Worst NPB Sets Of All Time

The Trading Card Database's Twitter feed has been doing a countdown of the 40 worst baseball card sets of all time according to a reader's survey for the past couple of weeks.  It's been kind of interesting but since it's been so long since I've collected MLB cards I'm not all that familiar with the sets they've been talking about.   But I got inspired by the Shlabotnik Report's list of his worst sets of all time and decided to take a shot at creating a list of what, in my opinion, are the worst NPB sets of all time.

The only real criteria I had for coming up with this list is that they had to be sets that I actually had cards from.  Now, I have a lot of sets, so that might not sound like a big deal but there are sets that I haven't gotten because I thought they looked ugly.  So sets like the oddball 2016 Calbee All Stars set don't show up here.  

I've been thinking about this for a couple weeks now and I've come up with this list of 10 sets.  Ask me again in another six months and I'd probably come up with a different list.  But for now, here's the list in (roughly) chronological order:

1977 Yamakatsu JY16 "Badge Cards"

I love the Yamakatsu sets from the late 1970's/early 1980's.  All of them with the exception of this one.  In 1977 Yamakatsu got this crazy idea that they should sell cards with team logo badges attached to them by a safety pin like this Choji Murata card:

It's an interesting idea but the problem is that in many cases, the pin damages the card.  I opened a box of these in the mid-00's and most of the cards are bent and have rust stains.  Now granted, the cards might not have been as damaged if they're been opened when they were published some 30 years earlier but it still seems likely the cards could be messed up.  But even if the cards aren't damaged from the pins, there's some issues with the set.  First of all, because of the pin location, each card front has a thick border on the top with hole in it, as you can see with this card of Yutaka Enatsu:

Another issue is that a lot of the photos used in the set were previously used in other Yamakatsu sets, although I don't think that was limited to this particular set of theirs.  Lastly, there are no Giants player cards in the set.  Now this could be considered a good thing, as the Giants are WAY overrepresented in most of the card sets of the 1970's.  However, while not including any cards of Giants players, they still included five Giants-related cards in the 37 card set - three cards (one in blue, one in red and one in yellow) showing a generic Giants player (I think it's actually the team's mascot at the time) celebrating the team's Central League pennant in 1976, a card showing the team's record and manager from 1968 to 1976 and this card showing the date (in Showa era years) and location of Sadaharu Oh's milestone home runs:

Admittedly the Oh card's kind of interesting but the set would have been better served with an actual card of Oh instead.

Pre-1991 Takara sets

Takara made team sets of collectible game cards from 1978 to 1998.  In the years before BBM started in 1991, Calbee and Takara were the only card makers and since Calbee's sets were much smaller than Takara's and had multiple cards for players, Takara's 30 card team sets provided a much better representation of the active NPB players than Calbee did.  There's any number of players who didn't appear in a Calbee set in a given year but did appear in Takara.  Takara is also the best source of cards of the Lotte Orions in the years before Lotte allowed Calbee to do cards of their team.  Hiromitsu Ochiai's first card is from the 1981 Takara set.  The first cards for Motonobu Tanishige and Satoshi Nakajima are in the 1989 Takara set.  Takara also had the only card of Hideo Nomo from 1990, his rookie year.  So the Takara cards from before 1991 are really useful if you're looking for cards of guys who weren't big names at the time.

But.

The player photos in the years before 1991 are all portrait style photos of the player from the waist up.  I've always referred to these as "mug shots".  While it's not a big deal if you've just got one or two cards from the sets, I find year after year of these cards to be mind numbingly boring.  And what's worse, Takara appears to have reused the photos from year to year, just changing the backgrounds.  Take a look at this run of Tatsunori Hara cards from 1987 to 1990:

Pretty sure that's the same photo each year, although they cropped it for 1990.  Just the background changed.  And the same background was used for all the cards in a given year.  I feel like I should do some animated gifs like Nick Vossbrink did to demonstrate the reuse of a background.

I am cheating somewhat here as this is more than one set.  But on the other hand, they're so monotonous that it's hard to think of them as separate sets.

1992 BBM

I had a bit of a hard time narrowing down which of BBM's flagship sets was the "worst".  I'm not a big fan of the designs for the 2003 2nd Version set or either the 2004 1st or 2nd Version sets and I think the design of the 2012 1st Version set is WAY too similar to the 2011 1st Version set.  And then there's all the years of decent designs but repetitive photos - my standard "batters batting, pitchers pitching, catchers catching" complaint.  Another contender is the 1999 set which has the most difficult to read card numbers I think of any Japanese set.  I mean, this may not look too bad on a scan but it's a bear when you're sitting or standing in a card shop going through a box of commons:

And the backs of the leader cards were worse.  I just spent a couple minutes looking for the card number of this card (which is #2) before I scanned it.  Again, it's easier to see in the scan than in person:

Found it yet?

But ultimately the set I went with was the 1992 set.  There's just something about those colored borders with the repeating "BBM '92 BASEBALL CARDS" that's just plain ugly.  

1992 BBM #298

On the plus side, the card numbers are really easy to read on the back...

2000 BBM Diamond Heroes

I've never been much for BBM's higher end cards, whether they're called "Diamond Heroes", "Touch The Game" or "Genesis".  I prefer seeing full photos of players as opposed to ones with the player superimposed on some phony background.  While several of these sets have featured this kind of design, I feel like the 2000 one really stands out in its ugliness.  The backgrounds basically look to me like someone spilled battery acid on a circuit board.

2000 BBM Diamond Heroes #119

 

2000 Epoch Pro Baseball Stickers

Epoch's first foray into baseball cards was a 204 "card" set in 2000.  The "cards" were really stickers and there was a book that they could be pasted into.  That in itself was not a bad thing - NST had done some interesting sticker sets in the 1970's and 80's.  The problem I have with this set is that all the photos are headshots so, like the Takara sets, it's a "mug shot" set.  Again, an individual card with that kind of a photo is fine but a full set is boring.

2000 Epoch #042

2000 Upper Deck Ovation

2000 turned out to have several sets I don't like very much.  Kind of surprising it was the year I got serious about collecting Japanese baseball cards...

Upper Deck's two year experiment with NPB cards started in 2000 with the Ovation set.  It uses the same design as their MLB Ovation set from that year which I guess they thought was a good thing but I'm not real impressed with it.  The card is meant to be kind of like it's printed on a baseball so there's seams on either side of it and the whole thing's embossed.  The photo itself has kind of a foil/chrome overlay and the photo selection itself is kind of weak:

2000 Upper Deck Ovation #62

Upper Deck ultimately did four NPB sets in 2000 and 2001.  Two of the others were "Victory" sets which were kind of "meh" (The Shlabotnik Report includes the 2000 edition on his list) but their final set - the 2001 "Upper Deck" set is one of the best Japanese sets ever.

2003 JPBPA

In 2003 the Japanese Professional Baseball Player Association put out a 60 card set that was not licensed by any of the NPB teams so there's no team logos in the set.  Each of the 60 cards has a "special" version as well that's three times less common.  Instead of photos the set uses drawings of the players (or perhaps "computer rendered drawings based off of a photo" as SumoMenkoMan has speculated).  I really would like to like this set and I hesitated to put in on the list but between the drawings and the lack of logos, it just really isn't something I like.

2003 JPBPA #R-MI

2004 BBM 70th Anniversary

My unhappiness with most of the sets in this list pretty much are a matter of taste.  For the most part, I either don't like the design of the cards or the photos used on them.  This set is different, though, as the design's attractive and some of the photos, like this one of Shigeo Nagashima, are outstanding:

2004 BBM 70th Anniversary #33

So what's the problem?  The problem is the set's a rip off.  BBM issued this 48 card box set to celebrate the 70th Anniversary of professional baseball in Japan (or at least the 70th Anniversary of the first professional baseball team run by Yomiuri).  The set uses roughly the same design as the 2002 BBM All Time Heroes set and 46 cards from the set (all but two) use the EXACT SAME photo as the 2002 set.  Case in point:

2002 BBM All Time Heroes #005

Even the backs are almost identical:

But, you say, I don't have the All Time Heroes set so why should I care?  The other problem with the set is who's in it, or rather, who isn't.  As you probably guessed with the set having 48 cards, each of the 12 NPB teams has four cards in the set.  Two of these are retired players and two of them are active players (active in 2004, of course).  One of the retired players for the team is the team's current manager IF he played for that team during his career.  So, for example, Masataka Nashida was the manager of the Buffaloes at the time and had played for the Buffaloes during his career so he's one of the two OB Buffaloes.  But Orix manager Haruki Ihara had never played for the franchise so he's not in the set.  That's not necessarily a big loss because, no offense to him, Haruki Ihara is not a name that leaps to mind if you're trying to come up with a list of the 24 most important retired players in NPB history.  But there are several names that you immediately think of when compiling that list and they're not in the set.  One name in particular stands out.  Remember that there's only two retired representatives from each team included in the set.  The Giants manager at the time, Tsuneo Horiuchi, had played for the team and is therefore one of the two players.  And you already know that Shigeo Nagashima's in the set.  So who does that leave out?

Yup, the set to celebrate 70 years of professional baseball in Japan doesn't include Sadaharu Oh.  Luckily, when the 80th anniversary rolled around in 2014, BBM issued two pretty good sets - one for pitchers and one for batters - that did a better job of representation.

2017 BBM Genesis

I made a mistake two years in a row a few years back when I got carried away and decided to buy the "Genesis" base set in both 2017 and 2018.  I had kind of a good reason in 2017 - there were several late-signing foreign players who had cards in the set but hadn't appeared in any other BBM sets that year so far - but I blame buying the 2018 set on being jet lagged after returning from a two week vacation in the UK and seeing the set while I was on YJA looking for the Calbee Series Three set.  If you read my posts about the two sets I say nice things about them but in retrospect I don't really like either set all that much.  First of all, no one buys Genesis for the base set - you buy Genesis for the autograph and memorabilia cards and maybe the parallels.  Secondly, both of the sets have the kinds of designs that I've previously mentioned I don't like - the 2017 uses small photos with boring designs while the 2018 has the player photos superimposed on other backgrounds.  I think of the two of them I like the 2017 set less so I'm picking it for this list - ask me again later and I might pick the 2018 set.

2017 BBM Genesis #097

I haven't bought the Genesis set since 2018.  I do try to avoid making the same mistakes over and over.

2021 Topps NPB

I have mixed feelings about Topps getting into the Japanese card market.  I'd like to see some new ideas in Japanese baseball cards but I'm not convinced that Topps has any.  I know there are things Topps does with MLB cards that I absolutely don't want to see in Japan - way more cards for some teams than others, having too many short print variations and doing some sort of over-processing to their photographs to name a few.  Their first set last year had some really good photos but I thought overall it was weak - it was basically doomed because it used pretty much the same design as their 2021 flagship MLB set which was an ugly one, right down to its almost impossible to read player names.

2021 Topps NPB #146

And while I don't usually judge Japanese cards by their backs since I can't read much on them, I found the lack of effort on the part of Topps on the backs from this set to be pretty egregious:

I will say, as ugly as this set is, the "Chrome" version is probably uglier.  But I don't have any of those cards so it doesn't make the list.