2003 JPBPA Set

In honor of Labor Day here in the United States I thought I'd do a quick post on a set that was issued by the Japan Professional Baseball Players Association (JPBPA) back in 2003.  The base set contained cards of 60 players.  The image of the player was a drawing or painting and no team logos were shown.  The player's team was also not identified.  Most of the major NPB stars of the era were included in the set - Koji Uehara, Kazuhiro Kiyohara, Tadahito Iguchi, Hiroki Kuroda, Yoshinobu Takahashi, Hisashi Iwakuma, Tomoaki Kanemoto, Kazuo Matsui, Nobuhiko Matsunaka, Daisuke Matsuzaka and Takuro Ishii to name a few.  Each of the 60 cards has a parallel version - the "special" version - and autographed versions of the "special" version were available.

I had bought a pack of these from YakyuShop back when the set originally came out.  Well, I say "pack" but it was actually sold in little boxes.  Each box contained four cards - three base set cards plus one "special" card - along with a player pin.  I think every box contained the same ratio of base cards to "special" card so the "special" cards are three times as rare as the base set cards.

Here are the cards that I got:

#R-TI

#R-MI

#R-MK

#SP-KO

Here's what the backs looked like - the backs of the regular cards looked just the same as the backs of the "special" cards:

Here's photos of the front and back of the box that the cards came in:

And finally here's the player pin I got in the box:

It was kind of an odd set and the JPBPA never issued another one.  I'm not a big fan of sets that don't have the team logos (I never buy anything from Panini) so this was never a set i was real interested in completing.  Ryan on the other hand has the complete base set and posted all the cards a few years back.