Last week when I did my post about the 2020 NPB Award Winners I noticed that Pacific League Rookie Of The Year Kaima Taira did not have a card in either the 1st or 2nd Version sets from BBM this year. This is not the first time this has happened - the 2018 Pacific League Rookie Of The Year Kazuki Tanaka didn't have a card in either of BBM's flagship sets from 2018 either. I thought I'd do a little research and see how often it's happened in BBM's history.
Now you may be asking yourself "How can this happen? Doesn't BBM issue a card of each year's entire rookie class?" The answer is yes, but "rookie" means something different for BBM than it does for NPB. For BBM, a "rookie" is a player in his first professional season. In this context, Kaima Taira's "rookie" season was 2018. For NPB, a "rookie" is a player who has not exceeded 30 innings pitched or 60 at bats with the ichi-gun team, has been registered to the team's 70 man roster for less than five years and has never played in an overseas league (so Tyler Austin was not eligible for the Central League award this year). So while BBM didn't consider Kaima a rookie in 2020, NPB did.
As you see then, the only "rookies" that are guaranteed to be in BBM's flagship set each year are the previous year's draft picks. Anyone else is subject to whether or not BBM thinks the player is worth including - and since they aren't playing on the ichi-gun team, they probably won't. The one thing in BBM's favor is if the player is obviously playing well on the top team in the early part of the season BBM can include them in the 2nd Version set. This actually happened for both Rookies Of The Year last year - neither Munetaka Murakami nor Rei Takahashi (who were both 2017 draft picks and therefore 2018 "rookies" in BBM's eyes) were in 1st Version but both were included in 2nd Version.
What I found out when I looked into this is that BBM has not had a card of a Rookie Of The Year in that year's flagship set (or sets) eight times since they started doing cards in 1991*. What's kind of surprising about that total is that it's not randomly distributed between the two leagues - it's happened seven times for the Pacific League winner but only once(!) for the Central League winner.
*I want to caveat this by saying that the Rookie Of The Year did not have a "regular" player card in the flagship set. They may have appeared in a subset or insert set dedicated to top prospects.
The Central League winner who didn't appear in the flagship set(s) was Tatsuhiko Kinjoh in 2000. The Pacific League winners who were absent are Makoto Kaneko (1996), Tatsuya Ozeki (1998), Itsuki Shoda (2002), Ryo Sakakibara (2010), Hirotoshi Takanashi (2016), Tanaka (2018) and Taira (2020).*
*It's kind of odd that four of those seven (Kaneko, Shoda, Sakakibara and Takanashi) were Fighters
So obviously this will only happen if the award winner is NOT in their first professional year. One of the reasons for the discrepancy between the two leagues is that the Central League is much more likely to have their Rookie Of The Year be a rookie in BBM's eyes as well. Only five times in the last 30 years has the CL award winner not been in his first professional season. On the other hand, the PL winner has not been in his first professional season ten times, slightly more than a third of the time (there was no Pacific League Rookie Of The Year in 2000).
Still you'd only expect there to be a 2 to 1 difference between the two leagues, not a 7 to 1 difference. It's also happening more frequently - 2020 was the third time in the last five years that the Pacific League Rookie Of The Year was not in a BBM flagship set. All I can guess is that with so much more talent on the Pacific League teams than the Central League teams (based on the PL's dominance of the CL in both interleague and the Nippon Series over the past 15 years) that BBM has a tough time picking the players to include.
5 comments:
Interesting. I had always thought that the Rookies didn’t get a card in a flagship set until they proved themselves. Seems I was wrong.
That was the case prior to BBM's debut in 1991. For example, there are no 1990 Calbee cards of Hideo Nomo despite his breakout season. BBM included cards of the majority of the newly drafted players in their first three sets (1991-93) and all of them starting in 1994. I did a post about this a few years back if you want more details.
I was wondering about Taira as rookie of the year as he is every much a part of the '18-19 Lions team I have in an NPB Great Teams league I am doing for a tabletop baseball game. Odd to think of him as having still been a rookie this past year
One player actually has cards in both the 2011 BBM Rookie Edition Set #059 and the 2012 BBM Rookie Edition Set #108 Very strange ... it's Hirokazu Sawamura
You are correct that he has cards in both Rookie Edition sets but it's actually not all that unusual. In addition to the cards of the draft picks, Rookie Edition typically has a subset featuring established players. In the early years of the set this subset could be quite large (60 cards in 2003!) but more recently it's been 12 cards. Sometimes there's a theme to the subset and sometimes it just seems random.
I've always figured it was BBM's way of getting autographed cards of players other than the draft picks into the set.
Anyway it looks like the 2012 set had cards of 12 players that BBM felt had breakthrough seasons in 2011. This included at least four players who had been drafted in 2010 and appeared as draft picks in the 2011 set - Sawamura, Kazuhisa Makita, Yuya Fukui and Yuki Saitoh. Frankly this was probably BBM's excuse to add yet another card of Yuki Saitoh.
Similarly Shohei Ohtani appeared in consecutive editions of Rookie Edition in 2013 (as a draft pick) and 2014 (in a subset called "Then & Now").
Post a Comment