Baystars Fan Club Cards

I frequently mention that the biggest unknown area of Japanese baseball cards are the team issued/fan club cards.  Case in point - Ryan threw a bunch of such cards for the Baystars in the box he sent me back in July - 62 in all, dating from between 2016 and 2019.  Now I had a lot of Baystars team issued cards from this time period already so imagine my surprise that not only did I not have any of these cards, I only had one card that appeared to even be from one of the sets these cards were from!  It was even more surprising because, as far as I could tell, the cards appeared to be from 22 different sets!

It's hard sometimes to tell which set the cards just from the front of it so I figure the best way to do this post is to show the front and back of one card from each set.  I will point out that the majority of these cards have a "kira" finish on the front which doesn't always show up will in the scans.

I need to also point out that whoever Ryan got these cards from was apparently a big fan of pitcher Kenta Ishida as he's on 13 of the cards.  

Keep in mind that the names I'm giving the sets should in no way be considered the "official" name of these sets.  On the advice of a card collector on Reddit, I did some poking around the news archive on the Baystars' website to see if I could find anything about any of the sets.  I specifically was looking at the 2017 archive and while I did find some stuff about cards, they didn't seem to be talking about any of the cards I had.  So these names are simply ones I've given the sets to differentiate them from each other.

We'll do this year by year.  Ryan sent me five cards from 2016 that appear to be from four different sets.  I'm calling this first one the "Fan Club" set:

I'm calling this next one "Fan Club Kira":

"Fan Club Star Night":

This last one is "Fan Club Climax":

Almost half of the cards I got were from 2017 - 29 cards representing what I think is nine sets.  I again am calling the first one the "Fan Club" set.  This is the only one of all of these sets that I already had a card from:

"Fan Club Kira":

"Fan Club Kira Gold":

"This Is My Era" (it's not just pitchers so I assume they didn't mean "ERA"):

"I * Yokohama Day":

"Victory Festival 2017":

"Fan Club Star Night":

"Fan Club App Card Collection"  The lines of text on the back of the card says that Ishida came in 13th in the fan vote of the App Card Collection with 668 votes:

"Highlights" I find these the most interesting as they feature events from the season.  I don't know if these were released the same way that teams like the Giants issued "Winning Game Cards" or if they were released after the season.   I do know that there can be multiple cards for the same game.  All of the cards I have between this set and the similar sets from 2018 and 2019 feature Baystars wins at home:

Moving onto 2018, there were 17 cards from five sets.  This first set is "2018 Spring Camp":

"Fan Club Kira":

"Fan Club Kira Silver":

"Get The Flag!"  I think this was tied into the 20th Anniversary of the Baystars' 1998 Championship.  Besides the explicit mention of "'98" on the back of the card, Tanaka is wearing a throwback uniform:

"Highlights":

Finally for 2019, there were 11 cards in just four sets.  The first one is "2019 Spring Camp":

You could switch the names of the next two sets and they'd still fit.  Here's "Fan Club Kira":

And for lack of a better name, "Fan Club Kira Signature":

And, to wrap things up, "Highlights":

Whew!  That was a lot of cards and sets.  I don't think this is a comprehensive list of the sets for any of these four years and I have no idea what the total number of cards and sets the Baystars issued during this time period (or any other years for that matter).  I also don't know if other teams also have the bewildering number of fan club/team-issued sets.  I know there's a couple years that I have cards from multiple Lions sets but that's still on the order of three or four at most, not nine.