Shukan Baseball 3000

A few months back, BBM published a set that celebrated both their 35th year of producing baseball cards and the 4000th issue of Shukan Baseball.  I thought it might be interesting to take a quick look at what BBM did the previous time that Shukan Baseball hit a milestone - their 3000th issue in 2010.

BBM celebrated the 3000th issue by including a set of twelve baseball cards over three issues of the magazine in August of 2010 with each issue containing four cards.  As you can probably guess, twelve cards means that there's one player from each NPB team included.  Eight of the players were retired and the other four were active.

I don't know which issue was the 3000th but the first of the three had a cover date of August 2nd, 2010 and had the following four cards:

#1/12

#2/12

#3/12

#4/12

The next issue, with a cover date of August 9th, contained these four cards:

#5/12

#6/12

#7/12

#8/12

The final four cards were in the issue with an August 16th cover date and featured active players:

#9/12

#10/12

#11/12

#12/12

To be honest, this is an odd little collection of cards.  There's really nothing about Shukan Baseball on the cards other than the "Weekly Baseball 3000th" on the front.  The backs have a somewhat generic player biography that never mentions the magazine,  I've no idea why these particular players were selected instead of more famous players (like why Tsuneo Horiuchi instead of Shigeo Nagashima or Sadaharu Oh?)  There are no magazine covers depicted and I don't know if any of these photos were used on covers.

I was kind of disappointed by this year's 35th Anniversary/Shukan Baseball 4000th Issue set but I think it's a lot more interesting than what BBM did for Shukan Baseball's 3000th issue.