2019 BBM Baystars 70th Anniversary Set

The franchise that is now the Yokohama DeNA Baystars is celebrating its 70th Anniversary this year - technically 2019 is the team's 70th season.  The team came into existence as the Taiyo Whales in 1950 when professional baseball in Japan made a shift from the eight team Japan Baseball League (JBL) to the 15 team Nippon Professional Baseball organization.  The team originally played in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi in western Honshu and essentially was promoted from an existing industrial league team associated with the Maruha Corporation.  The team merged with the Shochiku Robins before the 1953 season and were renamed first to the Taiyo Shochiku Robins and then the Yosho Robins in 1953.  The team played their home games in Osaka for those two seasons.  Shochiku then divested itself from the team before the 1955 season and the name reverted to the Taiyo Whales.  The team then moved to Kawasaki where they would remain for the next 23 seasons.  They moved south to Yokohama in 1978 and were renamed as the Yokohama Taiyo Whales.  In 1993 the team changed their name to the Yokohama Baystars.  Following the 2011 season the team was sold to DeNA and the name changed again to the Yokohama DeNA Baystars.

BBM has issued a 90 card set to celebrate this anniversary.  While BBM has done a couple "OB team sets" for the franchise (a 2008 set celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the team's move to Yokohama and a 2013 set celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the team changing its name to Baystars), this is the first "full sized" set to cover the years prior to the move to Yokohama (BBM did publish a 30 card box set called something like Whales Achievement in 2015 that highlighted players from the years before 1978).  So when this set was announced I was really looking forward to seeing what BBM would do when covering a team's history that they had previously not done.  As it turns out, they did  a pretty good job.

Let's hit the basics on the set first.  As I said, there are 90 cards in the base set.  This breaks down to 7 "Whales History" cards, 71 cards for OB players (both retired and active former Baystars) and 12 cards for the current team.

The "Whales History" cards cover the history of the team from 1950 to 2018.  Each card highlights a group of seasons - card #01 covers 1950-59, card #02 covers 1960-67, card #03 covers 1968-77, card #04 covers 1978-92 (the Yokohama Taiyo Whales years), #05 covers 1993-2001, #06 covers 2002-11 and #07 covers 2012-18 (the DeNA years).  The team's two Nippon Series championships (1960 and 1998) are highlighted on the front of the appropriate cards.  All the cards have a horizontal format and I really like how there's a whale's tail that appears to the right of the caption on the bottom of the card:

#01

The meat of the set of course is the 71 cards of OB players.  This includes pretty much everyone that you'd expect - Takuro Ishii, Makoto Matsubara, Masaji Hiramatsu, Kazuhiro Sasaki, Motonobu Tanishige, Takashi Saitoh, Daisuke Yamashita, Norihiro Komada, Daisuke Miura and Takanori Suzuki.  Both Nippon Series winning managers (Osamu Mihara and Hiroshi Gondoh) are included.  There are two former players included who are still active (or at least active as the set went to press) players - Seiichi Uchikawa and Sho Aranami (who has just recently announced his retirement after spending much of this season playing in Mexico).  There are also a number of foreign players - John Sipin, Carlos Ponce, Jim Paciorek, Marc Kroon, Bobby Rose and Tyrone Woods.  There was at least one player - Makoto Inagawa - who I don't think ever had a BBM card before.  In fact as far as I can tell his only other cards are from the 1964 Marukami JCM 14g and Jintan Gum Plastic Cards sets. 

So who's missing?  I don't know the team's history real well but there were a couple names that I came up with.  The earliest debut of anyone included in the set was 1956 (Noburo Akiyama) so guys like Isamu Fujii and Hall Of Famers Noburo Aota and Haruyasu Nakajima were not included.  There's some other guys like Shinichi Etoh and Tomokazu Ohka who could have been included as well.  Hall Of Famer Kaoru Bettoh, who managed the team in the late 1970's, is not included.  There are some other gaijin who were curiously excluded - especially since Woods only played for the team for two seasons.  Guys like Leon Lee, Felix Millan, Tony Blanco or Glenn Braggs would not have been out of place in the set either.  And they could really have pulled a coup by featuring Yulieski Gurriel of the Astros who played half a season or so with the team in 2014.  Although given the way he parted ways with the team it's unlikely that we'll see any new Japanese cards of him anytime soon.

But for the most part BBM did a pretty good job representing the history of team.  And the photo selection was pretty good as well.  Here's some example cards:

#08

#18

#13

#50

#44

#59

#29

#22

I will say that the 12 cards for the 2019 Baystars are kind of an afterthought.  They use the same design as the OB cards and the photos are all in the "batters batting, pitchers pitching" rut that BBM's been falling into for the past few years.  There are cards for manager Alex Ramirez as well as Katsuki Azuma, Shota Imanaga, Shoichi Inoh, Takehiro Ishikawa, Takayuki Kajitani, Toshihiro Kuramoto, Masayuki Kuwahara, Jose Lopez, Toshiro Miyazaki, Yoshitomo Tsutsugoh and Yasuaki Yamasaki.

#82

You can see all the cards at Jambalaya.