First Sets Of 2025

The first three sets of the new year have been announced so let's do a quick overview of them...

- Ichiro Suzuki retired in 2019 but apparently missed the game enough that he founded a club baseball team called "KOBE CHIBEN".  He also passed the qualification examination to be coach high school baseball but the rules of the governing organization for high school baseball do not allow anyone working with professional teams to coach at a high school level.  Since Ichiro is still currently employed by the Mariners as some sort of "special assistant", he's apparently only allowed to do high school coaching over the winter.  I'm not clear on all the details but I think he's been primarily working with the women's team from Chiben Gakuen Wakayama High School.  There appears to be an annual game between KOBE CHIBEN and a women's high school baseball team the past four years.  The first game was played in Kobe but the last three have been played in Tokyo Dome.  The 2024 game featured not only Ichiro but also Hideki Matsui and Daisuke Matsuzaka on the KOBE roster.  BBM is putting out a box set for this game.  The official name is something like "High School Baseball Girls Selection VS Ichiro selection KOBE CHIBEN Baseball card set [DREAM]" but I think I'll just call it "Dream".  Each box contains 32 cards - a 30 card base set, one insert card (which is a parallel of one of the base set cards) and one "premium" insert card (which could be a foil signature, memorabilia, autographed or autographed memorabilia card - some of which feature one or more of Ichiro, Matsui and Matsuzaka).  The 30 base set cards have cards of the "three legends" and 20 members of the high school team.  The set will be out in early February.  What's interesting about this to me is that this will be Ichiro's first BBM card since 2009.  I had kind of figured that he had an exclusive deal with Epoch but maybe that ended this year.  It'll be interesting to see if he appears in any additional sets for BBM this coming year.

- "Rookie Edition", BBM's annual draft pick set, is back for its 23rd edition.  There's no real changes from the past few years.  The base set contains 135 cards - 122 cards for the 2024 draft picks, twelve "New Face" subset cards and a single "list of draft picks" card to make the number of cards in the set divisible by three.  The draft picks include both the 69 players taken in the regular phase and the 53 players taken in the ikusei (development player) phase who actually signed with their drafting team (Ryo Furukawa, the first development player pick of the Hawks, did not sign).  The twelve first round picks will again have "secret" versions which are short printed photo variations and all the regular phase draftees will have various foil signature parallels.  There are three types of insert cards - "Starting Point" (12 cards), "Close Relationship" (eight cards) and "Rookie Of The Year" (two cards featuring the 2024 Rookies Of The Year Hiromasa Funabasama and Natsuki Takeuchi).  There are autographed cards available for both the established players in the set (or at least the ones in the "Starting Point" insert set) and the draftees although I believe the draftees are only available as exchange cards.  The set will be released in late-February.

- The Eagles are continuing to collaborate with Epoch on their annual team set.  This set is usually sold in packs (or boxes of packs) at the Eagles' ballpark but also tends to be available nation-wide.  I'm assuming this set that's been announced is the 2025 Eagles 1st Version set although the web page does not say that.   The base set will contain 72 cards of active players on the roster including the development players.  It's unclear if the base set will include the 2024 draft class or not but I'd assume it will not include any players who've left the team since the end of the season (Masahiro Tanaka and Eigoro Mogi) or any players who've joined the team since then.  There are silver and gold foil signature parallels of all the base cards.  There are three types of insert cards - "Baseball Mates" (7 cards), "Keep Smiling" (17 cards) and "Uniform Collection" (22 cards) - and three types of autographed cards - "Authentic", "Record Achievers" and "2025 Rookie Autograph".  In addition, there will be memorabilia cards from game used uniforms of Takahiro Norimoto and Hideto Asamura and the ubiquitous Epoch premium GEM insert cards (both "White" and "Black").  The set will be released on March 1st.