 2014-15 Japan National Team Yoshinori Muto autograph card
8. 2015 BBM Rookie Edition Takayoshi Noma facsimile autograph parallel
9. 2015 BBM True Heart Mio Shirai autograph card
10. 2015 BBM True Heart Mio Shirai autograph photo card

Finally, the best part of each issue is usually the enclosed baseball cards.  This issue has 12 "Cross Plasma" cards.  "Cross Plasma" is this year's cross set subset for BBM.  There are 36 "Cross Plasma" cards in the 1st Version set and if BBM continues what they've done in past years, there will be 36 more cards in each of the 2nd Version and Genesis sets.  These 12 cards (one for each team) are not promo versions of 1st Version "Cross Plasma" cards but bonus ones - they are numbered CP 37 to CP 48 while the "Cross Plasma" cards in 1st Version are CP 1 to CP 36.  I'll be curious to see if BBM does this two more times this year - making it 36 SCM "Cross Plasma" cards to go with the 36 in each of the "flagship" sets.

The cards themselves resemble the "Cross X" subsets from previous years (Stream in 2010, Blast in 2011, Blaze in 2012, Wind in 2013 and Cosmic Cross in 2014 SCM) - a photo of the player superimposed on a "plasma" background on the front and the original picture on the back:

CP37/SCM308

Back of CP37/SCM308

The players in the set include two players returning from the US (Matsuzaka and Hiroyuki Nakajima), two players who changed teams over the winter (Takahiro Arai and Yoshisa Naruse) and three rookies (Kohei Arihara, Kona Takahashi and Tomohiro Anraku):

CP39/SCM310

I lucked into a silver facsimile autograph parallel for Atsushi Nohmi:

CP44/SCM315

All 12 cards can be seen at Jambalaya.

Card Of The Week March 29

Yoshitmo Tsutsugoh of the Baystars was the first player to multiple home runs this season, hitting one in each of his first two games.  This, of course, put him on pace for 143 home runs for the year but his lack of a home run in today's game dropped his projected total to about 95.  The fun you can have with small sample sizes...

2013 BBM Baystars #DB99

Marines Team Issued Sets

To continue my posts on team issued sets, I thought I'd do a quick one a couple sets I have cards from for the Marines.  These sets were issued through the Marines Fan Club called Team26.

I have five cards from the 2011 set.  I've actually done a post showing all five before but I'll repeat one of them here (with the card back):

The cards are unnumbered except for the player's uniform number.  The cards I have are Toshiaki Imae (#8), Yoshihisa Naruse (#17), Yuki Karakawa (#19), Tomoya Satozaki (#22) and Yoshifumi Okada (#66).

I have six cards from the 2012 set - five player cards plus a team card.  Here's one of the player cards along with the team card:

Like the 2011 cards, the 2012 cards are unnumbered except for the player's uniform numbers.  The five players I have are Tadahito Iguchi (#6), Toshiaki Imae (#8), Yoshihisa Naruse (#17), Yuki Karakawa (#19), and Katsuya Kakunaka (#61).

Cracking The SCM Price Guide Code

Sports Card Magazine (SCM) is published six times a year by Baseball Magazine Sha.  There is a vintage card checklist in each issue, the contents of which rotate from issue to issue.  I confirmed tonight that there's an actual pattern to this rotation.  Now granted, this isn't exactly on a par with cracking Enigma or (more appropriately) Purple but it did take having enough issues on hand to figure it out.

I put it all in table form.  The four columns on the right are all the recent issues of SCM that I have (per year of publication date) which I used to confirm this rotation.

Publication Date	Cover Date	Checklist Contents	2015	2014	2013	2012
January	March	Sumo/Other Sports	109	103	97
March	May	Baseball - BBM		104
May	July	Soccer - J League?		105	99
July	September	Baseball - nonBBM		106	100
September	November	Soccer - non J-League?		107	101	95
November	January	Wrestling		108		96

I want to note here that SCM actually uses the English word "soccer" in labeling those two checklists which I find kind of surprising.

I have a couple issues from 10 years ago that do not follow this pattern so I don't know how long ago this particular sequence of vintage checklists started.  And of course, past performance is no guarantee of future performance.  But I'm pretty confident right now that SCM Issue 110 (which comes out Saturday) will have the complete BBM listing for its vintage price guide.

More New BBM

BBM is finally starting to get caught up on their upcoming releases.  They put information for a couple new ones up on their website in the last week or so.

- As I think everyone expected, BBM is issuing an 80th Anniversary set for the Hanshin Tigers.  At 81 cards in the base set, this set is smaller than either of the two previous Tigers Anniversary sets - the 70th in 2005 and the 75th in 2010 - which both had 99 cards in the base set.  There's pretty much no subsets in the set, just a difference between whether the player is an OB player (66 cards) or a current player (15 cards).  There's a 15 card "Tigers Heroes" insert set and the usual assortment of autographed cards.  The set will be out in late April.

- The next two of BBM's annual team sets will be for the Buffaloes and the Hawks.  Both are pack based sets with 81 cards in their base set.  The Buffaloes base set will have 69 "regular" cards (for the manager and players), two checklist cards and an unidentified 10 card subset.  There will be three insert sets - "Bs Triplets" (3 cards), "Lockdown Relievers" (6 cards) and "Horn Attack" (9 cards) - and numerous autograph cards, including dual signature ones.  The set will be released in early April.  The Hawks set will have 68 "regular" cards (for the manager and players) and a number of subsets - a three card Daisuke Matsuzaka puzzle, three "Road To Record" cards, four "2014 Award" cards along with three single card "subsets" - "Next Decade", "2014 Japan" (Nippon Series Champs?) and a checklist.  There are two nine card insert sets called "Super Hawks" and "Hyper Hawks" and a wide variety of autographed cards.  This set will be out in late April.