Card Of The Week July 28

I complain quite a bit about how boring the photos on the cards from BBM, Calbee and Epoch have been recently.  Back when I first started collecting Japanese cards (around 2000) the photos were much more interesting - it was actually one of the things that really attracted me to the cards.  Here's an example from the 2000 BBM set (the Late Series that year to be exact):

2000 BBM #575

I can't imagine any of the companies using a photo that was this much fun in any sets now which is a huge shame.  By the way, Sean had a post a few months back regarding a lawsuit filed by a number of NPB stars in the mid-00's against their teams for allowing BBM and Calbee to produce baseball cards of them.  One of the interesting tidbits that Sean uncovered during his research on this case is that the card companies don't have their own photographers - in many cases they are forced by the teams to use photos taken by the team's photographer. As Sean says, this "may explain the crap photo selection in recent years!" 

I had picked this card up during my trip - not positive where although it was likely Quad Sports.  I had mentioned in my post from Tokyo that I'd done really well in knocking off cards for some of BBM's flagship sets in the late 90's - I had said that I'd completed the 1997 and gotten to just need one for each of the 1998 and 200 sets.  It turns out that I wasn't quite right - I was still short one card from 1997 and I needed two from 1998 and four from 2000.  I think that's still pretty good.  I had a bit of a similar thing with the Rookie Edition sets - I thought I'd completed the 2003 through 2006 sets but it turned out I was short one card from the 2003 set.  Again I still think I did pretty well.