GPBL Cards

Since I feel like I have a big backlog of cards to deal with, I'm going to kick off my trip-related posts with some posts about the cards I brought back.  This first post deals with some cards from the Girls Professional Baseball League (GPBL) which was the original name of the Japan Women's Baseball League (JWBL).  I had seen a four card lot of BBM's cards from the league a few months back and asked Ryan to pick it up for me.

There were four cards in the lot - two from 2010 and two from 2011.  Let's talk about the 2010 cards first:

2010 BBM Hyogo Swing Smileys #H08

2010 BBM Hyogo Swing Smileys #HS03

From just looking at the cards, it's not entirely obvious that they're from the same set.  The card number of the first cards has an "H" prefix while the second one has an "HS" prefix.  Luckily, the lot contained the envelope that the cards were distributed in and it has a checklist on it:

The Matsumoto card is in the first column while the Hagiwara card is in the second.  It looks like the "H" checklist and the "HS" checklist are the same.  I'm guessing the "S" in "HS" stands for something like "shiny" as the Hagiwara card has a foil finish on it.

These are the first 2010 GPBL cards I've gotten.  I assume these cards were distrubuted in the envelope at games that year but that's really just speculation on my part.  I know that that in 2011 there were essentially three GPBL sets by BBM (a Hyogo Swing Smileys team set, a Kyoto Asta Dreams team set and a 70-ish card set featuring all the players from both teams) but I have no idea if that was the case in 2010 also.  All I know for sure is that they did team sets for both Hyogo (which these cards came from) and Kyoto (which Ryan has the envelope from).  

Moving on to the 2011 cards...

2011 BBM Hyogo Swing Smileys #H21

2011 BBM Hyogo Swing Smileys #H15

It again is not completely obvious that these cards are from the same set but the checklist that Ryan sent me previously shows both of these cards.  It looks like cards 1-17 and cards 21-37 have the same players but have a slightly different design.

It also appears that BBM did not reuse the same photos for the team set and the 70-ish card GPBL set as neither card of Nonomura from the GPBL set (one of which can be seen here and the other can be seen in this post of Ryan's) use the same photo as the Nonomura card I have here.  Of course, that's just a data point of one so maybe it doesn't hold up for the rest of the cards.

I'd love to get more of these cards but it's so rare that I come across any.