2020 Eagles Team Issued Set

The Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles have published their own baseball card set for at least the last nine years.  That may not sound impressive - after all, almost all the NPB teams issue their own baseball card sets, frequently through their fan clubs.  The difference with the Eagles cards is that they are available via packs and include many of the same features that card sets from BBM and Epoch have - parallel versions, inserts and autographed cards.

I've picked up some of these cards in the past but last year I decided to pick up the entire base set.  Why you may ask?  The base set included all the players for Rakuten (well, mostly anyway) including the ikusei players.  As I mentioned in yesterday's post about last year's Epoch Buffaloes Rookies & Stars set I've been trying to pick up cards of the ikusei players whenever possible - mostly to have my collection represent as full a picture of NPB as possible.  I had thought about trying to get just the ikusei player cards from the set but I wasn't sure how difficult that would be.  I found someone selling the set on Yahoo! Japan Auctions for only 2000 yen and asked Ryan to pick it up for me.

The base set contains 81 cards which are all player cards - unlike BBM's "comprehensive" team sets there are no subsets.  17 of those players are ikusei so the remaining 64 players are from the 70 man roster.  There is no card for manager Hajime Miki or any of the coaches.

The set came out in late April but it's kind of obvious that there weren't any photos taken in spring training last year.  There are no in-game photos for any players who joined the team after the 2019 season ended.  The photos for the players from the 2020 rookie class are all head shots (or what I usually call "mug shots") while the photos for new Japanese players like Hideaki Wakui, Daichi Suzuki and Kazuhisa Makita are from the team's press conferences announcing their acquisition.  And there aren't any cards of new foreign players like Stefan Romero or JT Chargois.  Here's a bunch of example cards:

#01

#46

#67

#16

#42

#69

##06

#76

You'll notice that the cards say "1st Version" on the front.  As far as I can tell there was no 2nd Version last year.  

You can see all the cards from this set (including the inserts and parallels) over at Jambalaya.