SCM's Non-BBM Baseball Card Listings

I feel like I've been behind in the posts that I've wanted to do.  And with the NPB season wrapping up and about a billion guys announcing their retirement, it's just going to get worse.  With this post, however, I wrap up the last of my little background research projects (at least for now) so maybe I can concentrate on actual posts for the next month or so...

Each issue of Sports Card Magazine contains a "JSCA Official Price Guide".  (JSCA is Japan Sports Card Association.) The guide may be for baseball, wrestling, sumo or soccer cards.  As I've previously mentioned, there's a pattern to the rotation of the checklists.  Of the six SCM issues a year, there are two that are for baseball.  One of these is just for BBM issues and the other is for (obviously) non-BBM issues.  It's the latter that I want to address here.

I've previously described this list as covering "Calbee (all the way back to 1973 except for 1977-79), Lotte, Tomy, and Upper Deck".  That's accurate, but incomplete.  After examining the list in SCM #112, I've learned that the list also contains Q Card, Future Bee, Broccoli, and the recent Epoch box sets (but not the 2000 sticker set or the little cards sold in capsule machines).  The Lotte cards listed are the cards from 1989 and 1990 but not the stickers from the mid 00's.  It also lists the Hideki Matsui home run cards - at least the 1993-2002 ones that covered his home runs in Japan.

What was a little more interesting in the list was that there were several pre-2008 sets that do not appear in Engel.  There's what looks to be a box set for Randy Bass in 2000, a Calbee Dragons team set from 1997, and a couple sets from "Digi-Cube" for the Dragons in 2000 and 2001.

Here's the full list (SCM listed some 2015 sets but I stopped at 2014 as the 2015 listings also contained BBM sets).




Some additional comments:
- Early Calbee is listed by year, rather than set.  So 1975 starts with card #505 of what we generally refer to as the 1974/75 set, etc.
- SCM doesn't want to try to make sense of the 1977-79 Calbee issues either
- I have no idea why SCM decided to start listing Calbee's by series in 2002, stop in 2003 and then go back to it in 2004 (and every year since)
- SCM lists the Epoch sets from 2014 (Carp "First Victory" 40th Anniversary set, Giants V9 set) with the 2015 sets
- This is not a comprehensive list of non-BBM baseball card issues since 1973.  Off the top of my head, they've left out Yamakatsu, Nippon Ham, NST, Takara, Front Runner and Number Magazine as well as any of the collectible card game sets.
- For whatever reason, SCM lists the 2003 Japan National Team set published by BBM here rather than with the BBM sets