2023 BBM Farewell Set (the Expurgated Version)

Starting in 2011, BBM has issued an annual box set each winter featuring the baseball players who retired the previous season.  For the first few years the set might include multiple cards for a player, especially if that player had played for more than one team during his career.  For example, Kazuo Fukumori had three cards in the inaugural 2011 set showing him with the Baystars, the Kintetsu Buffaloes and the Eagles.  After a few years, however, BBM reduced the number of cards to only one per player and used photos of the player from their final NPB team, regardless of whether they had spent most of their career with another team.  I think the most egregious example of this was the 2021 set showing Hisashi Iwakuma as a member of the Yomiuri Giants, the last time he "played for" in Japan if you consider two innings pitched on the farm team having "played for" the team.

Despite these changes, I still made it a point to pick up this set every year - or more accurately ask Ryan to pick it up for me (although I did buy the first three sets myself on my first trip to Japan 11 years ago this week).  But three years ago, BBM made a change to the set that made me lose interest - they added retiring athletes from other sports to the set.  I've mentioned many times that I'm really a one trick pony any more when it comes to sports - I don't really pay any attention to anything other than baseball.  I made the decision in 2022 to not get this set anymore and I've skipped it the past two years as well.

So I was kind of surprised to discover a partial 2023 set in the box of cards that Ryan sent me.  What he did was send me just the baseball players from the set - 26 cards out of the original 39 in the base set.  I don't know what became of the other 13 cards but I don't really have to care about them.  Of course, this does bother my OCD some knowing this isn't really a complete set but I'm trying to ignore that.

For the cards themselves, they're pretty much what we've come to expect from this set.  There's a combination of photos from the player's retirement ceremonies where they're either waving goodbye to the fans or being tossed in the air by their teammates and generic "pitcher pitching, batters batting" photos of the players while they were still active.  The photo on the card is from the last year the player was active in NPB - for example Kazuhisa Makita spent the 2022 season in Taiwan playing for the CTBC Brothers so his photo is from the 2021 season when he pitched for the Eagles.  The big names in the set are probably Kosuke Fukudome, Yoshio Itoi, Chihiro Kaneko, Tomotaka Sakaguchi and Tetsuya Utsumi.  Here's some sample cards:

#01

#03

#08

#23

#02

You can see all the cards (including the non-baseball ones) over at Jambalaya.