2024 BBM Eagles

2024 is the twentieth season that the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles have been around and BBM is commemorating the occasion in a somewhat unique way.  Instead of issuing a stand-alone "Twentieth Anniversary" set (like they did for the team's tenth anniversary ten years ago), BBM basically appended a "Twentieth Anniversary" mini-set onto their annual Eagles team set this year.  

BBM's annual "comprehensive" team sets* have had base sets of 81 cards for ten years now with this being the first exception**.  This set has 117 cards with the first 81 cards being basically the standard team set and the remaining 36 cards being the "Twentieth Anniversary" mini-set.

*A "comprehensive" team set contains cards for all the players on the team's 70 man roster at the time the set went to press.

**I guess more accurately I'd say that this is the first team set that was intended to depart from the 81 card size since 2014.  There've been a couple sets that have only 80 cards because of a player leaving a team after the checklist being set but before the cards were published - BBM has pulled the card from the set but not replaced it in the checklist.

Let's dive into the standard team set portion first.  The bulk of those 81 cards are the 66 cards for manager Toshiaki Imae and all the players on the team's 70 man roster (which is apparently five players short of being full).  Normally this is the point in the post when I would talk about who's in the set and who's missing but that seems kind of silly here - the set contains everyone on the Eagles' roster and there's nobody missing.

The photos for BBM's "comprehensive" team sets are usually a mixed bag and this set is no different.  There are a lots of "batters batting, pitchers pitching" poses.  I'm generally a little more forgiving with these sets than I am of the flagship sets though and there's a handful of decent photos in this set.  There's also a couple cards that use a horizontal format which I'm very partial to.  Here's some examples - I really like the Takahisa Hayakawa photo:

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The remaining 15 cards of the standard team set portion are split up into five subsets that really don't serve any purpose other than to pad the set out to 81 cards.  There's a single card to celebrate the Eagles winning interleague this year; a two card "Brightest Hope" subset featuring rookies Tatsuki Koja and Daisuke Nakashima; a five card "Break The Limit" subset featuring pitchers Takayuki Kishi, Takahiro Norimoto, Kosei Shoji, Hayakawa and Seiryu Uchi; a five card "Unstoppable" subset featuring batters Hiroto Kobukata, Hideto Asamura, Itsuki Murabayashi, Ryosuke Tatsumi, and Yuya Ogoh; and a two card "Record Makers" subset featuring Masahiro Tanaka and Hiroaki Shimauchi.  Here's examples of all of these cards:

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Moving on to the "Twentieth Anniversary" mini-set, half of it is cards of OB players from the Eagles along with three of the team's former managers.  The players are Ginji (Akaminai), Koji Aoyama, Kazuya Fujita, Hiroyuki Fukuyama, Ryo Hijirisawa, Koichi Isobe, Hisashi Iwakuma, Shinichiro Koyama, Daisuke Kusano, Yuki Matsui, Motohiro Shima, Yosuke Takasu, Teppei (Tsuchiya), Naoto Watanabe and Takeshi Yamasaki.  The three managers are Yasushi Tao (the team's first manager), Katsuya Nomura (who led them to their first post-season appearance in 2009) and Senichi Hoshino (who led them to their only Nippon Series Championship in 2013).  I think Matsui is the only OB player who's still active somewhere else.

18 players (well, 15, really) is a small number to try to represent twenty years of history so there's any number of additional players who could have been included - Kazuo Fukumori, Kazuo Matsui, Jose Fernandez and Andruw Jones all come to mind.  But given the constraints of the set, BBM probably did as well as they could.

The card design for the OB cards is pretty much the same as the player cards in the standard team set portion of the set.  Again, there's a couple decent photos but most of them are pretty run-of-the-mill.  Here's a couple examples:

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The mini-set also contains nine cards for the Eagles career leaders in various categories.  This is a little misleading as there are nine different players represented but some of the players aren't the leader in the category they're on the card with.  For example, Asamura is on the RBI card but he's actually fourth on the list - Yamasaki's number one on the list but he's on the home run card.  Hiroaki Shimauchi is number two on the RBI list but he's on the hits card.  Of course, he's second on that list too but number one is Ginji who's on the batting average card.  You get the idea.  Here's Yamasaki's card as an example:

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The next six cards in the mini-set are reprints of the BBM 1st Version rookie cards of some significant Eagles players - Ginji (2006), Motohiro Shima (2007), Masahiro Tanaka (2007), Takero Okajima (2012), Takahiro Norimoto (2013) and Yuki Matsui (2014).  Here's Matsui's card:

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The final three cards in the set are highlights from the past 20 years.  That's right, according to BBM, the Eagles have only had three highlights since 2005.  Those highlights are them winning their first ever game (but let's not talk about their second game), Tanaka going 24-0 in 2013 and the Eagles winning the Nippon Series a month later.  I mean, the Eagles have not been a great team but they have made the playoffs five times in 19 previous seasons - maybe add one of those to the list?  Here's the card for Tanaka - he's got five total cards in the set:

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I'm not sure what to say about this set.  For me, I don't mind the merging of the historic set with the annual team set as I would have bought both of them if they were separate but I could see someone who only wanted a team set or a historic set but not both being kind of irritated.  The team set portion is fine - it's pretty much what you'd expect from a BBM team set.  The historic part is...OK.  I think they could have cut back or dropped the team leaders subset and added more OB players and/or highlights but other than that, it's passable.  I'm guessing that this means BBM isn't going to be doing an "Eagles History 2005-2024" set like the similarly named sets they've done for the Carp, Giants, Dragons, Marines, Tigers, Buffaloes, Swallows, Hawks and Lions since 2020.

As always, you can see all the cards (including inserts and parallels) over at Jambalaya.