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).

1999 BBM Mr Giants set

I had mentioned a while back that among the cards I got from Ryan in that big box in July were the last cards I needed to complete the 1999 BBM Mr Giants set.  Here's the post about the set that I promised (threatened?) to do back then.

In 1999, BBM issued a set dedicated to Shigeo Nagashima - aka Mr. Giants.  I'm not exactly sure if there was any particular reason they decided to do a Nagashima set as, at the time, he was in the seventh year of his second stint as Giants manager and he'd manage for two more seasons after this.  This would be just the second "historic" set that BBM would produce (following the 1994 Perfect Pitching set) and the first that would be sold in packs rather than as a complete set.

What distinguishes this set from other "single player" sets is that not all of the cards feature Nagashima.  Well, that's not exactly true as all but one of the cards have his picture on them somewhere.  But some 59 of the 108 cards in the base set feature players with some connection to Nagashima - teammates on the V9 Giants or players who played under him.

The base set is split into 11 separate subsets that ranged in size from five cards to 30 cards (12 subsets if you count the two checklist cards).  The first six subsets deal with his playing career from 1958 to 1974 while the remaining five cover aspects of his two stints managing the Giants (1975-80 and 1993 to when the set was published).  I thought I'd go over each subset and show the front and back of a card (or two) from it.

The first subset is labelled something like "Chronology Of Shigeo Nagashima".  Each of the 17 cards in the subset covers a separate season in his playing career.  Here's the one for his 1960 season:

There's two things I want to point about this card.  The first is that kind of ghostly image of Nagashima on the left side of the card.  That image is on almost every card for his playing career and it'll be replaced by another image of him as a manager on almost every card from his managerial days.  The second is that the back of the card has a blue background which indicates that it's a card from his playing days.  The managerial cards have a green background.

The second subset features nine players who were teammates of Nagashima on the V9 Giants (the team that won nine straight Nippon Series championships between 1965 and 1973), including manager Tetsuharu Kawakami.  The other players are Tsuneo Horiuchi, Kazumi Takahashi, Masahiko Mori, Shozo Doi, Yukinobu Fukuroe, Shigeru Takada, Isao Shibata and Toshimitsu Suetsugu.

The third subset is labeled "Famous Scene" and each of the ten cards in it commemorate some significant event in Nagashima's playing career.  Included are his collegiate career at Rikkio University, his signing with the Giants in 1957, his first game in 1958 when he struck out four times against Masaichi Kaneda and the Swallows, the Emperor's Game in 1959 (June 25, 1959 to be exact), and his retirement in 1974.  There are also cards for his wedding in 1964 and his four children (note that there's one card showing his kids, not a card for each one).  Here's the card for him signing with the Giants (and featuring another photo of Kawakami in a kimono on the back):

The fourth subset is called "Close Up" and each of the five cards describes a different characteristic of his playing career.  There are cards for the tendency for his helmet to fly off when he swung (although that card doesn't actually show that happening), his fielding, his base running and his home run hitting.  The last one, which I'm showing here, has his full career batting record on it:

The fifth subset is "Rival Pitchers" and features five significant pitchers (one from each of the other Central League teams) that Nagashima faced during his career - Masaichi Kaneda (Swallows), Minoru Murayama (Tigers), Shohachi Aniya (Carp), Senichi Hoshino (Dragons) and Masaji Hiramatsu (Whales).  Each card shows how he did against each pitcher - he hit Kaneda the best (.313) and Hiramatsu the worst (.193).  I suspect a partial explanation for that was that he faced Kaneda during the early part of his career and Hiramatsu during the last part of his playing days.  Here's the Kaneda card:

The last subset dedicated to Nagashima's playing career is labeled "Shukan Baseball Covers" and, as you'd expect from that name, all five cards show a different cover of Shukan (Weekly) Baseball magazine featuring him.  The text on the back appears to be from the issue.  This is the only one of the playing career subsets to not have the photo of Nagashima on the left side of the card.

At thirty cards, the first subset for Nagashima the manager is the largest one in the set.  Entitled "30 Warriors", it features thirty (obviously) players from the 1999 Giants, including rookie Koji Uehara and Tomohiro Nioka.  Other players include Hiromi Makihara, Masaki Saitoh, Kazuhiro Kiyohara, Yoshinobu Takahashi and Hideki Matsui:

You'll notice two things about this card.  The first is that, as I mentioned above, the backs of the managerial cards have a green background.  The second is that, again as I previously mentioned, the image of Nagashima on the left part of the card has changed to one of him as a manager.

The eighth subset is the five card "Victory" subset.  These cards celebrate the four Central League pennants that the Giants won under Nagashima (1976, 1977, 1994 and 1996) and the one Nippon Series Championship they won (1994).  (He'd win another pennant and championship in 2000, one year after this set came out.)  Here's the card for the 1977 championship:

This next subset is the one I find the most interesting.  It's called "#1 Draft Picks" and the nine cards feature players who were taken in the first round of the draft by the Giants in some - but not all - of the years that Nagashima managed the Giants.  The players are Shoji Sadaoka (1974 draft), Toshio Shinozuka (1975), Kazuaki Fujishiro (1976), Kazuhiro Yamakura (1977), Hideki Matsui (1992), Junichi Kawahara (1994), Yusaki Iriki (1996), Yoshinobu Takahashi (1997) and Koji Uehara (1998).  Most of the cards feature photos taken at the team's press conference announcing each year's draft class and include Nagashima (the fronts of the cards in this subset does not include the photo of Nagashima on the left side).  The other cards show the player on the field with Nagashima.

I think these are the first ever "draft pick" cards that BBM did - at least the first ones that came in packs (there had been a card included in an issue of Sports Card Magazine in early 1999 that I think was the actual first BBM "draft pick card").

I got curious - because of course I did - about why not every draft under Nagashima was included in the subset.  Three of the missing number one picks - Yasuhiro Hayashi in 1979, Matsuhiro Mino in 1993 and Shunsuke Hara in 1995 - had combined for a grand total of one game with the ichi-gun Giants by the time this set went to press (Hara eventually played in 68 games with the top team in 2003-06).  There was no number one pick for the Giants in 1978 - they had boycotted the draft due to the Suguru Egawa affair.

Speaking of Egawa, he's one of the players in the next subset which was entitled "Students".  All six players had retired by 1999 but had played under Nagashima as manager.  Five of them - Egawa, Kiyoshi Nakahata, Tadashi Matsumoto, Mitsuo Sumi and Takashi Nishimoto - had played for him during his first stint and the last - Tatsunori Hara - had finished his career during Nagashima's second stint.  I'm not sure what makes these guys "students" of Nagashima though.

The final subset is a return to the earlier "Close Up" subset, only this time the five cards deal with things that happened while Nagashima was manager.  There's a card for the Giants' 14 game winning streak in 1976, Toshimitsu Suetsugu hitting a sayonara home run in 1976, two players throwing no-hitters and the Giants beating the Dragons on the last day of the 1994 season to win the pennant as well as card with his full managerial record on it.  Curiously, the photos on the fronts of the cards seem to be unrelated to the text on the backs.  Here's the card with his managerial record:

The base set also included two checklist cards that form a little panorama of Nagashima waving to the fans on the day he retired as a player:

#107 (left) & #108 (right)

Card #108 is the only card in the set that does not show a picture of Nagashima.

There are two insert sets associated with this set.  The ten card "Nagashima Titles" set feature cards dedicated to awards and/or statistical titles that he won - MVP, Rookie Of The Year, Best 9, Golden Glove, Batting Crown, Home Run Crown, Hall Of Fame, etc.  The five card "Giants Heroes" cards are cards printed on clear plastic that include players from the 1999 Giants - Masaki Saitoh, Masumi Kuwata, Kazuhiro Kiyohara, Yoshinobu Takahashi and Hideki Matsui.  I only have one of the "Nagashima Titles" cards - the one dedicated to the ten times he lead the Central League in hits:

There's something that seems kind of odd to me about this set.  I realized when decided to try to build the set a few years ago and started to really understand how it was put together that someone was missing from it - Sadaharu Oh.  It seems strange that someone who would be closely associated with Nagashima for sixteen of the seventeen years of his career would be excluded from the set.  I mean, it would make perfect sense for Oh to appear in the "V9" subset.  In contrast, BBM's "single player" set for Oh from 2008 included four cards showing Oh with Nagashima.  I don't know why Oh's not in this set.

Wrapping up, it's an odd set and probably not all that appealing if you're not super-into Shigeo Nagashima.  I'm kind of questioning why I decided to complete it and thinking it was mostly due to it being the first pack-based "historic" BBM set.  Most of the cards were reasonably cheap, with the two Matsui cards probably being the most expensive (and I don't think either of them were more than 500 yen).  

2024 Epoch Career Achievements Japan National Team

Back in March, Epoch put out a box set called "Japan Professional Baseball OB Club Official Card Japan National Baseball Team Career Achievements 2024 Card Set" which is quite a mouthful.  I've taken to calling it the "Career Achievements Japan National Team" for simplicity.  The set was issued in partnership with the Japan Baseball Promotion Association (OB Club) but was a somewhat reasonably priced boxed set rather than their usual ultra high-end sets with six cards for something like 18,000 yen.  This set was a 28 card box set that retailed for 10,000 yen.  Each box contained the full 26 card base set plus one serially numbered parallel card and one of three different types of autograph cards.

I'm kind of confused about the timing of the set.  The set was released in March of 2025 but has a 2024 "cover date", implying that Epoch had intended to release the set in 2024.  But Topps had the Samurai Japan baseball card license in 2024 so I don't understand how Epoch could have released the set then.  It's possible (and, in fact, very likely) that I don't fully understand how the Samurai Japan licensing works - especially since BBM had included Samurai Japan cards in the 2023 Infinity set when Topps had the license and Bushiroad is putting out DreamOrder Samurai Japan cards next month (while I assume Epoch still has the license but maybe they don't).

The set features retired (OB) players who have either played for or managed Samurai Japan (or, as it was known before 2013, the Japanese National Baseball Team).  I should specify that it's only players and managers of the professional version of the team, so basically we're talking players from the past 20-ish years who took part in the major tournaments (Olympics, World Baseball Classic and Premier 12), minor tournaments like the Asia Professional Baseball Championship and all the various friendly matches over the past 12 years or so with Australia, Taiwan, the Netherlands, Mexico, Team Euro and the MLB All Stars.  All the players are depicted in their national team uniforms.

I mentioned that the base set contains 26 cards but there's only 25 people featured in the set.  Hirokazu Ibata, the current Samurai Japan manager, has two cards - one as a player and one as manager.  The other managers are Sadaharu Oh (manager of the 2006 WBC champs) and Hideki Kuriyama (manager of the 2023 WBC champs).

The remaining 22 players are kind of a mixed bag.  There's some fairly big names in the set - Norichika Aoki, Yoshio Itoi, Hisashi Iwakuma, Munenori Kawasaki, Nobuhiro Matsuda, Michihiro Ogasawara and Seiichi Uchikawa - but it's really missing the big stars from the 00's WBC and Olympic teams like Ichiro, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Koji Uehara, Kosuke Fukedome, Kenji Johjima, Shinnosuke Abe and Nobuhiko Matsunaka.  There's a lot of guys who were minor stars - Shunsuke Watanabe, Ryosuke Hirata, Motohiro Shima, Kazuhisa Makita and Yusuke Nomura - but I'm not sure how much of a draw any of them are.

I have most of the Japanese National Team cards and sets since...well, since 2000, when Upper Deck issued a set for the Japanese delegation to the 2000 Sydney Olympics which included most of the baseball team.  So I sat down and went through this set to figure out if there's anyone in it that hadn't appeared on a card in a National Team uniform issued by Upper Deck, Topps, BBM or Calbee.  I found only three guys - Tsuyoshi Ishizaki, Ryoma Matsuda and Tomomi Takahashi.  All three of these players had relatively short careers and only briefly played for Samurai Japan.  Ishizaki played in the 2017 Asia Professional Baseball Championship, Matsuda played in the friendlies against Taiwan in 2013 and Takahashi played against the MLB All Stars in 2014.  

There are two other players in the set whose National Team cards are a bit harder to find.  Satoshi Komatsu played in the 2009 WBC and is in Konami's Baseball Heroes WBC set.  Yoshio Itoi played in the 2013 WBC and only appears in the very rare Konami Samurai Japan set.

The cards themselves are...OK.  The photos are mostly "batters batting, pitchers pitching" poses although Samurai Japan cards are uncommon enough that I don't feel like I've seen the same photo for a player over and over like I do with some of the NPB cards.  I'm not a big fan of the card design - it seems kind of busy to me.  I feel like the design really cramps the photos but, as I've said countless times over the years, I prefer borderless card designs so maybe it's just me.  Here's some example cards:

#02

#08

#13

#24

#01

#12

#17

#26

I really wanted to like this set, especially since I decided to violate my "not buying any new sets" rule and asked Ryan to pick it up for me (although I can claim it's ok on a technicality - while it was released in 2025, it's REALLY a 2024 set).  However, I ended up disappointed with it.  I was hoping to get a "this is a good overview of the stars who've played for Samurai Japan" vibe from it and instead I got a vibe of "here's a bunch of Samurai Japan players who were willing to sign autographs for us" which is not an unusual feeling to get from OB player selection in an Epoch set (or BBM for that matter).  In addition to the missing players I mentioned above, it would have been nice if the set had included cards of Tatsunori Hara and Koji Yamamoto, the managers of the 2009 and 2013 WBC teams respectively, who've never had National Team cards.  Another interesting route Epoch could have taken would ahve been showing players who played for the amateur version of the National Team, especially guys who played on the Olympic teams in the 80's and 90's like Katsumi Hirosawa, Kozo Shoda, Atsuya Furuta, Hideo Nomo, Kenjiro Nomura and Hiroko Kokubo.  I've frequently said that I'm a sucker for National Team sets and this was probably my first real disappointment in one of them.

As usual, you can check out all the cards over at Jambalaya to see if you agree with my assessment.

There's been a lot of Samurai Japan posts this past week.  I'll get back to some NPB cards from Ryan's shipment next week.