Oldest BBM Set With An Active NPB Player - 2025 Edition

Time for my OTHER Opening Day tradition (and this one will continue) - which is the oldest BBM flagship set to have a currently active NPB player?

I got confirmation today that Hiroyuki Nakajima has officially retired.  He'd been hoping to catch on with another team after the Dragons released him at the end of last season but it was not to be.  This means that the final NPB player who appeared in the 2001 BBM set (the first one I ever collected) has now retired.  The oldest BBM flagship set with an active NPB player is now the 2002 set (or sets really as that was the first year that BBM issued their flagship set in two parts as the 1st and 2nd Versions).

Surprisingly, there's actually three active NPB players from the 2002 1st Version set - Takumi Kuriyama and Takeya Nakamura of the Lions and Masanori Ishikawa of the Swallows:

2002 BBM 1st Version #269

2002 BBM 1st Version #268

2002 BBM 1st Version #24 Facsimile Autograph Parallel

Ishikawa is the only one of the three who also appeared in the 2002 2nd Version set:

2002 BBM 2nd Version #442 Facsimile Autograph Parallel

I did not realize until I pulled these cards that I had the signature parallel for both of Ishikawa's rookie flagship cards.

I don't have enough Calbee cards to track this very as I didn't start getting the complete sets until 2012 but since I have Ishikawa's 2002 Calbee card, I know that the 2002 Calbee set is the oldest one with an active NPB player in it:

2002 Calbee #093

You'll notice that I've been careful to say "active NPB player".  That's because there's an active player in Japan who was in a BBM set earlier than 2002 - Munenori Kawasaki is still playing for the Tochigi Golden Braves of the independent Baseball Challenge League.  At 43 years of age, Kawasaki is actually two years younger than Ishikawa but was drafted in 1999 so his first BBM card was in the 2000 set.

Should all three of these players retire after this season (which wouldn't be a huge surprise), the new "oldest set with an active NPB player" would slip three years to the Hideaki Wakui and the 2005 1st Version set.  If I considered MLB player as well, Yu Darvish would be there with Wakui.