1999 BBM Mr Giants set

I had mentioned a while back that among the cards I got from Ryan in that big box in July were the last cards I needed to complete the 1999 BBM Mr Giants set.  Here's the post about the set that I promised (threatened?) to do back then.

In 1999, BBM issued a set dedicated to Shigeo Nagashima - aka Mr. Giants.  I'm not exactly sure if there was any particular reason they decided to do a Nagashima set as, at the time, he was in the seventh year of his second stint as Giants manager and he'd manage for two more seasons after this.  This would be just the second "historic" set that BBM would produce (following the 1994 Perfect Pitching set) and the first that would be sold in packs rather than as a complete set.

What distinguishes this set from other "single player" sets is that not all of the cards feature Nagashima.  Well, that's not exactly true as all but one of the cards have his picture on them somewhere.  But some 59 of the 108 cards in the base set feature players with some connection to Nagashima - teammates on the V9 Giants or players who played under him.

The base set is split into 11 separate subsets that ranged in size from five cards to 30 cards (12 subsets if you count the two checklist cards).  The first six subsets deal with his playing career from 1958 to 1974 while the remaining five cover aspects of his two stints managing the Giants (1975-80 and 1993 to when the set was published).  I thought I'd go over each subset and show the front and back of a card (or two) from it.

The first subset is labelled something like "Chronology Of Shigeo Nagashima".  Each of the 17 cards in the subset covers a separate season in his playing career.  Here's the one for his 1960 season:

There's two things I want to point about this card.  The first is that kind of ghostly image of Nagashima on the left side of the card.  That image is on almost every card for his playing career and it'll be replaced by another image of him as a manager on almost every card from his managerial days.  The second is that the back of the card has a blue background which indicates that it's a card from his playing days.  The managerial cards have a green background.

The second subset features nine players who were teammates of Nagashima on the V9 Giants (the team that won nine straight Nippon Series championships between 1965 and 1973), including manager Tetsuharu Kawakami.  The other players are Tsuneo Horiuchi, Kazumi Takahashi, Masahiko Mori, Shozo Doi, Yukinobu Fukuroe, Shigeru Takada, Isao Shibata and Toshimitsu Suetsugu.

The third subset is labeled "Famous Scene" and each of the ten cards in it commemorate some significant event in Nagashima's playing career.  Included are his collegiate career at Rikkio University, his signing with the Giants in 1957, his first game in 1958 when he struck out four times against Masaichi Kaneda and the Swallows, the Emperor's Game in 1959 (June 25, 1959 to be exact), and his retirement in 1974.  There are also cards for his wedding in 1964 and his four children (note that there's one card showing his kids, not a card for each one).  Here's the card for him signing with the Giants (and featuring another photo of Kawakami in a kimono on the back):

The fourth subset is called "Close Up" and each of the five cards describes a different characteristic of his playing career.  There are cards for the tendency for his helmet to fly off when he swung (although that card doesn't actually show that happening), his fielding, his base running and his home run hitting.  The last one, which I'm showing here, has his full career batting record on it:

The fifth subset is "Rival Pitchers" and features five significant pitchers (one from each of the other Central League teams) that Nagashima faced during his career - Masaichi Kaneda (Swallows), Minoru Murayama (Tigers), Shohachi Aniya (Carp), Senichi Hoshino (Dragons) and Masaji Hiramatsu (Whales).  Each card shows how he did against each pitcher - he hit Kaneda the best (.313) and Hiramatsu the worst (.193).  I suspect a partial explanation for that was that he faced Kaneda during the early part of his career and Hiramatsu during the last part of his playing days.  Here's the Kaneda card:

The last subset dedicated to Nagashima's playing career is labeled "Shukan Baseball Covers" and, as you'd expect from that name, all five cards show a different cover of Shukan (Weekly) Baseball magazine featuring him.  The text on the back appears to be from the issue.  This is the only one of the playing career subsets to not have the photo of Nagashima on the left side of the card.

At thirty cards, the first subset for Nagashima the manager is the largest one in the set.  Entitled "30 Warriors", it features thirty (obviously) players from the 1999 Giants, including rookie Koji Uehara and Tomohiro Nioka.  Other players include Hiromi Makihara, Masaki Saitoh, Kazuhiro Kiyohara, Yoshinobu Takahashi and Hideki Matsui:

You'll notice two things about this card.  The first is that, as I mentioned above, the backs of the managerial cards have a green background.  The second is that, again as I previously mentioned, the image of Nagashima on the left part of the card has changed to one of him as a manager.

The eighth subset is the five card "Victory" subset.  These cards celebrate the four Central League pennants that the Giants won under Nagashima (1976, 1977, 1994 and 1996) and the one Nippon Series Championship they won (1994).  (He'd win another pennant and championship in 2000, one year after this set came out.)  Here's the card for the 1977 championship:

This next subset is the one I find the most interesting.  It's called "#1 Draft Picks" and the nine cards feature players who were taken in the first round of the draft by the Giants in some - but not all - of the years that Nagashima managed the Giants.  The players are Shoji Sadaoka (1974 draft), Toshio Shinozuka (1975), Kazuaki Fujishiro (1976), Kazuhiro Yamakura (1977), Hideki Matsui (1992), Junichi Kawahara (1994), Yusaki Iriki (1996), Yoshinobu Takahashi (1997) and Koji Uehara (1998).  Most of the cards feature photos taken at the team's press conference announcing each year's draft class and include Nagashima (the fronts of the cards in this subset does not include the photo of Nagashima on the left side).  The other cards show the player on the field with Nagashima.

I think these are the first ever "draft pick" cards that BBM did - at least the first ones that came in packs (there had been a card included in an issue of Sports Card Magazine in early 1999 that I think was the actual first BBM "draft pick card").

I got curious - because of course I did - about why not every draft under Nagashima was included in the subset.  Three of the missing number one picks - Yasuhiro Hayashi in 1979, Matsuhiro Mino in 1993 and Shunsuke Hara in 1995 - had combined for a grand total of one game with the ichi-gun Giants by the time this set went to press (Hara eventually played in 68 games with the top team in 2003-06).  There was no number one pick for the Giants in 1978 - they had boycotted the draft due to the Suguru Egawa affair.

Speaking of Egawa, he's one of the players in the next subset which was entitled "Students".  All six players had retired by 1999 but had played under Nagashima as manager.  Five of them - Egawa, Kiyoshi Nakahata, Tadashi Matsumoto, Mitsuo Sumi and Takashi Nishimoto - had played for him during his first stint and the last - Tatsunori Hara - had finished his career during Nagashima's second stint.  I'm not sure what makes these guys "students" of Nagashima though.

The final subset is a return to the earlier "Close Up" subset, only this time the five cards deal with things that happened while Nagashima was manager.  There's a card for the Giants' 14 game winning streak in 1976, Toshimitsu Suetsugu hitting a sayonara home run in 1976, two players throwing no-hitters and the Giants beating the Dragons on the last day of the 1994 season to win the pennant as well as card with his full managerial record on it.  Curiously, the photos on the fronts of the cards seem to be unrelated to the text on the backs.  Here's the card with his managerial record:

The base set also included two checklist cards that form a little panorama of Nagashima waving to the fans on the day he retired as a player:

#107 (left) & #108 (right)

Card #108 is the only card in the set that does not show a picture of Nagashima.

There are two insert sets associated with this set.  The ten card "Nagashima Titles" set feature cards dedicated to awards and/or statistical titles that he won - MVP, Rookie Of The Year, Best 9, Golden Glove, Batting Crown, Home Run Crown, Hall Of Fame, etc.  The five card "Giants Heroes" cards are cards printed on clear plastic that include players from the 1999 Giants - Masaki Saitoh, Masumi Kuwata, Kazuhiro Kiyohara, Yoshinobu Takahashi and Hideki Matsui.  I only have one of the "Nagashima Titles" cards - the one dedicated to the ten times he lead the Central League in hits:

There's something that seems kind of odd to me about this set.  I realized when decided to try to build the set a few years ago and started to really understand how it was put together that someone was missing from it - Sadaharu Oh.  It seems strange that someone who would be closely associated with Nagashima for sixteen of the seventeen years of his career would be excluded from the set.  I mean, it would make perfect sense for Oh to appear in the "V9" subset.  In contrast, BBM's "single player" set for Oh from 2008 included four cards showing Oh with Nagashima.  I don't know why Oh's not in this set.

Wrapping up, it's an odd set and probably not all that appealing if you're not super-into Shigeo Nagashima.  I'm kind of questioning why I decided to complete it and thinking it was mostly due to it being the first pack-based "historic" BBM set.  Most of the cards were reasonably cheap, with the two Matsui cards probably being the most expensive (and I don't think either of them were more than 500 yen).