2022 BBM Rookie Edition

 

The 2022 edition of BBM's annual draft pick set - Rookie Edition - was released at the end of February.  The base set contains 141 cards - 128 cards for the 2021 draftees, one "draft pick" card and 12 "New Face" cards.

I give pretty much the same description of this set every year so I'll try to be brief.  The set contains cards all the 2021 draft picks (also know as the 2022 Rookie Class).  The photos for the cards are all taken at the press conferences that each team holds to introduce their draftees to the fans and the press.  As a result, they are generally boring poses showing a player swinging a bat, making a pitching motion or just adopting a "guts" pose.  (For the fifth year in a row BBM has included "secret" versions of the 12 first round picks which are short printed photo variants showing the player in a different boring pose.)

I think that the 128 players taken in last year's draft is the most in the 20 years that BBM has been doing the Rookie Edition set.  This includes both the regular phase of the draft as well as the development player (or ikusei) phase.  One of the reasons there's so many players drafted is there were quite a few ikusei players taken - 51 in all which I believe is a record.  The Hawks alone took 14 ikusei players which IS a record.  Overall they took 19 players which tied the record for most players taken in a draft set by the Giants in 2020 (7 in the regular phase and 12 ikusei).  All the teams except the Dragons took at least one ikusei player - the Giants had 10, the most after the Hawks.  Since BBM does not include the ikusei players in their team sets any more, this may be the only baseball card these players ever have.

This is the first baseball card for most of these players although there are three (Daigo Kamikawabata of the Fighters, Kazuya Maruyama of the Swallows and Shunsuke Sato of the Lions) who previously had baseball cards in either the 2019 or 2020 Panini USA Baseball Stars & Stripes sets.  For the first time since they started doing them back in 2018 Epoch did not issue any Epoch One cards for any team's drafted players.

Here's some sample cards:

#043

#114

#032

#053

#012

#097

For whatever reason, BBM wants number of cards in each year's version of the Rookie Edition to be divisible by three.  If the number of drafted players is not divisible by three, BBM will add one or two cards that simply list all the draft picks.  They're not quite checklists as they usually don't list card numbers or any of the cards in the sets that are not draft picks.  Since 140  - the number of draft picks (128) plus the 12 cards in the "New Face" subset - is not divisible by three, BBM added one "Draft Pick" card to make the set 141 cards which IS divisible by 3.  Here's the front and back of the card (#129):

The final part of the set is the 12 card "New Face" subset which features one player born in 2000 or later from each team.  These are all young players who are expected to contribute this season for the first time (as opposed to more established players born in the same time period who are already established players like Munetaka Murakami, Roki Sasaki or Yoshinobu Okugawa).  Probably the biggest names in the subset are Keito Mori of the Baystars and Chusei Mannami of the Fighters.

#130

My complaints about this set aside, I always feel this is an essential set to get.  I just wish BBM put a little more effort into it.  As I've said before, it'd be great if they showed photos of the players in their high school/college/corporate league/indy league team uniform instead of the relentlessly boring photos from the press conferences.  But it's been 20 years now and BBM hasn't changed how this set looks (or forked over the amount of money it would take for the rights to show such uniforms).

You can see all the cards in the set (including inserts and "secret" versions) over at Jambalaya.