Friday, September 11, 2020

Hideki Matsui BBM Flagship Cards

I got several comments on the attractiveness of Hideki Matsui's 1994 BBM card in the post I did about most Hall Of Fame players in a BBM set last week.  I replied to a couple of them that I thought that it was probably the most attractive photo of all his BBM flagship cards.  I thought I'd do a quick post to test that, so here's all of Matsui's BBM flagship cards - at least all the "regular" player cards - I'm not looking at his subset or insert set cards - from his rookie season of 1993 to 2002, his last year in NPB:

1993 BBM #423

1994 BBM #321

1995 BBM #286

1996 BBM #327

1997 BBM #300

1998 BBM #343

1999 BBM #326 (Gold Signature Parallel)

2000 BBM #425

2001 BBM #281

2002 BBM 1st Version #54

2002 BBM 2nd Version #498
After looking at them all, I stand by my original assessment - the 1994 card is the best photo, although I also like the 1997 and 2002 1st Version ones.  BBM doesn't seem to have used much of a variety of poses for him, unlike the selection Ichiro had over most of the same sets.

4 comments:

Fuji said...

A. The 1993 BBM design is fantastic. Reminds me of 1990 Pro Set football, hockey, or golf.

B. Starting to think Matsui might just be the Phil Niekro of Japanese baseball players, because he looks way older than other ball players his age. For example... he was 21 years old in 1996, but he looks like he's in his thirties on that 1996 card.

Nick Vossbrink said...

Yup. 1994 is the winner by a ton. Hopefully Matsui is still working with the Yankees next summer. I got his autograph on a ticket stub at Trenton a couple years ago but never had a card on my when he was signing.

NPB Card Guy said...

@Nick - Oh, very cool

Sean said...

The 94 does look cool, which is odd since he is sticking his tongue out!