I Got Zippy Zapped! Big Time!

A while back I got a DM from Kenny - aka Zippy Zappy - of the "Torren' Up Cards" blog asking for my address because he had what he described as "a little package ready to go" to me.  He had previously asked me if I was interested in the portion of the 2019 BBM "Brilliant Dragons" set so that's what I figured he was sending me.  When I asked him what I could send him in return he said "You can take a bunch of other cards off my hands so I can finally free up space."  I told him if they were NPB cards then sure, I'd take them.

I thought he was kidding until this past Monday when a large box (ok, officially it was a "medium flat rate priority mail box") showed up at my house.  Inside was a 400 count box full of baseball cards plus several BBM box sets (and scorecards from the Staten Island Yankees and Brooklyn Mets).  All in all there was about 500 cards in all - 300-ish assorted cards (mostly post 2001 BBM but there was some other stuff in there), the four BBM box sets (2015 Icons-Ace, 2016 Dragons Dash, 2016 Homecoming and 2019 Brilliant Dragons) and over 100 of the Sports Graphic Number cards.

I have a lot of cards, especially a lot of recent cards, so I was a little concerned that I might have most of these cards already.  What was kind of amazing was that over half of the cards - almost 300 of them actually - were new cards (or at least new to me)!  I don't know if this was by design or just dumb luck but I was pretty happy to have the new stuff.  I've been a bit overwhelmed trying to get my head around it all though.

I think I'm going to end up doing three or four posts on what he sent me.  This post is going to be about the 300-ish assorted cards.  Well, not all of the 300 cards.  I'm going to concentrate on the 60 or so cards from this group that I didn't already have (which hopefully doesn't sound ungrateful).  You're going to notice one repeating theme in this batch of cards - Kenny collects or collected cards of Hiroki Kuroda, the former Carp pitcher (and because Kenny's a Yankee fan I should admit that Kuroda is a former Yankee pitcher as well) so there are a LOT of Kuroda cards in this batch.

This is going to be pretty image heavy.  I didn't want to show all 60+ cards but they're from a diverse enough group of sets that I still needed show 40 or so cards.

There were a bunch of Kuroda cards from the BBM's high end sets.  Most of these are from Touch The Game which is was BBM called their high end sets from 2002 to 2011.  The first card is a very odd insert as it's got a cork covering:

2002 BBM Touch The Game #G4

2003 BBM Touch The Game #13

2004 BBM Touch The Game #121

2005 BBM Touch The Game #122

2006 BBM Touch The Game #133

2007 BBM Touch The Game #121

2015 BBM Genesis #075

Kuroda spent 2008 to 2014 playing MLB which accounts for the gap in high end cards.

There were a number of Kuroda cards from BBM Carp team sets between 2004 and 2007.  This includes a couple cards from a 2007 box set called "Carp Koibumi" as well as the annual "comprehensive" team sets.  I'll just show a couple of these.

2007 BBM Carp Koibumi #29

2004 BBM Carp #C71

2006 BBM Carp #C074

There were also cards from other BBM team sets for the Giants, Hawks and Dragons.  Again I'm just showing a subset of these:

2008 BBM Giants #G038

2010 BBM Giants #G061

2008 BBM Hawks #H51

2014 BBM Dragons #D43

There were a couple cards from various versions of BBM's "Historic Collection" sets.  The first one is a base card but the other two are serially numbered insert cards:

2004 BBM Golden Arms #097

2010 BBM Memory Makers #P14

2013 BBM Great Numbers #GN03

There were a couple Kuroda cards from random BBM sets:

2016 BBM Masterpiece #064

2016 BBM Fusion #GR19

There were a couple cards that were given away with issues of "Weekly Baseball":

The last two of those "Weekly Baseball" cards are promos.  There were a bunch of other BBM promo cards in the box:

2006 BBM 1st Version Promo

2010 BBM 1st Version "Special Promotion Card"

2013 BBM 2nd Version "Book Store Special Card"

2015 BBM 2nd Version Promo 

2015 BBM Genesis "Book Store Special Card"

2015 BBM Fighters "Limited Edition"

2018 BBM 1st Version "Book Store Special Card"

2018 BBM 2nd Version "Book Store Special Card"

There were two "two sided" promos.  The first one was for the 2009 BBM 2nd Version set and has Hiroyuki Nakajima on one side and Hayato Sakamoto on the other:

The other is for the 2009 BBM Touch The Game set and has Hisashi Iwakuma on one side and Norichika Aoki on the other:

As I mentioned, not all the cards were from BBM.  There was an unopened Calbee pack from 1984.  I couldn't resist opening it - it contained a card of Hikaru Takano:

1984 Calbee #294

There was also a 2012 Calbee Star Card of Atsunori Inaba, showing him celebrating getting his 2000th career hit:

2012 Calbee #S-52

There were a couple Epoch cards as well.  There were three cards from the 2016 Baystars Season Achievements set - here's the Takayuki Kajitani card:

2016 Epoch Baystars Season Achievements #17

There was a card from the 2016 Kabaya Central League Gum set (that was made by Epoch):

2016 Kabaya Central League Gum #21

There were also two promo cards from Epoch sets:

2017 Epoch OB Club Opening Day Starting Lineup Promo

2019 Epoch NPB Promo

Only need 421 now for the 2019 Epoch NPB set!

There were a couple cards from a 2011 Konami set called "Baseball Allstar's" (and yes, it has an apostrophe in the name).  Here's one of them:

2011 Konami Baseball Allstar's #062

There were only two cards from earlier than 2001.  One of these was the 1984 Calbee Takano card I already showed.  The other was a Hideki Matsui home run card from 1997:

I was amused to discover that the back of this card has a little Godzilla on it:

I saved the best cards for last.  There was a red facsimile signature parallel card of Hirokazu Ibata from the 2015 BM 1st2nd Version set:

These cards are serially numbered.  Check out the number on the back of the card:

All the numbers are unique but getting number 1 is pretty cool.

Kenny included a couple of memorabilia cards from Touch The Game sets.  Here's a "Cut Off Piece Ball" card for Takeshi Yamasaki from the 2009 set:

2009 BBM Touch The Game #B13

This 2008 Norichika Aoiki card is kind of unique.  It has a small bag of soil from Jingu Stadium.  The bag bulges out a little so my scan is kind of blurry:

2008 BBM Touch The Game #MS9

There was an authentic autographed card from the 2014 BBM Classic set for Kazuhiko Ushijima:

Lastly there was a Tetsuto Yamada jersey card from the 2015 BBM Swallows 3 Sluggers set:

2015 BBM Swallows 3 Sluggers #M02

Thanks Kenny!  These are great.  I'll write about some of the other cards in other posts in the next few days.  I promise they won't be as long as this post!