Animated

BBM included nine card puzzle subsets in their 1995 and 1996 sets.  The 1995 set had ones for Ichiro, Hideki Matsui and Hideki Irabu while the 1996 set had ones for Masaki Saitoh and Akira Etoh.  To be absolutely clear, only one side of the cards in the subset (the backs actually) had the puzzle - the other side (the fronts) showed a sequence of photos of the player hitting (in the case of Ichiro, Matsui and Etoh) or pitching (in the case of Irabu and Saitoh).

I've got all the cards for four of these five puzzles so far - I'm short two cards from the Ichiro puzzle.  The Saitoh one was the first that I had all the cards for - Ryan had sent me the last ones I needed in the box he sent me last winter.  When I did a post showing the completed puzzle and the sequence of photos on the cards on the other side, Nick Vossbrink left a comment suggesting that the fronts would make a killer gif.  I tried this out a few months ago when I picked up the last remaining Matsui cards and Nick was correct - they did make a killer gif:

If you look at the background you can see what looks like two Baystar players along with a Swallow.  I think the photo was taken during Game 2 of the 1994 All Star games which was played in Nagoya.

Now that Ryan had sent me the cards to complete the Irabu and Etoh puzzles, I did gifs for those as well as for Saitoh:

I remembered that the 2009 BBM Sadaharu Oh Memorial set had a sequence of cards showing Oh batting although it wasn't as part of a puzzle.  It wasn't quite the same as each card had two photos of him swinging on the backs but it still made a pretty good gif:

I considered cropping each half of the card separately and making a gif from all 18 images but you might notice that the right hand image steps through the center of the card so I don't think it would sync well with the left hand images.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestion, Nick, and, as always, thanks for tracking down the cards for me, Ryan.  I look forward to being able to do this for the Ichiro puzzle someday.