2001 BBM Tigers Box Break

I had yet another surgery recently (hip replacement this time) and I picked up an unopened box of BBM's Tigers team set from 2001 about a month or so earlier to give me something fun to open while I recovered.  I thought I'd do a quick post with a box break and a description of the set.

The 2001 BBM Tigers set had a base set of 99 cards that were broken down into several subsets.  There were 68 "regular" player cards (which included cards for manager Katsuya Nomura and coach Akinobu Okada), four "Best Result" cards (which appear to be team leaders from 2000 but with an odd selection of categories - wins, ERA, saves and triples), eight "Memorial" cards featuring milestones from the 2001 season (Nomura's 1200th managerial win, Takashi Yoshida's 1000th game, Keiichi Yabu, Shoji Tohyama and Tomochika Tsuboi making the All Star team), 1 card for the Tigers' 2001 rookie class (i.e. players taken in the 2000 draft), nine OB Tiger player cards (including Minoru Murayama, Koichi Tabuchi, Fumio Fujimura and Tadashi Wakabayashi), seven "New Wave" cards featuring young Tiger players and two checklist cards.  18 of the "regular" player cards have a purple facsimile autograph parallel.  Nine player cards have an "R. C." parallel which uses a different sepia tinged photo.  Six player cards have both types of parallel which means there are 12 that only have the facsimile signature parallel and three that only have the "R. C." parallel.  (And I don't know what "R. C." stands for although it wouldn't surprise me if it was "Rare Card".)

There were also two 9 card insert sets.  One of these was the "Specialist" set which highlights a skill of a player (Nobuyuki Hoshino's curveball, Shinobu Fukuhara's fastball, etc) and the other is a nine card set dedicated to Tigers legend Masayuki Kakefu.  There were two premium chase cards available as well - a Kakefu autographed card (numbered to 31) and a Keiichi Yabu Glove card (numbered to 50).

Each box contained 20 packs that contained 8 cards each, so there was a total of 180 cards available in a box.

I'll hit the highlight of the box first - I pulled a Yabu Glove card in the very first pack I opened:

The last guide Engel did that had values for BBM cards lists this as a $500 card.  However that guide was issued when Yabu was actually pitching in the US so that's a very inflated value.  The last Sports Card Magazine with a price guide for BBM cards (SCM #116) lists the card at 3000 yen and trending downward.

Here's how all 160 cards I got in the box panned out:

139 base - 88 unique, 51 doubles
3 Kakefu Special inserts
3 Specialist inserts
5 "R. C." parallels
9 Purple facsimile autograph parallels
1 Yabu Glove card

Not too bad - I got almost 90% of the base set in the box.  (Actually since I already had a handful of cards from the set I'm only about six cards from completing it.)  And obviously the Yabu card is a nice pull, even if it isn't worth $500.

Here's some sample cards.  First up Yabu's regular, purple facsimile autograph parallel and "R. C." parallel cards (all #T7):

Next up is a sample card from each subset.  I included both checklist cards because I liked how they went together:

#T72

#T73

#T81

#T88

#T93

#T98 & #T99

Here's cards from each insert set:

#SP4

#KS5

Here's what a pack looked like:

Each box also contained a poster: