2009 BBM Giants Expression Set

Dan of Korean Cardboard sent me two Giants related sets last week - the 2009 BBM Giants Expression set and the 2010 Giants "Winning Game Card" set.  I'll talk about the 2010 set soon but I wanted to do a quick post on the Expression set.  This was sold as box set with a 33 card base set - it's not clear to me if there was any sort of "special" insert card like an autograph or memorabilia card that came with it.

The big deal with this set was that it contained cards that showed close up photos of the players faces - so you can see their "expressions".  There's essentially 16 player cards in the set which includes Shinnosuke Abe, Hayato Sakamoto, Alex Ramirez, Seth Griesinger, Marc Kroon, Lee Seung-yuop, Yoshiyuki Kamei, Michihiro Ogasawara, Yoshinobu Takahashi and Tetsuya Yamaguchi.  The photos on the cards are very different from the usual BBM photos.  Here's some examples:

#07

#12

#10

#05

The rest of the set is broken up into four subsets.  There's a two card "Playback 2008" subset for how the Giants finished in 2008 - there's one card for them winning the Central League pennant and another for them beating the Dragons in the Climax Series (but no card for them losing to the Lions in the Nippon Series).  Here's the Climax Series card:

#18

There's a three card subset called "2009 Newcomer" which, as it sounds, includes three players new to the Giants in 2009 - Edgardo Alfonzo, Michael Nakamura and rookie Taishi Ohta.  Here's Alfonzo's card:

#20

Next up is a six card "Rising Stars" subset featuring Kamei, Daisuke Ochi, Sakamoto, Takahiro Suzuki, Shun Tohno and Yaamguchi.  I think the inclusion of Suzuki as a "Rising Star" is kind of odd considering that at the time he was 31 years old.  Here's Sakamoto's card:

#25

The last subset is another six card one for players who changed their uniform number coming into the 2009 season - Tomoya Inzen, Kamei, Ken Katoh, Ochi, Sakamoto and Tohno.  Here's Kamei's card:

#32

As you can tell, a number of player appear multiple times in the set.  Kamei, Ochi and Sakamoto have three cards each while Suzuki, Tohno and Yamaguchi have two cards each.

It's a nice little set and I'm grateful to Dan for sending it to me.  You can see all the cards over at Jambalaya.