I've been involved in a discussion on Reddit over the past week or so regarding a 2021 Konami Baseball Collection "SR" (super rare) card of Roki Sasaki. I won't rehash the discussion here - you can read it for yourself if you want* - but a lot of the discussion hinges on trying to determine when, exactly, the card was published.
* I should mention that I've had some somewhat less heated discussions in DMs with the OP regarding an actual 1/1 card he pulled. I also have to always remind myself that arguing with strangers on the internet is rarely a good idea.
Let's start with a little background on the Baseball Collection cards. Konami produced these cards for five years from 2018 to 2022. The cards were used in an arcade game and you'd win more cards playing the game although I'm not sure if the cards were somehow available outside of the game as well. It's not entirely clear to me if the cards were printed by the game or just dispensed - my gut feeling is that they were dispensed but the Japanese Wikipedia page for the game implies they were printed by the game.
Based on some advertising images for the game linked to by the OP on Reddit, the 2021 Baseball Collection cards were released on March 29th of that year. But did that mean that ALL the cards were released then or just some of them? And if it was just some of them, was the OP's Sasaki card one of them?
There were a couple things on the back of the card that I felt were clues but I wasn't sure how to interpret them. The first was the card's number - "202117-SR-M017-00". What did this mean? There's a couple things that are obvious - the "2021" is obviously the year, the "SR" is obviously because it's an "SR" card and the "M017" is Marines uniform number 17. I knew that the "17" at the end of "202117" was not for Sasaki's uniform number because I have other Baseball Collection cards where this number is not the player's uniform number but I didn't know what it meant. The second and much more interesting thing was the copyright date for the card which was, surprisingly, 2022, not 2021. What did this mean?
My suspicion was that the "17" digraph somehow indicated a card series of some sort and that the 2022 copyright meant that the series that the card was in was not actually published until 2022 despite having a "cover date" of 2021. I based this on the handful of 2021 Baseball Collection cards that I own. I have seven in all and I took a look at the backs of them all. What I found was that I had four cards that had "00" after the year, one that had "15", one that had "16" and one that had "19". Here's the front and back of one of the "00" cards and the other three cards:
Here's something interesting - if you look at the lower right of the card backs, you can see the copyright date for the card. The first three (the "00", "15" and "16" cards) have a copyright date of 2021 but the last one (the "19" card) has a copyright date of 2022. If the digraph does actually denote some sort of card series, it would appear that the change in year happened between "16" and "17".
I looked to see if any of my other Baseball Collection cards had a copyright date that was later than the "cover date" and if its digraph was a "high" number (although "high" is kind of meaningless out of context). I found I only had one - this 2019 Premium card of Takeya Nakamura:
Unfortunately, the digraph for this card doesn't help as it's "C9". It looks like Konami had issued some special cards that used different digraphs than two digit numbers, The one thing that indicates that this card was issued after the season ended is that it commemorates Nakamura winning a Best 9 award. It has to be for 2019 because Nakamura won the award that year but didn't in 2018.
So I had a theory that fit the evidence I had but I didn't really have any facts. It'd be great to be able to look at Konami's checklists but they basically purged everything each year from their websites and almost none of it appears to be available in the Wayback Machine. I decided to just Google "ベースボールコレクション" and see if anything useful came up. I was a little surprised this led me to Suruga-ya's website. More specifically, it led me to a page listing all of their Baseball Collection cards in their inventory (or may have once had in their inventory - it's not really clear to me how many of these cards are actually available for sale).
One of the interesting things in this listing is a column that includes "発売日" which appears to translate to "release date". Does this really mean the date the card was released or does it mean the date it entered inventory at the store? I looked at their listings for both BBM and Epoch and their listed release dates appear to match when the sets were released. It may be a kind of moot point - if Suruga-ya got the item in on the day it was released, the date will be the same regardless of what it actually means.
So the nice thing about the page listing all the Baseball Collection cards is that I can search by card number or, more usefully, PART of a card number. So I can search for all the 2021 cards simply by putting "2021" in the search field. Or, even better, I can search for all the cards that start with "202100" by entering "202100" in it.
What I get with the last search is a list of 285 cards that all have a release date of 3/29/21 which, as the OP of the Reddit post had pointed out, was the date the 2021 Baseball Collection cards were initially released so that checks out.
What happens if we do the search for the "202101" cards? We get a list of 39 cards that all have release date of 4/8/21. What's interesting is that the cards all carry the label "SEASON 2021アペンドパック第1弾" which translates to "SEASON 2021 Append Pack 1st Edition". So it does look like that digraph indicates the series number or the "append pack edition".
I should mention that I didn't confirm if all 285 "00" cards listed or all 39 "01" cards are unique with no card being listed more than once. Since most NPB card issues have sizes that are multiples of 12 (because there's the same number of cards for each team), my bet is that there are cards listed more than once. The other possibility is that not every card that was issued is listed. To be honest, this process was tedious enough without trying to determine if there were duplicate cards in the listings.
I repeated this process for "02", "03", "04", etc up to "19". Actually to be honest, I tried a search for "20" but got a "0 results for search" message. What I found is what I kind of expected. Each new "Append Pack" edition has a release date later than the one before it. And, as my handful of cards predicted, the 16th Edition was the last one published in the calendar year of 2021 (December 9th) with the 17th Edition being the first published in 2022 (January 6th).
I searched some of the digraphs that contained letters as well. I ultimately did searches on something like 39(!) separate digraphs. All the cards for a particular digraph had the same release date with two exceptions. Again, this may be the day the cards entered into Suruga-ya's inventory but why would all the cards for a given digraph have entered the store's inventory on the same day unless that was the day they were released?
The exceptions were the "R1" and "R2" cards. There were eight R1 cards - four of which were released on August 26th with two each being released on October 14th and November 11th. There were only three R2 cards with two of them being released on December 2nd and the other on December 23rd. I have no idea why these and only these have different release dates. All the "R3" and "R4" cards have the same release dates.
Here's a breakdown of all the digraphs I found along with their release dates. I've listed the R1 and R2 cards multiple times based on their different release dates.
| Digraph | Release Date | Number Of Cards | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 00 | 3/29/2021 | 285 | |
| C0 | 3/29/2021 | 12 | Startup Campaign |
| 01 | 4/8/2021 | 39 | Append Pack 1st Edition |
| 02 | 4/22/2021 | 38 | Append Pack 2nd Edition |
| N1 | 4/28/2021 | 24 | Nostalgic Player Card Challenge Part 1 |
| 03 | 5/27/2021 | 36 | Append Pack 3rd Edition |
| 04 | 6/10/2021 | 38 | Append Pack 4th Edition |
| C1 | 6/17/2021 | 12 | Starting/Relief Prospect Campaign |
| 05 | 6/24/2021 | 37 | Append Pack 5th Edition |
| C2 | 7/1/2021 | 12 | Utility Player Campaign |
| 06 | 7/8/2021 | 37 | Append Pack 6th Edition |
| C3 | 7/21/2021 | 12 | Franchise Player Campaign |
| 07 | 7/29/2021 | 39 | Append Pack 7th Edition |
| N2 | 8/5/2021 | 24 | Nostalgic Player Card Challenge Part 2 |
| 08 | 8/12/2021 | 39 | Append Pack 8th Edition |
| 09 | 8/19/2021 | 36 | Append Pack 9th Edition |
| 10 | 8/26/2021 | 36 | Append Pack 10th Edition |
| R1 | 8/26/2021 | 4 | Memorial Mission |
| C4 | 9/2/2021 | 12 | Helper Campaign |
| 11 | 9/16/2021 | 37 | Append Pack 11th Edition |
| 12 | 9/30/2021 | 38 | Append Pack 12th Edition |
| N3 | 10/7/2021 | 24 | Nostalgic Player Card Challenge Part 3 |
| 13 | 10/14/2021 | 39 | Append Pack 13th Edition |
| R1 | 10/14/2021 | 2 | Memorial Mission |
| 14 | 10/28/2021 | 38 | Append Pack 14th Edition |
| C5 | 11/4/2021 | 12 | New World Campaign |
| 15 | 11/11/2021 | 36 | Append Pack 15th Edition |
| R1 | 11/11/2021 | 2 | Memorial Mission |
| C6 | 11/25/21 | 12 | Rookie Campaign |
| R2 | 12/2/2021 | 2 | Memorial Mission |
| 16 | 12/9/2021 | 58 | Append Pack 16th Edition |
| K1 | 12/9/2021 | 24 | Japan’s No.1 Tournament |
| C7 | 12/23/2021 | 24 | Selection Player Card Challenge Fielder Edition |
| R2 | 12/23/2021 | 1 | Memorial Mission |
| 17 | 1/6/2022 | 69 | Append Pack 17th Edition |
| R3 | 1/13/2022 | 2 | Memorial Mission |
| K2 | 1/20/2022 | 36 | No. 1 Deciding Match |
| 18 | 2/3/2022 | 72 | Append Pack 18th Edition |
| C8 | 2/10/2022 | 12 | Pinch Hitter Trump Campaign |
| R4 | 2/10/2022 | 7 | Memorial Mission |
| C9 | 2/17/2022 | 34 | Title Holder Campaign |
| 19 | 2/24/2022 | 70 | Append Pack 19th Edition |
I don't think this list is actually complete as the search for all the 2021 cards gives a total of 1651 cards and my list here only accounts for 1423. My enthusiasm for this project kind of waned after a while and I felt I'd put enough effort into this to prove that my suspicions were correct.
2 comments:
Good detective work!
Thanks!
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