2024 BBM Team Sets

It's the last week of the 2025 regular NPB season so, of course, it's time for a post about the 2024 BBM team sets.  For over twenty years now, BBM has issued a "comprehensive" team set for each of the 12 NPB teams.  By "comprehensive", I mean a team set that contains a card of every player on the team's 70 man roster at the time the set went to press.  The 2024 version of the sets were issued between April and July of last year.

I had brought home five of the team sets - the Marines, Hawks, Tigers, Lions and Baystars - from my Japan trip last year and picked up the Eagles set from ZenMarket later that summer (due to the 20th Anniversary portion of the set).  The remaining six sets were in the box I got from Ryan towards the end of July.  (This is the traditional last post about each box of cards Ryan has sent me - there was enough in this last box that it's taken me two months to get to everything!)

Each set except the Eagles had a base set of 81 cards which included 63 to 69 "regular" cards featuring the players on the 70 man roster along with the team's manager.  The Eagles set had 117 cards - it was essentially a "franken-set" combining the "traditional" 81 card team set with a 36 card "20th Anniversary" set.  Most of the sets also had a single card dedicated to its mascot or mascots (the exceptions are the Swallow which have two and the Giants and the Eagles had none) and then the remainder of the set was made up of three to five subsets containing one to seven cards.  Some of the mascot cards double as a checklist for the set.  Here's the break down for each set:

Team	Player/Manager Cards	Mascot Cards	Subsets
Chiba Lotte Marines	67	1	Home Grown (4), Above All (4), Sonic Boom (3), The K (2)
Chunichi Dragons	69	1	Year Of The Dragon (5), New Dynamics (2), Native-Born Aichi Hero (4)
Fukuoka Softbank Hawks	63	1	Top Prospects (3), Keio Trio (1), Stellar Newcomer (2), Great Presence (5), Featured Players (6)
Hanshin Tigers	66	1	Newcomer (3), Titleholder (7), On The Rise (4)
Hiroshima Toyo Carp	69	1	Red Hot (3), Focal Point (5), Link (3)
Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters	67	1	Newcomer (4), Complete Control (4), Fight On (5)
Orix Buffaloes	67	1	Orimen Favorite Five (5), Combo (5), Bringer (3)
Saitama Seibu Lions	64	1	Connection (6), Fresh Face (4), Blue Blast (4), Another Scene (2)
Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles	66	0	Interleague Champs (1), Brightest Hope (2), Break The Limit (5), Unstoppable (5), Record Makers (2), 20th Anniversary (36)
Tokyo Yakult Swallows	68	2	Rising Stock (3), Talking Point (4), Amp Up (4)
Yokohama DeNA Baystars	66	1	Boost (3), Yokohama Bound (6), Discovery (2), Headliner (3)
Yomiuri Giants	65	0	Fielder Of Dreams (4), Rise Again (3), Smile On (3), Combo (3), Grade Up (2), Giants Pride! (1)

There's a total of 797 individual "regular" cards in all of these sets - 785 players and 12 managers.  As you might guess, there's a lot of players who show up in the team sets who did not appear in BBM's flagship sets - 1st Version, 2nd Version or Fusion.  This includes foreigners like Humberto Mejia, Christian Rodriguez, Carter Stewart, Jeremy Beasley, Robert Corniel, Bryan Rodriguez and Elvin Rodriguez along with somewhat big named players who maybe in a rough stretch or past their prime like Yasunobu Okugawa, Eigori Mogi, T-Okada, Yusuke Nomura, and Seiya Inoue.  Here's a card of a player from each set who was not in any of BBM's flagship sets:

2024 BBM Marines #M52

2024 BBM Dragons #D53

2024 BBM Hawks #H03

2024 BBM Tigers #T32

2024 BBM Carp #C09

2024 BBM Fighters #F02

2024 BBM Buffaloes #B65

2024 BBM Lions #L63

2024 BBM Eagles #E044

2024 BBM Swallows #S07

2024 BBM Baystars #DB07

2024 BBM Giants #G45

BBM Team Set "Color Variations"

For the past few years, BBM has included "color variation" cards in the pack for their "comprehensive" team sets for all twelve of the NPB teams.  I'm not positive, but I think they started doing them in 2022.  These are similar to the "secret" version cards found in BBM's flagship and Rookie Edition sets - a short printed photo variant of a base set card.  The difference with these is that there's a difference in the colors of the ephemera on the cards as well.  (1/11/26 UPDATE - the "color variation" cards started in 2023 but those did not have alternate photos - they had the same photo as the original card.  There were three "color variation" cards per team in 2023 but they've expanded it to twelve since then.)

This all would probably make more sense with some examples but for the longest time, I didn't have any.  Usually when I saw them, they were much more expensive than I wanted to pay.  But I had tracked down a couple a while back that were pretty reasonable and asked Ryan pick them up for me.  They were among the cards I got in the box from him a few weeks back.

I now have three of these, all of which are from 2024.  I'll show the regular card first, followed by the "color variation":

2024 BBM Tigers #T55

2024 BBM Tigers #T55 "color variation"

2024 BBM Lions #L56

2024 BBM Lions #L56 "color variation"

2024 BBM Lions #L51

2024 BBM Lions #L51 "color variation"

Like the flagship "secret" versions, the backs of the cards are exactly the same:

2024 BBM Lions #L51

2024 BBM Lions #L51 "color variation"

BBM's team sets tend to be kind of monotonous with their photo selection, so I'd kind of prefer that they use the interesting pictures on the regular cards rather than short prints.

Cards That Finished Sets And Others

That big box of goodies that Ryan sent me a few weeks back contained a number of cards that were the last ones I needed to complete some sets.  I thought I'd do a post talking about them, along with some other cards in the box that don't really fit into an easy category.  I was going to say "a quick post" but I don't think it'll be that quick.

Many if not all of these cards are ones that I found either on Yahoo! Japan Auctions or Mercari and asked Ryan to grab for me.

We'll go through the cards that completed sets first.  The box had the nine cards I needed to complete my 1999 BBM Mr. Giants set.  I'm going to dedicate a post to this set in the next few months so I'll just say that this is a set dedicated to Shigeo Nagashima that's different from any of the other "biographical" sets that I've seen BBM do for a player.  Here's two of the cards:

1999 BBM Mr Giants #G36

1999 BBM Mr Giants #G81

I got the last six cards I needed to complete the 1999 BBM/Yomiuri Shinbum Giants set.  Here's two of the cards:

1999 BBM/Yomiuri Shimbun Giants #15

1999 BBM/Yomiuri Shimbun Giants #S4

I've been trying for a few years to complete several BBM team sets from the 00's that I had opened boxes for in the past.  I think there were 15 sets in all between 2003 and 2007.  Ryan had found me a bunch of the cards in the past and I picked up most of the remainder on my trip last year.  But there were four cards from three sets that had still eluded me.  With those four being in the box, I've now completed the 2004 Giants and Tigers sets and the 2007 Tigers set:

2004 BBM Giants #G62

2004 BBM Giants #G10

2004 BBM Tigers #T41

2007 BBM Tigers #T013

I came back from last year's trip needing just two of the "Great Record" insert cards from BBM's Fusion sets and now I have them:

2016 BBM Fusion "Great Record" #GR20

2017 BBM Fusion "Great Record" #GR19

One of the few disappointments I had with last year's trip was being unable to track down the remaining 15 cards I needed from the 2023 Calbee Hawks set.  I fully expected to find them at some of the card shops I went to (especially Mint Hakata) but no one had any.  All have now been acquired and that set is now complete.  Here's two of the cards:

2023 Calbee Hawks #SH-03

2023 Calbee Hawks #SH-02

 The rest of the cards don't complete sets but were cards I was interested in for one reason or another.

I had been toying with the thought of getting all the "Best 9" insert cards from the 2011 BBM Tohto 80th Memorial set - a set dedicated to former players from the Tohto collegiate league.  I ultimately decided against it but not before I asked Ryan to grab this card of Shinnosuke Abe depicting him in his days with Chuo University:

2011 BBM Tohto 80th Memorial #BN11

I mentioned the other day that I had picked up a lot of Norichika Aoki cards to get the 2005 Shukan Baseball Season Memorial card of him.  Here are the other cards from that lot:

2010 Calbee Series One #017

2010 BBM 1st Version #BN09

2010 BBM 1st Version #GG07

I picked up the last base card I didn't have that depicted Hideki Irabu as a Hanshin Tiger:

2003 BBM Victory Road #17

I don't remember where I first saw this Calbee card of Nobuhiko Matsunaka but I found the photo interesting.  The lighting is really odd and I can't imagine that it's from an actual game.  But I don't know what it's from:

2007 Calbee Series One #019

It wouldn't be a box from Ryan without a bunch of unexpected cards.  He included a bunch of 2025 Calbee Series One cards:

2025 Calbee Series One #T-04

2025 Calbee Series One #T-05

2025 Calbee Series One #T-09

2025 Calbee Series One #T-13

2025 Calbee Series One #S-14

2025 Calbee Series One #S-17

2025 Calbee Series One #SO-05

Ryan also included a bunch of promo cards for the 2023 and 2024 Epoch NPB sets, keeping our ongoing joke about someone being able to build a complete set using the promo cards alive.  He only sent one 2023 card but included 15 2024 ones.  I'll only show one of the 2024 ones to go with the 2023 one:

2023 Epoch NPB Promo #314

2024 Epoch NPB Promo #288

The box included a bunch of Epoch One cards.  I'll be doing a post soon on the 2024 ones I got but I figured I'd go ahead and show off the two 2018 ones - they're both for Nazo No Sakana, the Mysterious Fish mascot the Marines had had between 2018 and 2021.  These are the last two cards that I'm aware of for the Fish that I didn't already have:

2018 Epoch One #208

2018 Epoch One #282

I'm trying to complete the 2013 Konami Samurai Japan set but it's going painfully slow.  There's 11 cards in all and this Yoshio Itoi card is only the third one I've found at a not terribly expensive price:

2013 Konami Samurai Japan #B13SJ011

And finally, I saw this autographed card of Futoshi Nakanishi for sale for 3000-ish yen (about $20) last summer which seemed very reasonable for an autograph of a Hall Of Famer who had passed away so I asked Ryan to grab it for me.  It's from the 2021 BBM Legendary Rookies set and is /117: