Magazine Cards

Among the many cards in the box Ryan sent me were a handful of cards that had been issued in magazines.  Three of these I had been eagerly awaiting as they closed out "sets" on my want list.

The first of these is this Hiromitsu Ochiai promo card from the 2002 BBM All Time Heroes set.  Despite the card not having any markings that it came from Sports Card Magazine (SCM), I'm pretty sure it was issued in SCM #30 in November of 2001.  Here's the front and back of it:

This is another example of BBM not clearly indicating on the front of the card that it's not really a memorabilia card - not that I thought this one was.  

This is the last SCM card that I was looking for.  I don't quite have a complete collection of all the baseball-related SCM cards but I have all that I wanted to get.  Most of what I don't have are promo cards - the Ochiai is a rare one that I wanted since it was Ochiai, one of my favorite players.

The second card I got that completed a set was this one of Shigeo Nagashima:

This ended a quest of mine that began when I picked up an oddball card of Eiji Sawamura from Rob Fitts four and half years ago.  It turned out that the Sawamura was one of five cards that BBM issued with a mook celebrating the Giants' 70th Anniversary in 2004.  Ryan had previously tracked down a copy of the mook for me.  Each issue had two of the five cards in it - the issue I got had Sadaharu Oh and Tatsunori Hara.  I found the Tetsuto Kawakami card at SportsCard BITS in Nagoya last year and found this one on Yahoo! Japan Auctions earlier this year.

Speaking of Nagashima, the third and final card that completed a "set" featured a manga version of him:

I don't know for sure what this is from but I assume that it was some sort of publication that was tied into the 2000 Nippon Series which was known as the "ON Series" since it pitted Nagashima's Giants against Sadaharu Oh's Hawks.  I had picked up the matching card of Oh about a year ago and now I have both cards.

The last two cards are each from my remaining magazine issued card goals.  This card of Isao Harimoto is from the Fall 2004 issue of "Baseball Magazine" and is one of four "Disbanded Club Player" cards that was given away with that issue:

Ten years later, BBM would use a better version of this photo in the Memories Of Uniform set.

I now have 31 of the 36 cards that were issued in "Baseball Magazine" between 2004 and 2008.

The other goal I have is trying to get all of the "Season Memorial" cards issued in Shukan Baseball between 2005 and 2016.  Like the "Baseball Magazine" cards, there are 36 of these total (four for each year form 2005 to 2010 and two for each year from 2011 to 2016).  With this 2005 Norichika Aoki card, I'm down to only needing 13 of them.

This was part of an auction containing several Aoki cards which I'll be sharing in future posts.