BBM issued an annual All Star set in conjunction with NPB's All Star series each year from 1991 to 2012. When I was first learning about Japanese baseball, these box sets were a pretty good way to get some idea who the better players were in NPB (with the usual caveats about All Star game rosters) although as I learned more, the sets got less useful.
One of the standard parts of the sets when I started getting them (in 2001) were cards that commemorated the previous year's All Star MVPs. I discovered, though, that the first couple All Star sets BBM put out did not have these cards. It wasn't until the fourth edition, in 1994, that BBM added these cards. What was kind of odd about the 1994 set was that BBM decided to play catchup. Not only would the set have the MVPs for the 1993 All Star games, it would also have the MVPs for the 1991 and 1992 games.
Actually, I'm not being entirely accurate. Unlike later editions of the set, the 1994 BBM All Star game base set itself did not include these MVP cards. Instead, each box set contained the entire 62 card base set plus two of six possible MVP cards. There were seven All Star games in 1991-93 - two in 1991, three in 1992 and two in 1993 - but one player - Atsuya Furuta - was MVP of two of the games.
I'm not entirely sure what possessed me to do this but I decided a few years back that I wanted to get all six of these cards. I had the two that I had gotten close to 25 years ago when I had originally bought my set and I think I got another one of them from Ryan somewhere along the line. I got two more of them from COMC and then I found the last one (Katsumi Hirosawa) on Ebay a few months back when someone had broken up their box set. So here's all six cards:
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| 1994 BBM All Stars #E1 |
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| 1994 BBM All Stars #E2 |
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| 1994 BBM All Stars #E3 |
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| 1994 BBM All Stars #E4 |
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| 1994 BBM All Stars #E5 |
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| 1994 BBM All Stars #E6 |
One kind of interesting thing to note is that neither Hirosawa nor Komada are in the base set as neither one made the 1994 All Star teams. Additionally, by 1994 Komada was not longer a member of the Giants - he'd joined the Baystars as a free agent that year.
BBM repeated this treatment of All Star game MVPs the following year. The 1995 All Star box set contained 63 cards - the 62 card base set and one of two insert cards for the 1994 All Star game MVPs. I had gotten the Koji Akiyama card with the set I had bought way back when but I decided to pick up the other one - Glenn Braggs - a few months ago once I had completed the 1994 cards. I was able to find it on Yahoo! Japan Auctions and bought it via ZenMarket. I paid way to much for shipping for it and a couple other things though, and that was before shipping from Japan became prohibitively expensive. But be that as it may, here are the two 1995 insert cards:
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| 1995 BBM All Stars #E1 |
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| 1995 BBM All Stars #E2 |
The 1995 set was the last time BBM put insert cards in their All Star sets for the previous year's MVP winners. They would be part of the base set until 2010. In 2010, BBM changed the release date of the set from July to August which allowed the set to reflect that year's All Star games. So starting in 2010, the All Star set included the MVPs of that year's games (which means that the 2009 All Star game MVPs never got commemorated). The change wasn't enough to save the sets, though, as BBM stopped doing them after 2012, along with their other annual box set - the Nippon Series set. I don't miss the All Star game sets much but I do miss the Nippon Series sets.
