Topps Now World Baseball Classic Cards

The World Baseball Classic kicked off today and, for the third time, Topps is issuing Topps Now cards for it.  So far there are only three cards available from the two games that were played today  - Travis Bazzana of Australia and Bo Gyeong Moon and Shay Witcomb of Korea.  All the cards will be listed on both Topps' US website and their Japanese website.   The cards are $8.99 each on the US site and 1485 yen on the Japanese one.  These three cards will apparently be on sale for 48 hours instead of what I thought was the standard 24 as they'll be available until 5:15 PM EST on March 7th.  I'm going to make a guess that Topps will release new cards at 5:15 EST for at least the next two days and then we'll see what happens on Sunday when most of the US switches to Daylight Savings Time.  My expectation is that the cards will go on sale at 6:15 EDT then but that's just a guess.

In addition to the single cards, Topps is also selling Topps Now team sets for six of the teams in the tournament - USA, Japan, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Korea and Puerto Rico.  The sets for the US, Japan, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela are $59.99 each (9900 yen on the Japanese site) and contain 13 cards - the 12 card base set plus one extra card that is either a parallel or an autographed card (I guess they've taken inspiration from BBM's box sets).  The Korea and Puerto Rico sets are $49.99 each (8250 yen) and have only 11 cards each - a 10 card base set plus the parallel or autograph card.  These sets will be available until 2:45 PM EDT on March 16th.

The twelve players listed for the Samurai Japan set are Shohei Ohtani, Seiya Suzuki, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Munetaka Murakami, Kazuma Okamoto, Kensuke Kondo, Yusei Kikuchi, Tomoyuki Sugano, Hiromi Itoh, Masataka Yoshida, Shugo Maki and Kaito Kozono.  There are seven different parallels available for all 12 players but there are only autographed cards available for four of them - Ohtani, Yamamoto, Murakami and Okamoto.

The ten Korean players are Jung Hoo Lee, Hyeseong Kim, Woo-Suk Go, Hyun Jin Ryu, Shay Whitcomb, Jahmai Jones, Dane Dunning, Do Yeong Kim, Hyun Min Ahn and Ju Won Kim.  Parallels are only available for the Jung Hoo Lee and Hyeseong Kim and Jung Hoo Lee is also the autograph available.

3/6 UPDATE - Checked Topps' website at 5:15 EST-ish and they've only added one card.  It was actually added earlier today.  The new card is for Shohei Ohtani's grand slam and is a little more expensive as it is $11.99 in the US and 1980 yen in Japan.  Apparently the difference in price is due to the possibility of getting a autographed and/or memorabilia card or an image variant card with it.  The card will be available until 2:45 EDT on Sunday, March 8th.

2025 BBM 35th Anniversary & Shukan Baseball 4000th Issue set

BBM celebrated their 35th year of doing baseball cards in 2026 and late in the year their parent company, Baseball Magazine Sha, published the 4000th issue of Shukan (Weekly) Baseball magazine.  To commemorate both of these occasions, BBM issued a set with the somewhat unwieldy name of "35th Anniversary & Shukan Baseball 4000th" or something like that.  The set was originally supposed to be released in December but it ended up getting delayed for a few weeks and didn't actually make it into the stores until early January.

I was intrigued enough by the set that I decided that I would buy it.  After all, I had bought BBM's sets for their 20th (2010), 25th (2015) and 30th (2020) Anniversaries so it'd be understandable if I broke my pledge not to buy anymore new stuff and picked it up.  It was a little on the pricey side - well, the set itself wasn't pricey but shipping was, especially since I was only getting the one set.  The total for everything was 7687 yen which worked out to $53.33.  That broke down to 1500 yen ($10.42) for the set, 500 yen ($3.47) for ZenMarket's fee, 600 yen ($4.17) for domestic shipping and 5078(!) yen ($35.27) for overseas shipping via DHL.  As far as I can tell, I did not have to pay any tariffs on the set - I didn't pay anything extra to ZenMarket and I wasn't charged anything by DHL.  I suspect this was because the set was so cheap - if I'd ordered more stuff, I'd have probably had to pay something.

As usual, I only got the base set, which contained 238 cards.  The base set is split not quite evenly between cards of OB players (118 cards) and active players (120 cards).  I suspect that BBM had issues lining all the OB players up as when the set was originally announced back in October, it was supposed to be 240 cards in total with 120 OB players.  This was probably the source of the delay in the publication of the set.  The active player cards are further split between "regular" cards and "rookie" cards done in the style of the initial BBM set in 1991.

Previously BBM had limited themselves to only players who were active in 1991 or later in their Anniversary sets but with Shukan Baseball having started in 1958, they were able to also include players from the previous 33 years as well to this set.  The set therefore includes legends like Sadaharu Oh, Shigeo Nagashima, Katsuya Nomura, Masaichi Kaneda, Kazuhisa Inao, Sachio Kinugasa, Yutaka Fukumoto, Hiromitsu Kadota, Koji Yamamoto, Atsuya Furuta, Hideki Matsui and Hiroki Kuroda.  There's a couple retired foreign players - Randy Bass and Warren Cromartie.  Bass shows up in sets pretty frequently but this is the first appearance by Cromartie in a BBM set since 2013.  There's a fair number of active MLB players in the set as well - Yu Darvish, Seiya Suzuki, Masataka Yoshida, Yusei Kikuchi, Yuki Matsui and Kodai Senga - although none of the Dodgers' ex-NPB contingent - Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto or Roki Sasaki - are included.  As usual there are a number of notable players missing, including the usual suspects of Ichiro, Hideo Nomo, Yutaka Enatsu and Kazuhiro Kiyohara.  I was kind of surprised, though, that the set didn't include Isao Harimoto, Masaaki Koyama, Choji Murata, Tsutomo Itoh, or Kosuke Fukudome.  

My initial hope for the set was that the front of each card would be a reproduction of a Shukan Baseball cover but, alas, that was not the case (although there are "secret versions" of 36 of the cards that ARE reproductions of the magazine covers but I didn't get any of those).  Having done some cursory inspection of the cards online, however, I got the impression that all the photos in the set had appeared on the cover of issues of the magazine over the years and that the cover of the magazine would appear on the back of the card.  But when I got the cards and was able to look at them all, I was surprised (and a bit disappointed) that only some of the cards featured what had been a cover photo.  Only 79 of the 118 OB cards had the cover photos - here's an example of the front and back of one that did:

#077

#077

I thought that "ok, maybe some of these guys were never on the cover of the magazine" but then I noticed there were some cards (18 in all) that had a magazine cover on the back that had a DIFFERENT photo than the front had.  Some appeared to have photos on the front that could have been taken at the same time:

#052

#052

Others just had a different (and in some cases inferior) photo on the front:

#017

#017

There's another 21 players whose card doesn't feature a magazine cover on the back.  Twenty of those cards just have the same photo on both sides of the card.  I'm kind of surprised that BBM couldn't find a cover photo of Kazuhiro Sasaki and some of the other players:

#049

#049

That final cover-less card is for Haruki Ihara and weirdly features a different photo on the back than the front.  I've no idea why his card is like this (and, to be completely honest, I've no idea why he's even in the set.  I mean, no offense to him, but if I making a list of the most significant players or managers over the last 68 years, he's not making the top 500, despite winning a Pacific League pennant in one of the three and half years he was a manager):

#100

#100

Despite my disappointment that not all the photos were cover shots, there were some decent ones in the set:

#036

#094

#057

#061

All of these except the Arakawa card had been cover photos.  The back of Arakawa's card shows a Shukan Baseball cover with another photo of him on it although it still shows him as a Yakult Atom.

The 120 active player cards are split into two groups - 108 "regular" cards (similar to the OB cards but with a different border color) and 12 1991-style cards for 2025 rookies.  Most of the major 2025 NPB stars are in the "regular" cards, including 2026-MLB players Munetaka Murakami, Kazuma Okamoto and Tatsuya Imai.  Other big names include Hiromi Itoh, Teruaki Sato, Kensuke Kondoh, Chusei Mannami and Shugo Maki.  There's also a handful of foreign players including Livan Moinelo, Raidel Martinez, Sandro Fabian, Franmil Reyes, Jose Osuna and Tyler Nevin.  There are also eight 2025 rookies included in the "regular" cards (as opposed to the 1991-style cards).  I was a little surprised that neither Yuki Yanagita nor Takeya Nakamura were in the set.  You could argue that neither played enough in 2025 but neither did Hayato Sakamoto and he's in the set so some fan service is not out of the question.

Only 16 of the 108 "regular" active player cards featured a photo that had been used on a Shukan Baseball cover, including one of my favorite cards from the set:

#135

#135

Posed shot in front of the Koshien Stadium scoreboard?  Proof that you can do a posed photo that doesn't look like a mug shot?  Yes to both.  Topps, please take note.

The other 82 active player cards feature the same non-cover photo on both the front and back:

#159

#159

The photo selection for the active players isn't great - way too many "pitchers pitching, batters batting" shots - but there are some good photos in the set.  It's probably not a coincidence that most of the were cover shots, including all the ones I'm using as examples:

#147

#201

#124

#140

Again, attention, Topps!  You can do a posed shot of a player that's more interesting than just a head and shoulders image of a player staring at the camera with no expression.

The last batch of cards in the set to talk about are the twelve 1991 style cards that feature one 2025 rookie for each team.  I've kind of mixed feelings about these cards as they seem like kind of an afterthought as well as really the only thing in the base set that really has anything to do with it being BBM's anniversary.  The twelve rookies are Yusei Ishizuka (Giants), Takato Ihara (Tigers), Yu Takeda (Baystars), Tai Sasaki (Carp), Yuto Nakamura (Swallows), Yumeto Kanemura (Dragons), Yudai Shoji (Hawks), Reo Shibata (Fighters), Misho Nishikawa (Marines), Ruo Muneyama (Eagles), Yusuke Mugitani (Buffaloes) and Seiya Watanabe (Lions).  Everyone but Shoji and Watanabe were their team's first pick in the 2024 draft (Shoji and Watanabe were their team's second picks).  My biggest gripe about this subset is that seven of the players (Nishikawa, Kanemura, Ihara, Shibata, Watanabe, Muneyama and Takeda) were in the "regular" player cards as well.  I think I'd really have preferred BBM to have these guys only show up in the the 1991 subset and include seven other players in the "regular" cards.  Here's the Muneyama card:

#236

I guess ultimately I'm feeling kind of "meh" about the set.  It had such promise but I think the execution by BBM could have been better.  It is possible that I'm being a little hard on the set since I violated my "not buying any new sets" pledge to pick it up.  I'm getting kind of gun-shy since this is the second set I've picked up since making that pledge and the second one that I'm somewhat disappointed with (the first being last year's Epoch "Career Achievements Japan National Team" box set).  Maybe I just need to stick to my guns and not get anything else.

One cool thing BBM could have done in the set was have a subset of cards showing covers of Shukan Baseball that had multiple players on it.  After all, the first ever issue of the magazine featured a photo of both Tatsuro Hirooka and Shigeo Nagashima.  There is a "Combined" insert set showing two players but it just shows an OB player and an active player from each team as opposed to a multi-player photo.

You can see all the cards over at Jambalaya (including some of the autographed cards and premium parallels and inserts).

Rich Gossage

I had mentioned a while back that Topps had included autographed cards of Rich Gossage into a couple of their NPB products.  To the best of my knowledge, Gossage, who had spent the 1990 season with the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks, had never had a Japanese baseball card before this.  I got an email from Kenny (aka Zippy Zappy) today in which he sent me an image of Gossage’s card from the Topps NPB Chrome set that he had swiped from an online auction:

I’m a bit curious why they didn’t include the team name on the card but it wouldn’t be Topps if they didn’t do something that makes me scratch my head.

I mock Topps a lot but I’m impressed that they’ve gotten some interesting OB players to sign cards for them.  For example, they’ve had what are pretty much the first NPB cards of Hideo Nomo since 1994.  I’d be more impressed (or at least more interested) if they’d issue base set cards of these guys rather than only rare and expensive autographed cards.

UPDATE - Fuji mentioned in a comment seeing a different autographed Gossage NPB card on Ebay so I took a look and found that he also had cards in both the 2025 Topps NPB and Stadium Club NPB sets.  I swiped the images:

I think both of these are better looking cards (mostly because I don't like the Chrome cards) but it's interesting that neither one identifies the team.

2024 Topps Stadium Club NPB

I make fun of Topps' NPB offerings a lot here and with pretty good reason.  I feel like Topps is pretty lazy and/or sloppy with their Japanese products, especially in comparison with BBM's sets.  I was intrigued, though, a few months back when Topps announced they'd be doing a Stadium Club set for NPB.  Stadium Club has always been an MLB product I've admired - it's always looked like they had some outstanding photography - and I had long wondered what an NPB version would look like.  The set was released in mid-December and I liked what I saw of it on Jambalaya enough that I decided to pick it up.  I got a complete set through ZenMarket and it got delivered to my house yesterday.

As I went through the cards last night, I was kind of surprised to discover how much I really liked the set.  I mean, obviously I thought I was going to like it or I wouldn't have ordered it but I really wasn't expecting how much better the cards would look in person then they did on Jambalaya's website.  Don't get me wrong - there's still a lot of nit-picky things that annoy me about the set so I'm not totally going off brand here, but for the most part, this is a really good set.  

The base set contains 216 cards which, as you probably can guess, are split evenly between the 12 teams so there's 18 cards per team.  Each team's manager and top three 2023 draft picks are included in those 18 cards.  Most of the big stars of NPB are in the set - Roki Ssaaki, Munetaka Murakami, Tomoyuki Sugano, Kazuma Okamoto, Kensuke Kondoh, etc.

This set really lives up to Stadium Club's reputation for good photography.  There's a lot of great photos included and the cards themselves just look really good.  Here's a handful of examples:

#91

#54

#81

#53

#103

#195

#75

#182

#169

#33

I mean, you just look at these photos and you hold your breath, hoping Tyler Austin didn't hurt himself on that play.  You can just sense the speed of Okabayashi.  Even the more mundane photos with a "pitcher pitching" pose look pretty good:

#122

I thought Murakami's photo looked familiar:

#184

A similar photo was used on an Epoch One card last April.  I assume it's from the same game (if not almost the same moment):

2024 Epoch One #271

To be clear - not all the photos in the set are breathtaking masterpieces.  But there's a really good variety of interesting shots and a healthy number of horizontally oriented cards.  One of the few things that I haven't complained about Topps' NPB cards is their photo selection and this set probably has the best.

My main nit-picky thing about this set to complain about is the card backs.  Once again, Topps has made no real effort on their card backs.  At least they're a little more colorful this time:

#160 (Chusei Mannami)

The one other minor complaint about the set is the inclusion of the managers.  I'm not sure I understand the point of having a set that specializes in interesting photos and include 12 cards of guys who it's going to be very difficult to have an interesting photo of.  Probably the dullest of these twelve cards is the one for the guy who shouldn't even be in the set, seeing as he resigned six and a half months before the set was released:

#183

I'm feeling a little melancholy about this post, as this is probably the last new set I'm going to get via ZenMarket.  Ryan has a few sets for me that he'll probably ship next month but, otherwise, this was it.  I'm glad it was a good set to end my run with ZenMarket with.

I put the link earlier in the post but I'll repeat it here - as always, you can see all the cards (including inserts and parallels) over at Jambalaya. 

2024 BBM Fusion

2024 BBM Fusion Set Summary

Size: 144 cards numbered 1-99, TH01-TH24, 601-620, 136
Cards Per Team:  Variable
Team Card Theme:  N/A
Number Of Leader Cards:  24
Checklists:  None
Subsets:  Title Holder (24), Rookie Edition Update(1), 1st Version Update (20)
Inserts:  Ceremonial First Pitch (31), Great Record (24), Legendary Player (12), Treasure (12, /25), Esperanza (24, /50)

Memorabilia Cards: There are three different types of autographed card available - "Team Pack Version" (cards in the style of the format for the autograph cards in the player's team set), "Autograph" and "Picturesque".  There are two versions of autographed cards for the "First Pitch Ceremony" cards as well - the "silver paper" version is the more rare of the two - not all the "First Pitch Ceremony" cards have autographed versions though.
Parallels:  12 regular player cards have a "secret" alternate photo version.  36 regular player cards have three facsimile signature parallels - gold (/100), blue (/75) and holo (/50).  "Title Holder" cards have four parallels - "silver paper" (/200), "gold paper" (/100), "silver paper + holo PP" (/50) and "gold paper + holo PP" (/25).  "Great Record" insert cards have six facsimile signature parallels - "kiwi green" (/200), "gold" (/100), "holo blue" (/75), "holo" (/50), "red" (/25) and "royal purple" (/10).  "Legendary Player" insert cards have the same six parallels as the "Great Record" cards but they're not facsimile signatures - I think they're just the finish on the cards.  "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards have five parallels - "Holo PP" (/300), "Silver Paper" (/200), "Gold Paper" (/100), "Silver Paper + Holo PP" (/50) and "Gold Paper + Holo PP" (/25).
Notable Rookies: None 

Fusion, BBM's Frankenstein of a set that serves annually as the third installment of their flagship set as well as a "season in review" set, was the last of the four sets I received last week.  I always like this set but I always hate trying to write about it.

The base set contains 144 cards which this year are separated into four parts (usually it's only three).  There are 99 "Hall Of Records" cards which are pretty much the "regular" player cards (in as much as there are "regular" player cards in this set).  These cards contain both active and OB players and are numbered 01 to 99.  There are 24 "Title Holder" cards which are numbered TH01 to TH24.  There are 20 "1st Version Update" cards that are numbered 601 to 620 which continues the numbering from the 2nd Version set which in turn continued the numbering started in the 1st Version set.  And finally there's a one card "Rookie Edition Update" card that's numbered 136 since this year's Rookie Edition set had 135 cards.  So four different parts, four different numbering systems.  That's not confusing at all, right?

The 99 "Hall Of Records" cards serve as kind of a season summary but it's really not that straight forward.  In general, each event from 2024 that is highlighted on a card is followed in the set by another card highlighting a related event in the past.  Sometimes there are multiple cards from either 2024 or the past in the sequence.  I know this is confusing (although you'd think after nine years I'd be able to come up with a description that wasn't confusing) so let me show an example.  On June 25, Masato Morishita of the Carp threw a complete game shutout against the Swallows while throwing less than 100 pitches - what's called a "Maddux".  In addition, Morishita also had three hits while batting in the game, making him the first pitcher to have three hits in the same game in which he threw a "Maddux" since Kazuhisa Inao in 1968.  Morishita's card is card #50:

#50

Inao's card is the next one, card #51:

 

#51

If I counted correctly, there are 50 "Hall Of Records" cards that represent events from 2024.  As usual, I'm not sure what a lot of the events are (although I'd find out by looking at the cards with Google Translate) although I know that there are cards for both Shogo Togo and Daichi Ohsera's no-hitters.  I was a little disappointed that none of the games I went to last May ended up being included.  

It's kind of weird this year that some of the more prominent players in NPB aren't in the subset.  Munetaka Murakami, Hiroto Takahashi (two cards), Tetsuto Yamada and Tomoyuki Sugano are probably the biggest names.  No Kazuma Okamoto, Yuki Yanagita, Kensuke Kondoh, Yuki Okabayashi or Chusei Mannami.  (Kondoh does appear in the "Title Holder" cards.)  Roki Sasaki appears in the "Hall Of Records" cards but not for any 2024 events - Darwinzon Hernandez broke Sasaki's record for consecutive innings with a strike out to start the season so he's the "historic event" paired with Hernandez.  

Despite the lack of star power, the cards look pretty nice.  There's some good photos and several alternate uniforms are highlighted.  Here's a few of the cards:

#07

#40

#48

#58

#76

#78

Most of the 49 "historic events" in the set are represented by retired players.  I think the only players who are still active are the afore-mentioned Sasaki, Shogo Akiyama, Seiya Suzuki and Ryoji Kurabayashi (who also has a "2024 event" card).  The retired players are also a little lacking in star power with the biggest names being Sadaharu Oh, Hideki Matsui and Shigeru Sugishita.  BBM kept their streak going of having a card of a famous player with a team you don't think of him with - this year it's Kazuhiro Yamauchi with the Carp rather than the Orions or Tigers.  Here's some examples (including Yamauchi):

#06

#24

#20

#10

#61

The Title Holder cards are a throwback to the Leader subset cards BBM used to include in their flagship sets between 1991 and 2013*.  There are a total of 24 cards (numbered TH01 to TH24) that include the leader (or leaders) in twelve statistical categories for each league -  Batting Average, Home Runs, RBIs, Hits, OBP, Stolen Bases, ERA, Winning Percentage, Wins, Saves, Hold Points and Strikeouts.  If a player leads the league in multiple categories then he has multiple cards in this subset - for example, Munetaka Murakami has two cards since he led the CL in home runs and OBP.  Kensuke Kondoh, Hotoka Yamakawa, Tomoyuki Sugano and Hiromi Itoh also have two cards.  If more than one player tie for the lead in a category they all appear on the card so Itoh shares his card for leading the PL in wins with Kohei Arihara.  This year there's only one other card with multiple players - Shinya Matsuyama and Takuma Kirishiki tied for the CL lead in hold points.  Here's a couple of these cards so you can see what they look like:

#TH03

#TH18

* The big difference is that the "Leader" subset used to include award winners like MVP, Rookie Of The Year and Sawamura but the cut off for Fusion's publication is the end of the regular season and the awards aren't announced until roughly two months later.

The "1st Version Update" subset features cards of 20 players who were either not included in this year's 1st Version set or the "1st Version Update" subset from the 2nd Version set or were traded since their earlier appearance.  The only player in that latter category is Gakuto Wakabayashi of the Giants, who appeared in the 2nd Version set (regular card, not "1st Version Update") as a member of the Lions (the player he was traded for, Seiya Matsubara, is not in the set).  There are a couple other players in the subset who changed teams either last off season or during the season but didn't make it into either the 1st or 2nd Version set (Shun Mizutani, Luis Perdomo and Daiju Nomura).  There's several foreign players who didn't sign with NPB teams until mid-season (Dallas Keuchel, Coco Montes and Elier Hernandez).  The bulk of the players in the subset appears to be former ikusei players who graduated to their teams' 70 man rosters this year including some veterans who were rehabbing after injuries (Haruto Takahashi, Haruto Inoue, Sho Iwasaki and Ayumu Ishikawa).  Here's a couple examples:

#611

#601

#620

Normally there are 21 "1st Version Update" cards but this year, BBM decided to add a "Rookie Edition Update" card.  With their first pick in the ikusei portion of the 2023 draft, the Swallows had taken Shosei Takahashi, a high school student from Taiwan who has dual citizenship for Taiwan and Japan (which forces him to have to go through the draft to join NPB).  Takahashi (whose registered name is actually "Shosei") wasn't able to officially join Yakult until he graduated from high school in June which prevented him from being able to appear on a baseball card until now:

#136

The "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards are short printed and not considered part of the base set but I decided to get them anyway, which increased the price I paid for the set quite a bit.  The 31 cards are numbered FP33 to FP63 in continuation of the same subset in the 2nd Version set.  If you're not familiar with this subset, it features various Japanese celebrities throwing out the first pitch at a ballgame.  As usual I don't know who many of these people are but it's always kind of entertaining researching them.  There's the usual group of Gravure Idols including two members of Nogizaka46 (Hazuki Makai and Shiori Kubo) and two members of Aozora (Yui Kudo and Eren Sugiura) and one member of NMB48 (Chihiro Kawakami) along with Yumena Yanei and Kasumi Mori who don't appear to be associated with any group (and I may be mis-categorizing).  There are several singers (and it may be extremely hair splitting about whether these could be considered Idols as well) including two members of Morning Musume (Erina Ikuta and Ayumi Ishida) along with Haruka Nagata of Green-Yellow Society, Ayaka Sasaki of Momoiro Clover Z, Gakuto Oshio (Gackt) and Hitomi Furuya (hitomi).  There were a bunch of voice actors and actresses, several of whom are also singers - Honoko Inoue, Maaya Uchida, Yuri Komagata, Arisa Komiya, Ai Furihata, Minori Suuzki, Natsumi Murakami and Toshiyuki Morikawa - along with several actors and actresses - Yuuka Suzuki, Anna Yamada, Shiori Tamada, Akane Osawa (granddaughter of the late Keiji Ohsawa, who has a couple stints managing the Fighters), and Keito Tsuna.  The subset also includes three gold medal winners from last summer's Paris Olympics and Para-Olympics - Tokito Oda (wheelchair tennis), Coco Yoshikawa (skateboarding) and Shinnosuke Oka (gymnastics).  The last two celebrities are TikToker Hina Kagel and comedian Hideharu Egashira (Egashira 2:50).  I was kind of disappointed (although not surprised) that the actors from "Abunai Deka" that I saw throw out the first pitch in Yokohama weren't in the subset.   Eight of the celebrities have appeared in earlier versions of this subset - Yuri Komagata and Hazuki Makai were both in 2023 Fusion; Yuukai Suzuki was in 2022 Fusion; Anna Yamada and Chihiro Kawakami were both in both 2022 and 2023 Fusion; Ayaka Sasaki was in 2018 Fusion and Akane Osawa was in 2007 2nd Version.  This is Shiori Kubo's fourth appearance in this subset with her previously having been in 2020 Fusion and 2021 and 2023 2nd Version.  Here are the cards of Osawa and Yoshikawa:

#FP46

#FP57

Fusion traditionally has two non-premium insert sets - "Great Record" and "Legendary Players".  I'm really only interested in the "Great Records set but I've never seen a listing that included it without the other set so I ended up getting both of them.

"Great Record" is a 24 card set that features two players from each team who achieved some milestone during the 2024 season.  Some of the milestones commemorated are Munetaka Murakami's 200th career home run, Tomoyuki Sugano's 1500th strikeout, Yoshitomo Tsutsugoh's 1000th hit and Tetsuto Yamada's 1500th hit.  Some teams didn't necessarily have two (or even one) major milestones this past season so the Buffaloes are represented by Taito Takashima's first career win and Seiya Yokoyama's first career hit.  The cards are super shiny this year which make them a little difficult to read both in person and when scanned.  There is a kind of nice, 3-D effect with them though.  Here's a couple examples:

#GR10

#GR13

The "Legendary Players" set has 12 cards - one for each team - showing OB players.  Each OB player also appeared in the "Hall Of Records" subset although not necessarily for the same team as here - for instance, Kazuhiro Yamauchi is a Daimai Orion in the subset rather than a Hiroshima Toyo Carp.  Other players in the set include Seiya Suzuki, Kazuhisa Inao, Matt Winters and Carlos Ponce.  These are also very shiny but a little more readable than the "Great Record" cards.  Here's Winter's card as an example:

#LP12

As always all the cards from the set can be seen over at Jambalaya.