2025 BBM 35th Anniversary & Shukan Baseball 4000th Issue set

BBM celebrated their 35th year of doing baseball cards in 2026 and late in the year their parent company, Baseball Magazine Sha, published the 4000th issue of Shukan (Weekly) Baseball magazine.  To commemorate both of these occasions, BBM issued a set with the somewhat unwieldy name of "35th Anniversary & Shukan Baseball 4000th" or something like that.  The set was originally supposed to be released in December but it ended up getting delayed for a few weeks and didn't actually make it into the stores until early January.

I was intrigued enough by the set that I decided that I would buy it.  After all, I had bought BBM's sets for their 20th (2010), 25th (2015) and 30th (2020) Anniversaries so it'd be understandable if I broke my pledge not to buy anymore new stuff and picked it up.  It was a little on the pricey side - well, the set itself wasn't pricey but shipping was, especially since I was only getting the one set.  The total for everything was 7687 yen which worked out to $53.33.  That broke down to 1500 yen ($10.42) for the set, 500 yen ($3.47) for ZenMarket's fee, 600 yen ($4.17) for domestic shipping and 5078(!) yen ($35.27) for overseas shipping via DHL.  As far as I can tell, I did not have to pay any tariffs on the set - I didn't pay anything extra to ZenMarket and I wasn't charged anything by DHL.  I suspect this was because the set was so cheap - if I'd ordered more stuff, I'd have probably had to pay something.

As usual, I only got the base set, which contained 238 cards.  The base set is split not quite evenly between cards of OB players (118 cards) and active players (120 cards).  I suspect that BBM had issues lining all the OB players up as when the set was originally announced back in October, it was supposed to be 240 cards in total with 120 OB players.  This was probably the source of the delay in the publication of the set.  The active player cards are further split between "regular" cards and "rookie" cards done in the style of the initial BBM set in 1991.

Previously BBM had limited themselves to only players who were active in 1991 or later in their Anniversary sets but with Shukan Baseball having started in 1958, they were able to also include players from the previous 33 years as well to this set.  The set therefore includes legends like Sadaharu Oh, Shigeo Nagashima, Katsuya Nomura, Masaichi Kaneda, Kazuhisa Inao, Sachio Kinugasa, Yutaka Fukumoto, Hiromitsu Kadota, Koji Yamamoto, Atsuya Furuta, Hideki Matsui and Hiroki Kuroda.  There's a couple retired foreign players - Randy Bass and Warren Cromartie.  Bass shows up in sets pretty frequently but this is the first appearance by Cromartie in a BBM set since 2013.  There's a fair number of active MLB players in the set as well - Yu Darvish, Seiya Suzuki, Masataka Yoshida, Yusei Kikuchi, Yuki Matsui and Kodai Senga - although none of the Dodgers' ex-NPB contingent - Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto or Roki Sasaki - are included.  As usual there are a number of notable players missing, including the usual suspects of Ichiro, Hideo Nomo, Yutaka Enatsu and Kazuhiro Kiyohara.  I was kind of surprised, though, that the set didn't include Isao Harimoto, Masaaki Koyama, Choji Murata, Tsutomo Itoh, or Kosuke Fukudome.  

My initial hope for the set was that the front of each card would be a reproduction of a Shukan Baseball cover but, alas, that was not the case (although there are "secret versions" of 36 of the cards that ARE reproductions of the magazine covers but I didn't get any of those).  Having done some cursory inspection of the cards online, however, I got the impression that all the photos in the set had appeared on the cover of issues of the magazine over the years and that the cover of the magazine would appear on the back of the card.  But when I got the cards and was able to look at them all, I was surprised (and a bit disappointed) that only some of the cards featured what had been a cover photo.  Only 79 of the 118 OB cards had the cover photos - here's an example of the front and back of one that did:

#077

#077

I thought that "ok, maybe some of these guys were never on the cover of the magazine" but then I noticed there were some cards (18 in all) that had a magazine cover on the back that had a DIFFERENT photo than the front had.  Some appeared to have photos on the front that could have been taken at the same time:

#052

#052

Others just had a different (and in some cases inferior) photo on the front:

#017

#017

There's another 21 players whose card doesn't feature a magazine cover on the back.  Twenty of those cards just have the same photo on both sides of the card.  I'm kind of surprised that BBM couldn't find a cover photo of Kazuhiro Sasaki and some of the other players:

#049

#049

That final cover-less card is for Haruki Ihara and weirdly features a different photo on the back than the front.  I've no idea why his card is like this (and, to be completely honest, I've no idea why he's even in the set.  I mean, no offense to him, but if I making a list of the most significant players or managers over the last 68 years, he's not making the top 500, despite winning a Pacific League pennant in one of the three and half years he was a manager):

#100

#100

Despite my disappointment that not all the photos were cover shots, there were some decent ones in the set:

#036

#094

#057

#061

All of these except the Arakawa card had been cover photos.  The back of Arakawa's card shows a Shukan Baseball cover with another photo of him on it although it still shows him as a Yakult Atom.

The 120 active player cards are split into two groups - 108 "regular" cards (similar to the OB cards but with a different border color) and 12 1991-style cards for 2025 rookies.  Most of the major 2025 NPB stars are in the "regular" cards, including 2026-MLB players Munetaka Murakami, Kazuma Okamoto and Tatsuya Imai.  Other big names include Hiromi Itoh, Teruaki Sato, Kensuke Kondoh, Chusei Mannami and Shugo Maki.  There's also a handful of foreign players including Livan Moinelo, Raidel Martinez, Sandro Fabian, Franmil Reyes, Jose Osuna and Tyler Nevin.  There are also eight 2025 rookies included in the "regular" cards (as opposed to the 1991-style cards).  I was a little surprised that neither Yuki Yanagita nor Takeya Nakamura were in the set.  You could argue that neither played enough in 2025 but neither did Hayato Sakamoto and he's in the set so some fan service is not out of the question.

Only 16 of the 108 "regular" active player cards featured a photo that had been used on a Shukan Baseball cover, including one of my favorite cards from the set:

#135

#135

Posed shot in front of the Koshien Stadium scoreboard?  Proof that you can do a posed photo that doesn't look like a mug shot?  Yes to both.  Topps, please take note.

The other 82 active player cards feature the same non-cover photo on both the front and back:

#159

#159

The photo selection for the active players isn't great - way too many "pitchers pitching, batters batting" shots - but there are some good photos in the set.  It's probably not a coincidence that most of the were cover shots, including all the ones I'm using as examples:

#147

#201

#124

#140

Again, attention, Topps!  You can do a posed shot of a player that's more interesting than just a head and shoulders image of a player staring at the camera with no expression.

The last batch of cards in the set to talk about are the twelve 1991 style cards that feature one 2025 rookie for each team.  I've kind of mixed feelings about these cards as they seem like kind of an afterthought as well as really the only thing in the base set that really has anything to do with it being BBM's anniversary.  The twelve rookies are Yusei Ishizuka (Giants), Takato Ihara (Tigers), Yu Takeda (Baystars), Tai Sasaki (Carp), Yuto Nakamura (Swallows), Yumeto Kanemura (Dragons), Yudai Shoji (Hawks), Reo Shibata (Fighters), Misho Nishikawa (Marines), Ruo Muneyama (Eagles), Yusuke Mugitani (Buffaloes) and Seiya Watanabe (Lions).  Everyone but Shoji and Watanabe were their team's first pick in the 2024 draft (Shoji and Watanabe were their team's second picks).  My biggest gripe about this subset is that seven of the players (Nishikawa, Kanemura, Ihara, Shibata, Watanabe, Muneyama and Takeda) were in the "regular" player cards as well.  I think I'd really have preferred BBM to have these guys only show up in the the 1991 subset and include seven other players in the "regular" cards.  Here's the Muneyama card:

#236

I guess ultimately I'm feeling kind of "meh" about the set.  It had such promise but I think the execution by BBM could have been better.  It is possible that I'm being a little hard on the set since I violated my "not buying any new sets" pledge to pick it up.  I'm getting kind of gun-shy since this is the second set I've picked up since making that pledge and the second one that I'm somewhat disappointed with (the first being last year's Epoch "Career Achievements Japan National Team" box set).  Maybe I just need to stick to my guns and not get anything else.

One cool thing BBM could have done in the set was have a subset of cards showing covers of Shukan Baseball that had multiple players on it.  After all, the first ever issue of the magazine featured a photo of both Tatsuro Hirooka and Shigeo Nagashima.  There is a "Combined" insert set showing two players but it just shows an OB player and an active player from each team as opposed to a multi-player photo.

You can see all the cards over at Jambalaya (including some of the autographed cards and premium parallels and inserts).

Zippy Zapped Yet Again!

I arrived home from work Tuesday evening to discover another trans-Pacific delivery from Kenny (aka Zippy Zappy). The brown envelope contained a whopping 13 cards - two from Calbee and eleven from Epoch.

I'll start off with the Calbees.  These are two more of their "Pro Yakyu Spirits A" cards although it was not immediately obvious if they were from the set that was released at the beginning of last December (which Kenny had sent me a card from earlier this year) or the one that came out at the end of last month (both sets are called the same thing - "Pro Yakyu Spirits A").  I finally realized that the card numbers indicated that they were both from the set from last month (even though the "cover date" on the cards is 2025):

2025 Calbee Pro Yakyu Spirits A #PS-41 (Naofumi Kizawa)

2025 Calbee Pro Yakyu Spirits A #PS-44 (Hiromi Itoh)

I guess had expected that these cards would have "Series2" on them since the ones from December had "Series1" but they don't.  Well, actually now that I look at all the cards in the set over at Jambalaya, I see that the "Anniversary Player" cards from the set do have "Series2" on them (as opposed to these which are "Prospi Selection" cards).  So cards PS-01 to PS-24 which were in the set released in December are "Series1", as are cards PS-24 to PS-48 which were in the set released in January.  But cards PS-49 to PS-72 that are also in the set released in January are labeled "Series2".  Make perfect sense, right?

Kenny figured out the best way to keep them straight: "I thought these were all the same set but the only difference was whether they came 1 per bag or 2 per bag."  (The set from December was 

The Epoch cards were much less confusing.  They were all from last year's NPB set.  I was really happy to get these as Epoch was the only Japanese card manufacturer that I hadn't gotten any cards from last year:

2025 Epoch NPB #167

2025 Epoch NPB #107

2025 Epoch NPB #121

2025 Epoch NPB #038

2025 Epoch NPB #075

2025 Epoch NPB #144

2025 Epoch NPB #211

2025 Epoch NPB #229

2025 Epoch NPB #181

2025 Epoch NPB #096

2025 Epoch NPB #002

So once again, thanks for the cards, Kenny!

2017 Konami Baseball Collection Location Tests

Konami's most recent collectible card game was called Baseball Collection.  Apparently the cards were won by playing an arcade game and were subsequently used in the playing of more games.  Konami produced the cards for five years, from 2018 to 2022.  

Or so I thought.

I was recently made aware through a comment by a reader to an old post that Konami did a number of "test events" for the game in late 2017 and early 2018.  These events apparently featured cards that I'd never seen before - or had even heard about.  The person who commented on the post mentioned that there was a test event in Osaka that he was particularly interested in.

I did a little research to see if I could find out anything about these cards.  I went back to the search page for Baseball Collection on Suruga-ya's website - the same one I had used last year to figure out how Konami numbered their cards.  I plugged "2017" into the search field and was pleasantly surprised to have a list of 134 cards appear.  The cards appeared to be in two groups based on the prefixes of the card numbers.  There were 14 cards with a "201701" prefix and 120 cards with a "201702" prefix.  All of the "01" cards had a release date of September 22, 2017 associated with them along with the text "Baseball Collection Location Test Version Round One Umeda Store Exclusive"*.  All of the "02" cards had a release date of October 1, 2017 and had the text "Baseball Collection Location Test Version".

* To be clear - the text was associated with the listing of the cards at Suruga-ya - not on the cards themselves

Umeda, of course, is in Osaka so my first thought was that this was the event that the commenter was referencing.

According to the card lists, it looked like there was one card per team for the "201701" cards plus two extra cards of Shohei Ohtani (there's a total of three Ohtani cards in this group of cards - one of which is at the top of this post) and ten cards per team for the "201702" cards (and no Ohtani cards).

So we've established that there were definitely 2017 Baseball Collection cards.  But I wondered what else I could find out about the test events.  Well, to be completely accurate, I wondered what Kenny and Ryan could find out about the test events as both of them are ,uch better at finding out stuff about gaming cards that I am.  

Kenny found a long video showing someone playing the game in early 2018 and a brief mention of the game in a preview of new games from early February, 2018.  Ryan found someone selling another Ohtani card from the "201701" cards (the extremely low price of which makes me think it's an old listing).

Both of them independently of each other found a very useful site that contains a great deal of information about the test events for the game.  That site confirmed that the initial test event began on September 22, 2017 at the Round One Umeda store*.  This was followed by another event in mid-October at an unrecorded location in Aichi (I don't think it was a secret test or anything, I'm guessing the author of the page simply didn't know where it was).

* Round One is a chain of "Sports Entertainment" stores in Japan (and apparently also the US)

The next event wouldn't be until mid-January of 2018 at the Silk Hat Kawasaki Dice store (Silk Hat being a chain of arcades) which was followed by an event in mid-to-late February as "Sports Wave Iron Arm 24 Hamano Store Comtec Tower" which I think is in Chiba (not positive but I think Sports Wave is part of the Yamazakiya arcade chain).  The next event was in early March in Hiroshima at the Amipara arcade (Amipara being another arcade chain).  Later in March, there were two events at Round One locations in Yokohama and Fukuoka.  The final events (or at least the final ones listed) were at the end of April and beginning of May at both the Silk Hat Kawasaki Dice store and the Giga Zone Hiroshima Station store (which apparently closed at the end of August, 2021).

The site also gives the pricing information.  It cost 300 yen for one credit which allowed you to play one game and get one card.  The cards apparently were actually printed by the game machine (as opposed to simply dispensed).  It was possible to buy multiple credits/cards at one time but there was no discount.  Two credits were 600 yen, three were 900 yen and four were 1200 yen.  Five was, as you'd expect, 1500 yen but you would be guaranteed that one of your five cards was a "Rare" (or better) card.  The next listed increment is nine - I don't know if that meant you couldn't buy six, seven or eight credits in one go or not.  The nine cards (2700 yen) would be include two "Rare" (or better) cards.

I was initially thinking that the listing at Suruga-ya of the 2017 cards might be comprehensive, even though there were only 14 of the "201701" cards, but doing a search of "ベースボールコレクションロケテスト" ("Baseball Card Location Test") on Mercari disabused me of that notion.  To be fair, it may have a complete listing of the "201702" cards but the Mercari search came up with additional "201701" cards.  What should have tipped me off that that wasn't a complete listing of the "201701" cards is that 12 of the 14 were marked as "UR" or "Ultra Rare" while there was only one "Rare" card and one "Normal" card.  I want to show a couple sample "201701" cards although the only "UR" card I've seen is the Ohtani card at the top of this post.  That image was swiped from Suruga-ya but you can also see the card at this post on Mercari - in case you feel like spending 355,050 yen ($2432).  Here's a couple "R" ("Rare") cards:

And a couple "N" ("Normal") cards:

Here's what the backs of the cards look like.  The backs are the same regardless of whether the card in "UR", "R" or "N":

Something interesting to note about the backs - the card numbering is a little different than it would be in later years as the player's uniform number has not been incorporated into the number.  There's also a two letter designation of "NM" for the "Normal" cards rather than the single letter used from 2018 on.  (The "Rare" designator also changed from "RA" to "R".)  So, for example, while this card of Sugano has a number of "201701-NM-G003-00", later cards of Sugano would have numbers like "201810-N-G019-00".

Konami changed the card design completely between the "201701" cards and the "201702" cards.  The "201702" cards look very similar to the 2018 cards.  Konami also changed the designation of the rarest cards from "UR" ("Ultra Rate") to "SR" ("Super Rare").  Here are example cards of each type - "N", "R" and "SR" (all three images were swiped from Suruga-ya):

The card backs again were the same regardless of whether the card was "SR", "R" or "N":

In paleontology, we'd refer to this card back as a "transitional fossil" as it exhibits traits of its predecessor (the card number not including the player's uniform number) as well as its successors (the rest of the card back looks pretty much the same as the card backs for the 2018-22 cards).

Because there's a three month gap between the initial test events in September/October of 2017 and the later test events in January-May of 2018, I'm going to guess that the "201701" cards were used in the 2017 events and the "201702" cards were used in the 2018 events.  The author of the web page that both Kenny and Ryan pointed me at attended a couple of the events in Kanto in January, February and April and all the cards in the photos on the site appear to be the "201702" cards.

As you might expect with the "2017" test events lasting until May of 2018, the "official" 2018 Baseball Collection cards were not released until September 25th, nearly the end of the baseball season.  Curiously, the first digraph on the 2018 card numbers (the two digits following the year in the first group of numbers) was "10" while it was "00" in subsequent years.  The remaining four sets were released near the beginning of the baseball season - late March of each year except 2020 when COVID delayed the start of the season until June.

Thanks again to Kenny and Ryan (as well as the unknown author of that website) for doing the research for me on this.

Card Of The Week February 15

Someone on the Japanese Baseball Card Discord group was showing off their recent card acquisitions a few weeks back and one of the cards they'd picked was Hideki Matsui's rookie card from the 1993 set.  Another member of the group asked if it was an original card or a reprint and the poster confirmed that it was an original.

That got me thinking about what reprints exist for Matsui's rookie card.  I only know of two "official" reprints - ones that were issued by BBM.  The first was an insert from the 2000 BBM "flagship" set.  To celebrate their tenth year of publishing baseball cards, BBM included 12 card insert set featuring reprints of one rookie card from each of the twelve teams.  Matsui was the Giants representative.  

The second card was included in the 2003 BBM "The Legend Of Hideki Matsui" set.  It was part of the base set, along with reprints of his 1997 Diamond Heroes Jersey card (sans jersey) and one of his cards from the 1999 Yomiuri Shimbum Giants set.

I have both of these reprints along with the 1993 original so I thought I'd share them here.  The 2000 reprint is pretty clearly marked on both the front and back as a reprint but the 2003* card is only marked as a reprint on the back.  Despite BBM having adopted the standard 2 1/2" x 3 1/2" card size in 1995, both reprints are the original 2 2/8" x 3 3/8" size that BBM's used for their 1991-94 cards.

Here are the fronts and backs of all three cards:

* The set was released in early 2003 but the cards all have a 2002 copyright on them

1993 BBM #423

1993 BBM #423

2000 BBM "Rookie Reprint" #R8

2000 BBM "Rookie Reprint" #R8

2003 BBM "The Legend Of Hideki Matsui" #52

2003 BBM "The Legend Of Hideki Matsui" #52

I don't know of any other reprints of Matsui's rookie cards.  BBM did another "Rookie Reprint" insert set in the 2017 1st Version set but it only included active players.  BBM did another tribute set to Matsui when he retired in 2013 but it did not contain any reprint cards.