It's funny how you can get a wrong piece of information stuck in your head for years.
From 2001 to 2010, the farm team for the Yokohama BayStars was known as the "Shonan SeaRex" and had completely different uniforms than the top team. What I thought had happened is that the BayStars had sold the naming rights for the team to a company called "Shonan". Orix had done this around the same time, selling the naming rights to their farm team to the Anabuki Construction company. The team was called "Kobe Surpass" where "Surpass" was the name of a brand of condominiums that the company built.
I was doing a little research on farm teams recently though and I discovered that I was wrong. It was actually a marketing decision by the BayStars to attempt to built a separate brand name for the farm team - if for no other reason than to sell more hats and jerseys. "Shonan" is a region in Kanagawa Prefecture along the Sagami Bay coast near Yokosuka, where the farm team plays and "SeaRex" was chosen for the both the nautical theme and I guess to have yet another camel-cased team name. I'm not sure why they scrapped it after 2010 but ever since then the ni-gun team's just been the BayStars and have used the same uniforms as the ichi-gun team.
Photos of players wearing Shonan uniforms started showing up in BBM sets starting in 2001 and continued to do so until 2010. Here are all the SeaRex cards from BBM's flagship sets from those years - oddly enough there were none in 2002 or 2009 and the only 2nd Version set to have any was 2010:
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| 2001 BBM #324 |
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| 2001 BBM #323 |
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| 2001 BBM #327 |
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| 2001 BBM #326 |
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| 2001 BBM #75 |
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| 2001 BBM #325 |
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| 2001 BBM #329 |
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| 2003 BBM 1st Version #182 |
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| 2003 BBM 1st Version #186 |
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| 2003 BBM 1st Version #181 |
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| 2003 BBM 1st Version #183 |
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| 2003 BBM 1st Version #185 |
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| 2003 BBM 1st Version #180 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version #372 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version #355 |
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| 2004 BBM 1st Version #371 |
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| 2005 BBM 1st Version #491 |
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| 2005 BBM 1st Version #487 |
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| 2005 BBM 1st Version #492 |
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| 2005 BBM 1st Version #486 |
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| 2005 BBM 1st Version #484 |
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| 2005 BBM 1st Version #489 |
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| 2006 BBM 1st Version #323 |
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| 2006 BBM 1st Version #324 |
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| 2006 BBM 1st Version #320 |
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| 2007 BBM 1st Version #427 |
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| 2007 BBM 1st Version #426 |
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| 2007 BBM 1st Version #428 |
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| 2008 BBM 1st Version #140 |
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| 2008 BBM 1st Version #142 |
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| 2008 BBM 1st Version #141 |
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| 2008 BBM 1st Version #139 |
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| 2010 BBM 1st Version #214 |
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| 2010 BBM 1st Version #216 |
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| 2010 BBM 1st Version #213 |
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| 2010 BBM 1st Version #215 |
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| 2010 BBM 1st Version #193 |
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| 2010 BBM 2nd Version #619 |
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| 2010 BBM 2nd Version #621 |
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| 2010 BBM 2nd Version #620 |
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| 2010 BBM 2nd Version #617 |
As you might expect, SeaRex uniforms also appear in BBM's BayStars team sets during the 00's as well (although BBM's first BayStars team set wasn't until 2003). I only have a handful of cards from these sets so this is an incomplete list of cards:
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| 2003 BBM BayStars #YB032 |
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| 2003 BBM BayStars #YB035 |
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| 2004 BBM BayStars #YB33 |
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| 2004 BBM BayStars #YB66 |
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| 2004 BBM BayStars #YB41 |
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| 2004 BBM BayStars #YB54 |
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| 2004 BBM BayStars #YB57 |
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| 2004 BBM BayStars #YB30 |
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| 2004 BBM BayStars #YB20 |
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| 2007 BBM BayStars #YB051 |
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| 2007 BBM BayStars #YB058 |
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| 2008 BBM BayStars #YB33 |
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| 2009 BBM BayStars #YB19 |
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| 2009 BBM BayStars #YB66 |
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| 2009 BBM BayStars #YB07 (Foil Parallel) |
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| 2009 BBM BayStars #YB40 |
I only know of two other times that BBM showed Shonan uniforms on cards and both of these came in "Historic Collection" sets after the SeaRex were gone:
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| 2014 BBM Brilliant Teenagers #043 |
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| 2015 BBM Memories Of Uniform #042 |
I believe that the 2015 Takamori card is the only one that has "Shonan SeaRex" on it.
These are all the SeaRex that I know of. I assume there are more in the BayStars team sets. I don't have a lot of Calbee cards from the 2000's so I don't know if there are any in them although I suspect that there are not.
And as far as I know there are no cards showing the "Kobe Surpass" uniforms.
1 comment:
I have to admit I'd never heard of the Shonan SeaRex, but I'm impressed that the owner of a Japanese franchise actually came up with the (obvious) idea of trying to create a seperate identify for their farm team. Its always seemed such a waste to me that there is a second "Chunichi Dragons" team based in Nagoya, stocked with very high calibre players but nobody ever bothers to go see them because why would they when the real Chunichi Dragons play in the same city.
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