2022 BBM Swallows History 1950-2022

BBM issued the "Swallows History 1950-2022" set back in late August.  This is the seventh in their OB team "history" sets going back the past few years.  Following the lead of the previous sets, this set has 90 cards in its base set split into three categories - "Swallows History", OB players and active players.

The Swallows entered professional baseball in 1950 as the Kokutetsu Swallows.  Kokutetsu sold the team to Sankei in early 1965 and from May 10th of that year to the end of the season the team was known as the Sankei Swallows.  Sankei then renamed the team the Sankei Atoms due to the popularity of the "Mighty Atom" anime (known in the West as "Astro Boy").  In 1969, Sankei jointly ran the team with Yakult and the team was known simply as the Atoms.  Yakult took over full ownership of the team in 1970 and the team became the Yakult Atoms.  In 1974 Yakult reverted the nickname back and the team became the Yakult Swallows.  In 2006 the team prepended their host city to the name to become the Tokyo Yakult Swallows.

There are seven "Swallows History" cards.  Each covers a 9 to 12 year period in the team's history between their founding in 1950 up until last year.  The front of each card shows some highlight of the stretch of years the card covers while the backs list the team's finish in each year of the featured time period.  Here's the card commemorating the years between 1961 and 1970 - not entirely sure if these are Sankei or Yakult Atoms:

#02

The bulk of the set is the 71 OB player cards.  I'm pretty sure these are all retired players - I don't think there are any former Swallows players who are still active with other teams.  As usual the player selection is heavy on players from the 1970's and later and particularly heavy on players who are still alive and can sign autographs.  There's only two OB players in the set who have passed away - Masaichi Kaneda and Katsuya Nomura (who managed the team from 1990-98).  There are four Kokutetsu Swallows included in the set - Kaneda, Yukihiko Machida, Genjiro Murata and Sadayuki Tokutake - but no Atoms.  Everyone else in the set is a Swallow.  The OB cards pretty much include all the big names that you'd expect - Tsutomu Wakamatsu, Toru Sugiura, Takhiro Ikeyama, Atsuya Furuta, Akihiko Ohya, Atsunori Inaba, Shinya Miyamoto, Kazuhisa Ishii, Akinori Iwamura, Shingo Takatsu and Kazuhiro Hatakeyama.  The biggest name that was missing that I could think of is Katsuo Ohsugi.  There's only one foreign player - Alex Ramirez - so guys like Dave Hilton, Jack Howell, Tom O'Malley, Roberto Petagine and Bob Horner don't appear.   Three players - Murata, Kunio Fukutomi and Tetsuo Nishii - appear to have their first ever BBM card in this set.

The cards themselves are gorgeous.  Once again BBM has found a lot of great photos with a nice of posed and action shots.  There's only maybe two black and white photos.  The cards use pretty much the same design as the other History sets.  Here's a bunch of examples:

#08

#10

#20

#33

#31

#44

#43

#52

BBM has made a bit of a departure from the previous sets in how they're handing the 12 active player cards.  Instead of using essentially the same design as the OB cards but with a tinted background, these cards use a completely different design.  The 12 active players include Munetaka Murakami, Tetsuto Yamada, Norichika Aoki, Yasuhiro Ogawa, Yasunobu Okugawa, Yuheo Nakamura, Shingo Kawabata and Masanori Ishikawa.  Here are the cards for Ishikawa and Yamada:

#82

#85

You can see all the cards in the set over at Jambalaya.