Some time ago, I had picked up what I thought was a complete 2000 BBM O-N set off of Ebay but instead I got something that was a bit of a mystery. The 2000 BBM O-N set was a high end box set dedicated to Shigeo Nagashima and Sadaharu Oh and contained 54 cards including film cards for each player and a pair of memorabilia cards for each player (a jersey card and a windbreaker card). Let me be clear - the set didn't have the possibility of getting one of those four memorabilia cards - all four were included in the box.
You can read all the gory details about it here but what I had bought was an odd mess of cards that didn't make any sense until I realized that BBM had issued two different versions of the set - a "Basic" set (which was numbered to 3000) and a "Limited" set (which was numbered to 2000). What I had bought was a mix of cards from both sets that only included the Nagashima memorabilia cards from the "Limited" version of the set. There had been another auction from the same seller (a consignment store that didn't really know anything about the cards) that looked like it had the rest of the cards - including the Oh memorabilia cards from the "Limited" set and all four memorabilia cards from the "Basic" set. Once I realized what was going on, I attempted to buy the other lot but I was not successful.
What I had ended up with was a mish-mash of cards from the two sets. I had 31 cards from the "Limited" set and 24 cards from the "Basic" set. There were four cards that I had both the "Limited" and "Basic" versions for so I couldn't quite build a complete composite "franken-set" out of what I had - I was short three cards. Two of those cards were the Sadaharu Oh memorabilia cards so the chances were pretty good that I was never going to get a complete "franken-set" either as I'm generally not willing to spend a lot of money on single cards and Oh jersey cards weren't going to be cheap. As the years went by, I picked up the other regular card that I needed but I never really expected to get the Oh cards for something I was willing to pay.
Recently, however, I kept seeing a Japanese seller on Ebay offering the four memorabilia cards from the "Basic" set. I think it's been the same seller every time, but the price kept changing every time they listed it. I don't remember for sure but I think it would vary between $125 and $145. I put it in my watchlist a couple times to see if they'd offer it to me a lower price but they never did.
Or at least, never did until about two weeks ago. I think they were asking $136-ish for it and they offered it to me for $130-ish. I countered with $100, expecting them to just say "no" and not negotiate any further. To my surprise, they countered with something a little lower and we went back and forth a couple times before they offered the cards to me for $114. I thought long and hard about it since, as I said before, I don't tend to spend a lot of money on single cards. I ultimately decided to pull the trigger, thinking that it was a good price on two Sadaharu Oh memorabilia cards and maybe I could sell the two Nagashima memorabilia cards I already had to recoup some of the money I'd spent. Shipping was free but with sales tax, the final price was around $120. I paid up and was a bit surprised at how fast I got the cards - they showed up at my house last Tuesday, just about ten days after I paid for them. There was just one minor problem with the cards.
They weren't memorabilia cards.
To be clear, it wasn't obvious that they weren't memorabilia cards from the photos of the auction. The cards had been packed in the original box in plastic covers so if you weren't looking really closely or never took the cards out of the cases, you might not have realized that the cards weren't actually memorabilia cards. And the cards themselves are identical to the real memorabilia cards from the "Limited" version of the set. See if you can tell in these photos which one is the memorabilia card and which is not:
You may have guessed from the fact that they're in screw-down cases that the memorabilia cards are the ones on the left. You can see, though, that there's nothing on the non-memorabilia card that differentiates it from the memorabilia version - other than the lack of memorabilia, of course.
I want to be clear here that I don't think the cards are fake. I think that the "Basic" version of the set contained cards that looked like the memorabilia cards but weren't. The cards are serially numbered to 3000. I think this is an important fact that anyone looking at buying one of these sets (or a card like this one for sale on COMC) should be aware of. Here's the front and back of all four cards:
I messaged the seller to say that I was disappointed with the cards since they weren't actually memorabilia cards and wanted to return them. They offered to refund half of the price and let me keep the cards. I again thought long and hard about it and decided that avoiding the hassle and price of sending the cards back to Japan was probably worth just taking the refund. I ultimately ended up paying $60-ish for the four cards which breaks down to $15 per card. I'm not going to say I'm happy with this outcome (if I'd known they weren't memorabilia cards ahead of time, I wouldn't have paid $60 for them) but I'm content with it. And at least I now have a complete set - essentially a somewhat enhanced "Basic" set.
I'm probably giving the seller too much of a pass here - I suspect they actually knew that the listing was misleading. But I do need to wonder what the hell BBM was thinking with these cards. Why is there nothing obvious on the cards to indicate they aren't really memorabilia cards?
This isn't the first time that I'd seen something like this happen. In the early 00's, it wasn't uncommon for BBM to issue a boxed set that could possibly contain a memorabilia card. The boxes that DIDN'T include the memorabilia card would contain a similar looking card that took the memorabilia card's place in the set. I had been thinking that the cards actually would say "non-memorabilia" on them but it turns out that I was misremembering this. Here's a handful of these cards:
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| 2003 BBM Japan National Team #NJ |
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| 2002 BBM All Stars #A65 |
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| 2003 BBM PL Champion Hawks #SJ |
I think some of these are more obviously not really memorabilia cards than others.
There are cards that BBM marked as "non memorabilia" or "non jersey" though but it looks like they only did it on promo cards like the ones issued with Shukan Baseball or Sports Card Magazine:
But BBM actually wasn't consistent with always labeling the promo cards that way:
The back of this particular card does mention that it's a "non-jersey" card.
I actually have both the memorabilia card for Norichika Aoki from the 2007 1st Version set AND the promo version of the card that was issued in Sports Card Magazine. Can you tell which is which in this photo?:
The back of the promo version says "promo" on it and isn't serially numbered. The actual memorabilia card (the one on the right) is serially numbered to 300.
I guess the moral of the story is to be extremely careful when buying BBM memorabilia cards from the 00's.
