Weekly Baseball

Baseball Magazine Sha, the publisher of BBM baseball cards, is primarily a magazine publisher (as you might expect from their name).  I believe that the company was founded in 1946 or 47 (there's a 50th Anniversary card in the 1996 BBM set), some 45 years before they started publishing baseball cards.  In 1958 the company began publishing Shukan (Weekly) Baseball (there was a "40 Years of Shukan Baseball" subset in the 1998 BBM set).

Brief digression - despite the name, I'm not entirely sure how often the magazine comes out - each issue has a number that starts over each year (i.e. the first issue each year is issue #1) but it looks like the last issue in the year has a number like 71.  Looking at the back issues BBM lists for 2013,  there are 51 issues listed and they are skip numbered (there's no #3 for instance).  I don't know if there are issues that aren't listed or if there's some other numbering scheme they are using.

At some point in their history, BBM started inserting cards in occasional issues of Shukan Baseball.  I'm not entirely sure when it started but the earliest card I've found on Yahoo! Japan Auctions is from 2002.  I've started compiling a list of the cards that I'll publish soon.  I've been using the usual sources (Yahoo! Japan Auctions, BBM's website and Jambalaya) for research.

What I've figured out so far is that it looks like recently (since 2010 maybe) the cards have been pretty much straight promo versions of cards from BBM sets.  The more interesting cards are from 2010 and earlier.  There were 10 issues in each of 2013 and 2014 that included baseball cards - each time it was a pair of cards.

I picked up a recent issue (#13 with a cover date of April 6) that had a couple 1st Version promo cards in it (Daisuke Matsuzaka and Hiroki Kuroda) just to check it out.  I was hoping that the issue might contain a list of all the Shukan Baseball cards (like SCM has a list of all the cards they've issued) but it did not.  Here's the front and back of the two cards:

I can't say that these cards get me all that excited.  I'm generally not that interested in promo cards for the sake of promo cards so I probably won't go out of my way to get the magazine again.  I am interested in some of the earlier (2010 and before) cards however.

BBM inserting cards into magazine does not appear to be limited to just Sports Card Magazine and Shukan Baseball.  BBM published a 12 issue series of mooks on Shigeo Nagashima, each one of which contained two exclusive Nagashima cards.  I had picked up a mook about the Hankyu Braves at Shosen Grande when I was in Japan two years ago that contained four promo cards for the 2011 Legend of the Bs set - each card featured a photo that was different than the one in the actual set.  And finally, I believe that the 2009 Legend Player set that appears to have been issued to celebrate the 60th Anniversary of the two league sytem was actually distributed in magazines or mooks - it may have actually been Shukan Baseball but I haven't figured it out yet.  It would explain why I never saw the set on BBM's website and why it doesn't appear in the list of BBM sets in the SCM.

I hope to get the list of cards published in the next week or so.

Card Of The Week May 10

I just finished reading Rob Fitts' new book Mashi: The Unfulfilled Baseball Dreams of Masanori Murakami, the First Japanese Major Leaguer this past week.  Once again Rob has written an excellent book that is well worth reading.

I got curious again over what cards are out there for Murakami.  There still only appear to be four cards of him from his playing days - 1967 Kabaya-Leaf #302, 1979 TCMA #37 and #37 in both the 1981 and 1982 Takara Fighters sets (along with his 1965 Topps #282 rookie card).  I haven't seen any evidence that he ever had a Calbee card.  The only one of these cards that I have is the TCMA one:

He's had more than twice that many card in the past 25 years.  BBM did a "Murakami Memories" subset in 1993 (maybe for the 30th Anniversary of his NPB debut in 1963) that contained four cards - one for each team he played for (Nankai Hawks, San Francisco Giants, Hanshin Tigers and Nippon Ham Fighters):

1993 BBM #476

1993 BBM #477

1993 BBM #478

1993 BBM #479

He appeared in two 2005 BBM issues - the Fighters team set (#F94) and 2nd Version:

2005 BBM 2nd Version #817

More recently he's appeared in a couple different OB sets, both from BBM and from Epoch:

2008 BBM Hawks 70th Anniversary #24

2009 Epoch All Japan Baseball Foundation 15th Anniversary #47

2013 BBM Hawks 75th Anniversary #15

He also appeared in the 2012 Epoch Geneology Of The Aces set (#22) which features what looks like the same photo as #476 from the 1993 BBM set.

Card Of The Week May 3

Last week Dragons player/manager Motonobu Tanishige became just the second player in NPB history to appear in 3000 games.  Tanishige joins another former player/manager, Katsuya Nomura, as the only players to reach this milestone.  Nomura's record for most NPB games appeared in is 3017 and it's generally expected that Tanishige will pass him this season.

It's still possible, however, for Tanishige to experience a first in his career, even after 3000 games.  Yesterday, in his 3001st game, he was ejected for the first time ever after making contact with the home plate ump when arguing a close play at the plate:



For the record, I think the runner was out but I don't think it was possible for the ump to see it from where he was standing.  And NPB has not yet implemented the same kind of replay system that MLB has.  (And Tanishige would have been ejected anyway for making contact with the umpire.)

It's kind of ironic that he gets ejected from a game against Yokohama, his original team from 1989-2001.

Here's a card of Tanishige from the "Grand Masters" subset of the 2011 BBM Dragons team set (#D86):

Giants Team Issued Sets

Just another quick overview of team issued sets, this time for the Yomiuri Giants.  Jason listed a number of Giants sets but there isn't much overlap between what he has listed and what I have other than the 2013 "Players Card" set.

2002 "New Generation"

The backs of all the cards that I have from this set are identical and just contain schedule information.   The only numbers on the cards are the player's uniform number.   I have Yusaku Iriki (#20), Junichi Kawahara (#15), Kimiyasu Kudoh (#47) and Kazutaka Nishiyama (#26).

2004 Team Set

I only have two cards from this set - Kimiyasu Kudoh (#47) and Takayuki Saitoh (#37).  Jason has five other cards listed from this set.

2013 Players Card

I'm pretty sure the data on the bottom right of the front and back is the date that the card was given away (or made available to buy maybe?).  I've got the same six cards that Jason lists - Shinnosuke Abe (#10), Hisayoshi Chono (#7), Hayato Sakamoto (#6), Hirokazu Sawamura (#15), Tomoyuki Sugano (#19) and Toshiya Sugiuchi (#18).  (As an aside, I frequently feel like some of the team issued cards I end up with are kind of the lower profile guys for the team.  Not so with this bunch.)

2013 OB Giants

Apparently at the same time that the Giants were giving away a set of the current team in 2013, they were also giving away a set of OB players.  I have 16 cards from this set - Shozo Doi, Isao Harimoto, Tatsuro Hirooka, Tsuneo Horiuchi, Kunio Johnouchi, Masaichi Kaneda, Yoshitaka Katori, Yukinobu Kurue, Masumi Kuwata, Hiromi Makihara, Masahiko Mori, Sadaharu Oh, Isao Shibata, Kazunori Sinozuka, Sadaaki Yoshimura and a two sided Hideki Matsui/Shigeo Nagashima card.  Most of the cards use black and white photos but some of the more recent players have color photos:

I've lumped the two sided Matsui/Nagashima card in with this set as the design is very similar but it's possible that it should be considered a separate issue.  Both sides have a "kira" finish to them (that doesn't really come across well in the scan) - I don't know if all the Matsui/Nagashima cards have it or if it was just a few.

Full list of BBM sets

Ryan Laughton left a comment on a post a few weeks ago that kind of sent me down a rabbit hole that I'm just now coming out of.  Ryan said that he had stopped buying American cards in the mid 1990's because there was such an explosion of sets that it was impossible to keep up and he felt that BBM had done a similar explosion around 1998 and 1999.  I got curious and decided to do a count of the number of sets that BBM had published each year (using SCM's listings in SCM #110 as the "official" list) and see if Ryan was right.  Here are the counts:

Year	Count
1991	3
1992	3
1993	3
1994	5
1995	6
1996	5
1997	8
1998	9
1999	11
2000	11
2001	12
2002	15
2003	19
2004	26
2005	27
2006	26
2007	33
2008	32
2009	34
2010	36
2011	38
2012	40
2013	48
2014	48
2015	16

Ryan's right in that BBM did start to increase the number of sets they did each year in the late 1990's but I think real explosion happened in the 2003-2004 time frame.

It's pretty wild to look at the numbers.  BBM has done a total of 514 sets in 25 years (well, 24 plus four months so far this year).  The total number of sets they did their first 10 years (1991 to 2000) was only 64.  The total for their next 10 years (2001-2010) was 260.  Their total for just the four plus years since 2011 is 190!

After I did the counts, I decided that I needed to sit down and (finally) generate the complete list of BBM sets based on what was listed in SCM #110.  It took a couple weeks to do, but I've now added this list to the Set Index page.

The sets are listed in the same order that they appear in SCM - the odd change in how the sets are listed around 2012 is due to a change they made, not me.  There are a number of sets that they list in a particular year even though the year shown on the front of the card is different - for example the "Memories Of Uniform" set has "2015" on the front (so I consider it a 2015 set) but SCM includes it in the list of 2014 sets.  I've included Engel's set notations where ever possible - since he hasn't done a modern checklist since mid-2008, his number stop there.  Engel actually lists a number of sets that SCM does not - I'll be adding them to the set index separately.  As far as I could tell, there was only one pre-2008 set that SCM listed that Engel did not which is pretty damned impressive if you ask me.

I've included links for any sets that I've written about - I think I've actually written posts on about 30% of the sets.

What I'd like to do is further expand the set index by including similar lists for the Epoch and Front Runner sets.  The Calbee sets are fairly self expanatory and any major earlier sets are already well covered by Engel.

Card Of The Week April 26

Kenny Ray of the Eagles did something no one else has ever done before this past week - he became the first pitcher in his 40's to win his first four starts of the season.  The previous record of three was set by Lotte's Choji Murata in 1990.

This is Ray's second stint in Japan.  He had previously pitched for the Eagles in 2013, making five appearances (including three starts) down the stretch.  He also contributed five scoreless innings in the post season.

I was kind of surprised to discover there are almost no Japanese cards of Ray prior to this year.  It looks like he didn't sign with the Eagles until mid way through the 2013 season (his first appearance with the ichi-gun team was in mid-July) so he didn't make it into any of BBM's sets that you might expect to find him in - 1st Version, 2nd Version or the Eagles team set.  He's also not in the Eagles team issued card set.  I was kind of surprised to see that he did not appear in the "First Crown" box set that BBM issued to celebrate the Eagles' first ever pennant.  And since the 2014 BBM Eagles 10th Anniversary set only had a "Best 9" for the 2013 team, he didn't make that set either.  According to the work that Jason's done over at SportsCardForum, the only Japanese card of Ray from 2013 was from the fourth series of Owners League cards that year (#119).  He is in the new 2015 BBM 1st Version set (#140) as well as the BBM Eagles team set (#E18).

Had BBM continued to do Nippon Series sets, he would have had a card in the 2013 edition of that set.

I don't have any of his Japanese cards yet (although I'll have the 2015 1st Version card in a couple weeks) but while looking into his background, I did discover I have two minor league cards for him.  I used to spend a lot of time rooting for the Wilmington Blue Rocks and I found that I have a card of him from their 1995 team set (from Choice) as well as a card of him from a set the team did in 2000 celebrating former Blue Rocks who had made it to the majors:

1995 Choice Wilmington Blue Rocks #24

2000 Choice Blue Rocks In The Show #30

2013 BBM Masahiro Tanaka Invincibility Legend set

2013 was a pretty amazing year in NPB.  In the Central League you had Wladimir Balentien chasing (and eventually passing) Sadaharu Oh's record for most home runs in a season (which was actually shared by Tuffy Rhodes and Alex Cabrera but they did it in the Pacific League) while in the Pacific League you had Masahiro Tanaka chasing an undefeated season - eventually ending the season at 24-0 while leading the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles to their first ever pennant and Nippon Series championship.  It was a lot of fun for me to follow here on the East Coast of the US, waking up every morning to see what the two of them had done or (even better) getting to tune in via Justin.tv to watch them do it.

BBM published a box set in November of 2013 that celebrated Tanaka's 24-0 season.   It was called something along the lines of "Unbeaten Legend" although according to Ryan, the kanji for the title could also be translated as "Invincibility Myth".  I like the name "Invincibility Legend" myself so that's what I've been going with.

The base set contains 27 cards.  24 of these cards commemorate each of Tanaka's wins in 2013 (regular season only, not the Climax Series or Nippon Series).  The front of these cards shows a picture from the game in question while the back has the line score and other information about the game:

#01

Back of #01

Here's some of the other cards for the victories:

#03

#11

#15

#18

#25

You're probably asking yourself what the other three cards in the base set are for.  One of them is for Tanaka's only save during the regular season that year - Eagles manager Senichi Hoshino brought him in to close the game in which the Eagles clinched the Pacific League pennant on September 26.

#23

Tanaka's winning streak actually started with his last four wins in 2012 (for a total of 28) and one of the other cards in the set commemorates the first win of the streak against the Fighters on August 26, 2012 - the card is called "PROLOGUE to the Legend".

The final card in the set is a shot of Tanaka with the idol group Momoiro Clover Z, of whom he apparently is a big fan.

#27

This was a difficult set to track down.  It had a print run of only 1500 sets and it seemed like everyone who got one was holding on to it.  Ryan has been scouring the card shops in Japan looking for an opened set but coming up empty.  I lucked into a set a few weeks ago on Yahoo! Japan Auctions.  Total cost including shipping and kuboTEN fees was around $30 which is much higher than I would normally pay for an opened box set but considering how rare these appear to be, I wasn't too unhappy about it.

You can see all the base set cards over at Jambalaya.  Ryan's post on the set goes into some detail about the premium cards that were also in the box with the base set.