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.

Magazine Cards

Among the many cards in the box Ryan sent me were a handful of cards that had been issued in magazines.  Three of these I had been eagerly awaiting as they closed out "sets" on my want list.

The first of these is this Hiromitsu Ochiai promo card from the 2002 BBM All Time Heroes set.  Despite the card not having any markings that it came from Sports Card Magazine (SCM), I'm pretty sure it was issued in SCM #30 in November of 2001.  Here's the front and back of it:

This is another example of BBM not clearly indicating on the front of the card that it's not really a memorabilia card - not that I thought this one was.  

This is the last SCM card that I was looking for.  I don't quite have a complete collection of all the baseball-related SCM cards but I have all that I wanted to get.  Most of what I don't have are promo cards - the Ochiai is a rare one that I wanted since it was Ochiai, one of my favorite players.

The second card I got that completed a set was this one of Shigeo Nagashima:

This ended a quest of mine that began when I picked up an oddball card of Eiji Sawamura from Rob Fitts four and half years ago.  It turned out that the Sawamura was one of five cards that BBM issued with a mook celebrating the Giants' 70th Anniversary in 2004.  Ryan had previously tracked down a copy of the mook for me.  Each issue had two of the five cards in it - the issue I got had Sadaharu Oh and Tatsunori Hara.  I found the Tetsuto Kawakami card at SportsCard BITS in Nagoya last year and found this one on Yahoo! Japan Auctions earlier this year.

Speaking of Nagashima, the third and final card that completed a "set" featured a manga version of him:

I don't know for sure what this is from but I assume that it was some sort of publication that was tied into the 2000 Nippon Series which was known as the "ON Series" since it pitted Nagashima's Giants against Sadaharu Oh's Hawks.  I had picked up the matching card of Oh about a year ago and now I have both cards.

The last two cards are each from my remaining magazine issued card goals.  This card of Isao Harimoto is from the Fall 2004 issue of "Baseball Magazine" and is one of four "Disbanded Club Player" cards that was given away with that issue:

Ten years later, BBM would use a better version of this photo in the Memories Of Uniform set.

I now have 31 of the 36 cards that were issued in "Baseball Magazine" between 2004 and 2008.

The other goal I have is trying to get all of the "Season Memorial" cards issued in Shukan Baseball between 2005 and 2016.  Like the "Baseball Magazine" cards, there are 36 of these total (four for each year form 2005 to 2010 and two for each year from 2011 to 2016).  With this 2005 Norichika Aoki card, I'm down to only needing 13 of them.

This was part of an auction containing several Aoki cards which I'll be sharing in future posts.

Magazine Cards

I want to do yet another quick post about some cards I picked up on the trip.  This time it's cards that were distributed with magazines and it really will be a quick one.

One of my goals right now is to pick up all the cards that were distributed with the "Season Memorial" issue of Shukan Baseball every year between 2005 and 2016.  There are 36 total cards with four cards per year between 2005 and 2010 and two cards each year from 2011 to 2016.  I had asked Ryan to pick up a couple from 2006 off of Yahoo! Japan Auctions a few months back and it was among the cards he gave me when we met up in Tokyo:

What was kind of interesting about these cards is that they were still in the original package.  The cards were distributed in an envelope that was attached to the binding of the magazine.  Each card was sealed in plastic on one side of the envelope.  As I said, there were four possible cards but you only got two of them in magazine and there was no way to know which two.  Someone had removed the envelope from the magazine and split it open so that there were two separate pieces that each had one sealed card.  Here's what the outsides of the envelope looked like:

I did a scan of the cards still sealed on the envelope sides but it's hard to really see anything:

I have liberated the cards from the envelope sides.

I discovered that Bits had a number of these cards but I ran into a problem with my want list.  While it listed the cards that I knew I needed, there are a couple years where I'm unsure of what the cards are.  For example, for 2008 I know that two of the cards are Alex Ramirez and Satoshi Komatsu but I don't know who the other two cards are.  Now normally this doesn't present a problem for me because if I see one of these cards on Yahoo! Japan Auctions while browsing at home, I can check my database or even the card binder to see if I already have it or not.  I had neither of those resources handy at Bits, of course, and to make matters worse, the cards were a bit on the pricey side so I didn't want to just buy them all and sort it out later like I might have if they'd been 100 yen each.  I picked up this 2007 Michihiro Ogasawara for 500 yen because I knew it was one I needed:

But I also picked up a 2005 Yasutomo Kubo card for 500 yen that it turned out I already had.  I've updated my want list now to list the cards I have as well as the ones I know I'm missing to hopefully prevent a repeat of this in the future.

Bits surprised me by having one of the two cards I was missing from the 2004 Yomiuri Giants 70th Anniversary magazine.  It was 800 yen which may have been one of the most expensive cards I bought on the entire trip but I figured it was unlikely I was going to see it again:

For the record, the other cards that were available in the magazine were Eiji Sawamura, Shigeo Nagashima, Sadaharu Oh and Tatsunori Hara.  I now have all of them except Nagashima.

Finally Ryan and I were browsing one of the Mandarake stores at Nakano Broadway just a few hours before my flight left for home.  This particular one had a bunch of old magazines and I came across a 2005 Tigers Interleague Program.  It was shrink-wrapped and two baseball cards were sliding around inside the wrap.  I had remembered that BBM had done cards for the Interleague programs in both 2005 and 2006 so I bought the magazine.  It was 1000 yen which I figured wasn't too bad.  Since the magazine had been sold at Tigers home interleague games, both cards were Tigers players:

There were 24 cards in all - two per team.  Here's what the front of the magazine looks like (although it's a little bigger than my scanner can scan):

There's an ad at the back of the magazine that shows all 24 cards.  I took a picture of it since I figured that I might damage the magazine trying to scan the page:

2006 BBM Weekly Baseball 1st Version Promos

I did a post last summer about a set of 12 promo cards for the 2007 BBM 1st Version set issued with Shukan (Weekly) Baseball.  Each card featured a different photo than the corresponding card in the 1st Version set and was labeled "2007 Opening Game Weekly Baseball".

Shortly after doing that post I had discovered that BBM had done something similar in 2006 although it was 24 cards in all.  The first 12 cards were the top draft picks for each team from the previous fall's draft (although I don't quite know how they selected players because that draft had two separate phases - one for high school players and the other for college/industrial league players) while the other 12 were for established players.  I had found an auction on Yahoo! Japan Auctions for the latter 12 cards and asked Ryan to pick them up for me.  The cards were in the box he sent me last month.

The fronts of the promo cards have a yellow-ish border instead of the white of the original cards and have a "Weekly Baseball" label on the bottom.  The backs are identical and have the same card numbers.  Here's all 12 cards alongside their original versions:

#20

#53

#75

#125

#159

#182

#242

#274

#294

#351

#366

#400

It probably doesn't mean anything but I find it interesting that Norichika Aoki and Hiroki Kuroda are the only players to appear in both the 2006 and 2007 promo sets.

As I said, the backs of the promo cards are identical to the original cards.  If I didn't tell you the promo card was on the right here, I don't think you'd be able to tell:

I'd love to track down the other 12 cards but they seem to be pretty rare.  I don't know if BBM did anything similar for any other years.

SCM And Other Magazine And Promo Cards

One of my collecting goals over the past few years has been to get all the baseball cards that were issued with Sports Card Magazine (SCM) over the years.  With this batch of cards from Ryan I am now just one card away from that goal.  I thought I'd show off a bunch of the SCM cards I got although there's a few that I'll be including in other posts:

2003 SCM #27

2003 SCM #32

2004 SCM #33

2004 SCM #37

2008 SCM #108

2008 SCM #110

2008 SCM #111

2009 SCM #117

2009 SCM #127

2009 SCM #131

2010 SCM #159

2010 SCM #161

One of my other goals has been getting all the cards issued in Shukan (Weekly) Baseball's annual "Season Memorial" magazine from 2005 to 2016.  I came across this card of Tomoaki Kanemoto from the 2005 edition on Yahoo! Japan Auctions (YJA) and asked Ryan to pick it up for me:

There were some Shukan Baseball promo cards for a couple Rookie Edition sets in the lot of Lions cards that included the Daisuke Matsuzaka "Super Rookie" card.  The interesting thing about these is that unlike most promos for Rookie Edition, these feature a different photo than the actual card.

Yet another goal of mine is to get all 36 cards that were issued in "Baseball Magazine" between 2004 and 2008.  This Isao Harimoto card is the 29th of the cards:

It's hard to track these cards down for two reasons.  The first is that I don't know for sure who's on the cards I'm missing and the second is that it's very difficult to get a search going in Mercari or Yahoo! Japan Auctions where you can differentiate between "Baseball Magazine" the card company and "Baseball Magazine" the magazine.

The game programs sold during the interleague portion of the 2006 NPB schedule included two baseball cards - one for each of the teams in that particular game.  There ended up being 60 cards in all - five per team.  I had seen these listed in Engel but it wasn't until last year sometime when I saw one on YJA and asked Ryan to grab it for me:

I've often said that cards issued with magazines are one the biggest unknown areas of Japanese baseball cards.  There's no list anywhere that I've ever seen that says what's out there.  Case in point - this 2023 Shota Imanaga card.  I suspect it's from some Baystars magazine or maybe the team's year book but I have no idea.  It's got a card number of #YM01 which implies there are more cards.  Actually since the card number has a leading zero, it implies that there's more than nine cards.  But I don't know anything else about the set.

I'm also want to show off a couple random promo cards that were in the box.  Most of these came in the lot of Lions cards while the other was in the lots for Haruki Nishikawa of the Fighters - it should be pretty obvious which cards came from which lot.

This first card is double sided:

This next card is also double-sided.  I actually have no idea what set this is a promo for:

I got a couple other "Book Store Special Card" promos:

Lastly I got a "Fighters Foundation" card for Takuya Nakashima.  This card uses roughly the same design as the 2017 BBM Fighters set but the photo is different.  This is the second "Fighters Foundation" card that I have.  Like the Imanaga card, I have no idea how many cards like them are out there.  Actually since the cards are unnumbered, I can't even guess how many cards there are.