Wednesday, April 23, 2014

New Historic Sets

A couple new historic sets were announced recently:

- BBM is putting out what I suspect will be the first of at least two sets to celebrate the 80th Anniversary of professional baseball in Japan.  I'm not quite sure what to call the set so I'm going to go with "80th Anniversary Pitchers".  As you might expect from that name, the set will exclusively feature pitchers, both OB and current.  The set contains 99 cards - 90 player cards and a nine card subset that I think is for pitching records.  The Google translation is a bit confusing but I think that instead of any insert cards there are foil signature parallel cards available as well as actual autograph cards.  The set will be out in late May.

- In 1975 the Hiroshima Toyo Carp won their first ever Central League pennant.  They followed this up with five more pennants in the following 16 years - 1979, 1980, 1984, 1986 and 1991, winning the Nippon Series in 1979, 1980 and 1984.  To celebrate the 40th Anniversary (yeah, I know, it's really the 40th season since 1975) of their first pennant, Epoch is putting out a box set featuring Carp players and managers from all six pennant winners.  The set will contain 55 cards - 54 base set cards plus one "special" card - I think they are only autograph cards but I'm not positive.  I'm also not entirely sure if Epoch is putting this out on their own or in conjunction with the OB Club/Japan Baseball Promotion Association.  The set will be released on May 24.

1 comment:

Ryan G said...

If I can find a reasonably priced base set, I'm looking forward to owning the BBM set, and hopefully others in the series. Since I'm not a big team fan I can't really appreciate the Carp set but it should be fun to see what Epoch offers.

Random thought for BBM. They aren't having inserts here but there is a "leaders" or "records" or "achievements" subset. These ideas could be used for future insert sets (as with the other subsets in BBM's sets). BBM's subsets usually seem to have more substance than the inserts, though this year's flagship took a bit of a step backwards in that regard.