Best 9 and Golden Glove Award Cards In BBM Sets

Among the post-season awards that NPB issues are the Best 9 and Golden Glove awards.  The Golden Glove awards are basically their version of the MLB Gold Glove awards - they're issued to the player at each defensive position that the voters think had the best defensive performance for the season.  There's a set of awards for each league which means there are usually 18 awards each year.

The Best 9 awards are awarded to the player at each position that the voters think had the best overall performance for the season.  Like the Golden Glove awards, there's a set of awards for both leagues with the Pacific League team having a DH so there's usually 19 awards given out each year.  The Best 9 awards don't have a direct analogy to MLB.  The knee-jerk reaction would be to use the Silver Slugger award but that's not accurate for two reasons - the Silver Slugger awards are for "offensive performance" rather than "overall performance" and the Best 9 awards predate the Silver Slugger awards by 40 years - NPB (or more accurately its predecessor Japan Baseball League) started issuing the Best 9 awards in 1940 while MLB didn't start the Silver Slugger awards until 1980.

There was a stretch when BBM used to include cards for the winners of these awards in the following year's flagship set(s), either as insert sets or as subsets in the base set.  The first year the Best 9 award winners appeared in a set was 1997 and the Golden Glove award winners were added in  2000.  The last year that the award winners were in the flagship set was 2013, which - not coincidentally - was the last year BBM included the "Leaders" subset for the previous year's statistical leaders.

I thought it might be interesting to show one of the award winner cards from each year.  We'll start with the Best 9 winners first.  As I mentioned, the first flagship set to have the Best 9 winners was 1997.  The cards were an insert set that year but were part of the base set in 1998.  They went back to being insert cards in 1999 and remained that way until 2011.  From 2011 to 2013, they were in the base set again.  When BBM split the flagship set up into separate 1st and 2nd Version sets, the Best 9 cards were always in the 1st Version sets.

BBM actually had two versions of the cards in 2001.  When BBM issued their "Late Series" cards that year, they not only replaced all the base cards for the Tigers and BlueWave with new cards, they also replaced all the Best 9 cards with new versions.  The original cards were numbered #B1 to #B18 and the "Late Series" cards were numbered #B19 to #B36.

Here's an example Best 9 card for each year (with two for 2001).  I don't have an example for 2008 so I'm using an image I swiped from the internet.  I also don't have an example from 2010 but I have a promo version of one so I'm using that.

1997 BBM #B7

1998 BBM #531

1999 BBM #B11

2000 BBM #B5

2001 BBM #B2

2001 BBM "Late Series" #B20

2002 BBM 1st Version #BN12

2003 BBM 1st Version #BN12

2004 BBM 1st Version #BN8

2005 BBM 1st Version #BN3

2006 BBM 1st Version #BN17

2007 BBM 1st Version #BN6

2008 BBM 1st Version #BN07

2009 BBM 1st Version #BN05

Promo version of 2010 BBM 1st Version #BN01

2011 BBM 1st Version #377

2012 BBM 1st Version #358

2013 BBM 1st Version #363

A couple notes:

• Many of the cards have a shiny finish that don't necessarily scan well
• The 2001 cards are plastic "lenticular" 3D cards that also don't scan well
• The1999 cards all feature Chiba Marine Stadium in the background which was the host of one of the All Star games in 1998.  I have no idea what that would have to do with the Best 9 awards though as the Best 9 award winners weren't necessarily on the All Star teams
• Players were depicted wearing their uniforms from the season they won the award, not the season the cards were from.  So if a player switched teams after winning the award (or the player's team changed names like Matsunaka's in the 2004-05 offseason), the player is shown with their original team.  (This was true for the Golden Glove cards as well.)

On to the Golden Glove cards.  As I said, they were first included as insert cards in the 2000 set and remained insert cards until the last three years (2011-13) when they, like the Best 9 cards, were subsets in the base sets.  In 2002, the first year that BBM had split their flagship set into the 1st and 2nd Version sets, the Golden Glove cards were with the 2nd Version set.  BBM switched them to the 1st Version set in 2003 and they remained there from then on.

Like the Best 9 cards, there are two different versions of the Golden Glove cards in the 2001 set.  The original versions (#G1 to #G18) were replaced with new versions (#G19 to #G36) in the "Late Series".

Here's examples of Golden Glove cards from 2000 to 2013 (again with two for 2001).  I was only short one example - 2009 - and I again am using an image I swiped from the internet for that year.

2000 BBM #G8

2001 BBM #G1

2001 BBM Late Series #B19

2002 BBM 2nd Version #GG16

2003 BBM 1st Version #GG2

2004 BBM 1st Version #GG18

2005 BBM 1st Version #GG16

2006 BBM 1st Version #GG4

2007 BBM 1st Version #GG6

2008 BBM 1st Version #GG08

2009 BBM 1st Version #GG10

2020 BBM 1st Version #GG02

2011 BBM 1st Version #394

2012 BBM 1st Version #380

2013 BBM 1st Version #395

A couple notes:

• Again, there are shiny parts of some of these cards which make them not scan particularly well
• The 2001 cards are plastic and semi-transparent
• The 2002 cards are lenticular and don't scan well

I mentioned that I didn't think it was a coincidence that BBM stopped doing these cards at the same time they stopped doing the "Leader" subset.  These cards presented the same problem - what do you do about the players who've left NPB since winning the award?  

I've been making an assumption about how the licensing for NPB cards works but what I think happens is that BBM (or Calbee or Epoch or Topps) can make a card for any player in NPB in the same year that the player is in NPB.  But if a player leaves NPB the following year, BBM has to enter into a separate licensing agreement to include the player in that year's set.  For example, Ichiro won both a Best 9 and a Golden Glove award in 2000, his last year playing in NPB.  To include cards of him in the respective insert sets in 2001, BBM had to make a separate licensing deal with him.  I'm not positive but I think the only player they weren't able to get for these sets was 2000 Best 9 award winner Bobby Rose, who had a somewhat contentious exit from the Baystars.  I suspect, however, that by 2013, BBM had decided they didn't want to do this anymore.  They moved the statistical leaders to the Fusion set they added in 2016 but, since that set goes to print before the awards are announced, it does not include the Best 9 or Golden Glove winners (or MVP, Rookie Of The Year, Shoriki or Sawamura award winners either).