2004 BBM Giants 70th Anniversary Magazine Cards

Now that I have all of them, I wanted to do a quick post showing the cards that were distributed in the mook (magazine/book) that BBM published in 2004 to celebrate the 70th Anniversary of the Yomiuri Giants.  Each issue had an envelope embedded in it that contained two of the five possible cards - Eiji Sawamura, Tetsuharu Kawakami, Shigeo Nagashima, Sadaharu Oh and Tatsunori Hara.

I first became aware of these cards when I picked up the Sawamura card from Rob Fitts off of Ebay back in 2021.  Neither Rob or I knew where the card had come from but it didn't take too long before I not only figured out that it came from a magazine but I found a copy on Yahoo! Japan Auctions that I asked Ryan to pick up for me.  That issue contained the Oh and Hara cards.  I didn't hold out a whole lot of hope that I'd find the other two cards but I was pleasantly surprised.  I found the Kawakami card at SportsCard BITS in Nagoya last year and the Nagashima card on Yahoo! Japan Auctions (via Ryan) earlier this year.

I've shown all these cards in previous posts but I wanted to show them all in one post.  Here's the front and back of all five cards:

I didn't notice until I was doing this post that the Kawakami card has his signature on it.  Unfortunately it appears to be printed on the card and not a real autograph.  I don't think it's a parallel as the image of the card on the envelope embedded in the magazine shows the signature on Kawakami's card but no signatures on the other cards.  So I think all of the Kawakami cards have the facsimile signature on them.  I suspect that the image BBM used for the card had the signature on it.  I will say it's odd that they used that image since it's not like photos of Kawakami as a player are rare (unlike Sawamura).