2006 BBM 1st Version

2006 BBM 1st Version Set Summary

Size:  501 cards
Cards Per Team: 37 (team card, manager + 35 players)
Team Card Theme:  Game Action/Candids
Numer Of Leader Cards:  36
Checklists:  None
Subsets:  Retirement Players (20), Legend Players (4)
Inserts:  Best 9, Golden Glove
Memorabilia Cards:  Jersey cards for Toshiya Sugiuchi, Toshiaki Imae and Daisuke Miura.  Tomoaki Kanemoto bat card.  Dual jersey cards for Sugiuchi & Miura and Imae & Kanemoto.
Parallels:  108 cards have silver facsimile autographs.  There is also a gold facsimile autographed version of those 108 cards that is serially numbered to 100. Autographed Versions of Retirement Players (except Koji Gotoh and Daisuke Motoki) and Legend Players subsets (numbered to 50).  Gold and "Blue Hologram" parallels for both the Best 9 and Golden Glove insert sets - the "Blue Hologram" parallels are serially numbered to 100.
Notable Rookies:  Kazuyuki Yoshimi, Yuichi Honda, Nobuhiro Matsuda, Daikan Yoh (as Chung-Shou Yang), Takahiro Okada, Ginji Akaminai

After growing the 1st Version set back to the pre-2002 "flagship" set sizes in 2005, for 2006 BBM dialed the size of the 1st Version set back down a little.  The 2006 set had 501 cards in it, almost 60 cards down from the 2005 set.  The drop in set size is pretty much completely attributable to the drop in the number of players depicted - the 2005 set had 40 players per team (480 player cards in all) while the 2006 set had just 35 (420).  Atsuya Furuta of the Swallows had been named player-manager and so had both a player and a manager card.

Cards #325 (left) and #341 (right)

Once again, 108 of the player cards (9 per team) had two varieties of parallel facsimile autograph cards - gold (numbered to 100) and silver.

Gold and regular versions of card #183

Silver and regular versions of card #78

Besides the annual Leader subset, the only subsets in this set are the Retired Player subset containing cards of player who retired at the end of the previous season and the Legend Player subset featuring cards of managers who left their positions (either voluntarily or otherwise) following the 2005 season.  One Retired Player who stands out is Shigetoshi Hasegawa who had been playing in MLB for the Angels and Mariners since 1997.  I believe at this time he is the only player to retire as an MLB player to appear in one of BBM's subsets or sets for retiring players.  Kazuhiro Sasaki also appears in this particular subset, but he had played in NPB the previous two seasons.  The other 18 players in the subset are Koji Gotoh, Kiyoshi Hatsushiba, Tsutomu Iwamoto, Takashi Kashiwada, Tetsuru Kawajiri, Makoto Kitoh, Kanei Kobayashi, Daisuke Motoki, Takeshi Nakamura, Shinji Nishiyama, Kenjiro Nomura, Koichi Ohshima, Toshikazu Sawazaki, Masanori Taguchi, Taisei Takagi, Hiroshi Takamura, Kenichi Watanabe and Tatsuki Yamamoto.  The four former managers (Legend Players) are Tsuneo Horiuchi, Yasushi Tao, Tsutomu Wakamatsu and Koji Yamamoto.  They're all depicted as managing the team they were left go from (the Giants, Eagles, Swallows and Carp respectively) rather than from their playing days like all the previous Legend Player subsets.  There are serially numbered (to 50) autographed versions of all the Retirement Player and Legend player cards except for Gotoh and Motoki for some reason.

#475

#486

Regular packs for the set contained the two now-standard insert sets for the previous season's Best 9 and Golden Glove teams.  There were gold parallel versions of both inserts also along with a serially numbered (to 100) "blue hologram" version.

#BN2

Gold Version of #BN11

#GG4

Engel does not list any special "Light" pack cards associated with this set - no "kira" cards, not MVP inserts.  I do not know if this is simply an oversight on his part of if BBM either did not issue "Light" packs for this set or didn't issue special cards with them.  Engel does list "Light" pack cards for the 2006 2nd Version set so I'm inclined to believe that BBM didn't issue them for this set.

Other cards and ephemera (this is the last set that I attempted to build from unopened boxes so the last one that I'll have wrappers, etc for):

#57

#159

#131

#230

#181

#279

Back of #375 (Shinnosuke Abe)

#499

#450

Wrapper

Box top

Checklist insert in box