To Infinity...But Not Beyond

I'm pretty much a one trick pony when it comes to spectator sports - I'm really not all that interested in anything other than baseball anymore.  This is especially true when it comes to trading cards - I'm just not that interested in collecting any sport other than baseball.

With that in mind you can understand why I've never gone in for the recent multi-sport sets that BBM has issued.  They did their first one - Masterpiece - in 2016 to celebrate the 70th Anniversary of BBM Magazine Sha, the magazine publisher that is BBM's parent company.  They followed that in each of the next two years with a set called Infinity.  All of these sets have featured baseball players but for the most part I've felt they've just had a kind of run-of-the-mill selection of players.  I say for the most part because I was interested in (and asked Ryan to get for me) three of the cards from the 2017 set that featured famous amateur players.

I noticed something interesting about the baseball players in the 2018 set - they all fell into one of two categories.  Either they spent time playing in MLB (or at least MLB organizations) or they were related to another baseball player.  There are 36 baseball cards in the set and 26 are of players with experience in North America - Masanori Murakami, Satoru Komiyama,  Masao Kida, Keiichi Yabu, So Taguchi, Tsuyoshi Shinjyo, Yasuhiko Yabuta, Tadahito Iguchi, Hisanori Takahashi, Mac Suzuki, Kenshin Kawakami, Hideki Okajima, Yoshinori Tateyama, Kenji Johjima, Akinori Iwamura, Koji Uehara, Kazuo Matsui, Kosuke Fukudome, Ryota Igarashi, Kyuji Fujikawa, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Tsuyoshi Wada, Kensuke Tanaka, Norichika Aoki, Tsuyoshi Nishioka and Toru Murata.  (Off hand this is probably less than half of all the Japanese players to play in MLB.)  The remaining ten players can be grouped by their familial relationships - there's the father/son duo of Katsuya and Katsunori Nomura, the uncle/nephew duo of Tatsunori Hara and Tomoyuki Sugano; the brothers Matsunuma (Hirohisa and Masayuki) and Tomashino (Kenji and Seiji) and the brother/sister pair of Shingo and Yuki Kawabata.

I asked Ryan to pick up only one of these 36 cards - the card of Yuki Kawabata:

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The back of Kawabata's card uses the same image as the front of the card - I'm assuming that's the case for all the player cards.

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The set had an interesting subset however called "Family Ties" that showcased the relationships between the ballplayers.  I asked Ryan to pick up all five of the baseball related ones (the subset actually contains 13 cards - the others show relationships in track, curling, sumo, wrestling, football and motor sports.  One of the families showcased are the three Murofushi siblings who I think are all hammer throwers).  (And I don't know why the Hara/Sugano card is "Kinship Ties" rather than "Family Ties".)

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The one disappointing thing about these cards is they use the same image as the player's regular card both on the front and on the back, with the exception of the Nomura card which has a photo of the two of them when Katsuya was managing Katsunori with the Swallows in the 90's:

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Ryan included a couple of the "Sparkly Sky" insert cards from this set and they show that BBM continued being lazy in the images they used - they are the same ones as from the player cards.  And it's on the back of the insert card as well.  So that image of Sugano is used six times total on the front and back of three cards - on his "regular" player card, his "Family Ties" card and his "Sparkly Sky" insert card:

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You can see all the cards for the set over at Jambalaya.