Friday, February 23, 2024

SCM And Other Magazine And Promo Cards

One of my collecting goals over the past few years has been to get all the baseball cards that were issued with Sports Card Magazine (SCM) over the years.  With this batch of cards from Ryan I am now just one card away from that goal.  I thought I'd show off a bunch of the SCM cards I got although there's a few that I'll be including in other posts:

2003 SCM #27

2003 SCM #32

2004 SCM #33

2004 SCM #37



2008 SCM #108

2008 SCM #110

2008 SCM #111

2009 SCM #117

2009 SCM #127

2009 SCM #131

2010 SCM #159

2010 SCM #161

One of my other goals has been getting all the cards issued in Shukan (Weekly) Baseball's annual "Season Memorial" magazine from 2005 to 2016.  I came across this card of Tomoaki Kanemoto from the 2005 edition on Yahoo! Japan Auctions (YJA) and asked Ryan to pick it up for me:


There were some Shukan Baseball promo cards for a couple Rookie Edition sets in the lot of Lions cards that included the Daisuke Matsuzaka "Super Rookie" card.  The interesting thing about these is that unlike most promos for Rookie Edition, these feature a different photo than the actual card.



Yet another goal of mine is to get all 36 cards that were issued in "Baseball Magazine" between 2004 and 2008.  This Isao Harimoto card is the 29th of the cards:


It's hard to track these cards down for two reasons.  The first is that I don't know for sure who's on the cards I'm missing and the second is that it's very difficult to get a search going in Mercari or Yahoo! Japan Auctions where you can differentiate between "Baseball Magazine" the card company and "Baseball Magazine" the magazine.

The game programs sold during the interleague portion of the 2006 NPB schedule included two baseball cards - one for each of the teams in that particular game.  There ended up being 60 cards in all - five per team.  I had seen these listed in Engel but it wasn't until last year sometime when I saw one on YJA and asked Ryan to grab it for me:


I've often said that cards issued with magazines are one the biggest unknown areas of Japanese baseball cards.  There's no list anywhere that I've ever seen that says what's out there.  Case in point - this 2023 Shota Imanaga card.  I suspect it's from some Baystars magazine or maybe the team's year book but I have no idea.  It's got a card number of #YM01 which implies there are more cards.  Actually since the card number has a leading zero, it implies that there's more than nine cards.  But I don't know anything else about the set.


I'm also want to show off a couple random promo cards that were in the box.  Most of these came in the lot of Lions cards while the other was in the lots for Haruki Nishikawa of the Fighters - it should be pretty obvious which cards came from which lot.

This first card is double sided:



This next card is also double-sided.  I actually have no idea what set this is a promo for:



I got a couple other "Book Store Special Card" promos:




Lastly I got a "Fighters Foundation" card for Takuya Nakashima.  This card uses roughly the same design as the 2017 BBM Fighters set but the photo is different.  This is the second "Fighters Foundation" card that I have.  Like the Imanaga card, I have no idea how many cards like them are out there.  Actually since the cards are unnumbered, I can't even guess how many cards there are.



4 comments:

Fuji said...

I notice some of these cards have both BBM and SCM on them. I've never own either publication, but is this like Tuff Stuff adding cards into an issue of Beckett?

NPB Card Guy said...

BBM cards are published by Baseball Magazine Sha which is a magazine publisher. Baseball Magazine Sha publishes "Shukan Baseball" and "Baseball Magazine" and also used to publish "Sports Card Magazine" (the last issue was in January of 2017). So this is more like the cards that Topps included with their magazine - both the cards and the magazine are coming from the same publisher. The main difference is that these cards are a lot nicer than the perforated sheets that Topps did.

Baseball Magazine Sha also published the Interleague programs in 2006 and (I assume) that Baystars magazine from last year. All the cards in this post are BBM issues although some of them don't have their logo on the front.

Sean said...

Oh wow, that is a neat collecting project.

How many cards did SCM create over the years?

NPB Card Guy said...

There were a total of 467 SCM cards in the roughly 20 years the magazine was published. I have the full list here. I was only interested in getting the baseball related ones so I probably "only" have around 350-400 of them. (Of course, now I'm curious what the actual number is but I need to go to sleep...)