Sunday, July 25, 2010

60th Anniversary Lions Set

Last week, BBM announced yet another new Anniversary set - this time for the 60th Anniverary of the Lions. Now one might wonder why BBM felt it necessary to issue another Lions commemorative set after just doing a couple two years ago in connection with the 30th Anniversary of Seibu buying the team and moving them from Fukuoka to Saitama, but that would almost be as silly as asking why there needed to be a Tigers 75th Anniversary set five years after the Tigers 70th Anniversary set.

Anyway, needed or not, the set will be a pack based set containing 99 base cards. There's six "Team History" cards, 54 cards of OB players (which appear to include both Kazuo Matsui and Daisuke Matsuzaka), and 14 cards for the Lions Classic games this year (featuring current players wearing the 73-74 Taiheiyo Club Lions uniforms). There's also 25 cards that are translating as "Taiheiyo Club Lions" but I strongly suspect are really for the 2010 Lions (since a subset featuring the current team is a standard of the Anniversary sets). There's a club Best 9 insert set and a bunch of possible autograph cards - the example shown is of Frank Howard (I'm hoping that means there's a card of Hondo in the regular set). The set will be out in late August.

As this is the 60th Anniversary of the beginning of the two league system, it will be interesting to see what other Anniversary sets BBM decides to do. The other teams celebrating their 60th birthday this year are the Marines and the Swallows, both of whom had 40th Anniversary sets for their current owners in the past couple years. There also has still been no Anniversary set for the Fighters - I guess they could do a 65th Anniversary set since the team first played in 1945 (well, really 1946 - there really was no season in 1945) as the Senators.

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