2022 BBM Rookie Edition

 

The 2022 edition of BBM's annual draft pick set - Rookie Edition - was released at the end of February.  The base set contains 141 cards - 128 cards for the 2021 draftees, one "draft pick" card and 12 "New Face" cards.

I give pretty much the same description of this set every year so I'll try to be brief.  The set contains cards all the 2021 draft picks (also know as the 2022 Rookie Class).  The photos for the cards are all taken at the press conferences that each team holds to introduce their draftees to the fans and the press.  As a result, they are generally boring poses showing a player swinging a bat, making a pitching motion or just adopting a "guts" pose.  (For the fifth year in a row BBM has included "secret" versions of the 12 first round picks which are short printed photo variants showing the player in a different boring pose.)

I think that the 128 players taken in last year's draft is the most in the 20 years that BBM has been doing the Rookie Edition set.  This includes both the regular phase of the draft as well as the development player (or ikusei) phase.  One of the reasons there's so many players drafted is there were quite a few ikusei players taken - 51 in all which I believe is a record.  The Hawks alone took 14 ikusei players which IS a record.  Overall they took 19 players which tied the record for most players taken in a draft set by the Giants in 2020 (7 in the regular phase and 12 ikusei).  All the teams except the Dragons took at least one ikusei player - the Giants had 10, the most after the Hawks.  Since BBM does not include the ikusei players in their team sets any more, this may be the only baseball card these players ever have.

This is the first baseball card for most of these players although there are three (Daigo Kamikawabata of the Fighters, Kazuya Maruyama of the Swallows and Shunsuke Sato of the Lions) who previously had baseball cards in either the 2019 or 2020 Panini USA Baseball Stars & Stripes sets.  For the first time since they started doing them back in 2018 Epoch did not issue any Epoch One cards for any team's drafted players.

Here's some sample cards:

#043

#114

#032

#053

#012

#097

For whatever reason, BBM wants number of cards in each year's version of the Rookie Edition to be divisible by three.  If the number of drafted players is not divisible by three, BBM will add one or two cards that simply list all the draft picks.  They're not quite checklists as they usually don't list card numbers or any of the cards in the sets that are not draft picks.  Since 140  - the number of draft picks (128) plus the 12 cards in the "New Face" subset - is not divisible by three, BBM added one "Draft Pick" card to make the set 141 cards which IS divisible by 3.  Here's the front and back of the card (#129):

The final part of the set is the 12 card "New Face" subset which features one player born in 2000 or later from each team.  These are all young players who are expected to contribute this season for the first time (as opposed to more established players born in the same time period who are already established players like Munetaka Murakami, Roki Sasaki or Yoshinobu Okugawa).  Probably the biggest names in the subset are Keito Mori of the Baystars and Chusei Mannami of the Fighters.

#130

My complaints about this set aside, I always feel this is an essential set to get.  I just wish BBM put a little more effort into it.  As I've said before, it'd be great if they showed photos of the players in their high school/college/corporate league/indy league team uniform instead of the relentlessly boring photos from the press conferences.  But it's been 20 years now and BBM hasn't changed how this set looks (or forked over the amount of money it would take for the rights to show such uniforms).

You can see all the cards in the set (including inserts and "secret" versions) over at Jambalaya.

Card Of The Week March 13

The MLB lockout ended on Thursday and there's been a bunch of transactions since then.  I haven't been paying close attention but I noticed two that involved former NPB players.  Drew VerHagen, who had spent the past two seasons with the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, signed a two year deal with the Cardinals on Friday.  Then yesterday former Saitama Seibu Lions and Seattle Mariners pitcher Yusei Kikuchi signed a three year deal with Toronto.  We're still waiting to see who signs Seiya Suzuki but in the meantime here are cards of VerHagen and Kikuchi:

2021 BBM Fighters #F75

2011 Lions Fan Club #17

2021 BBM Daisuke Matsuzaka ~ Heisei no Kaibutsu set

BBM issued a box set back in December to commemorate the retirement of Daisuke Matsuzaka.  The set was called "Heisei no Kaibutsu" or "the Monster of Heisei" which was Matsuzaka's nickname coming out of high school.  Each box contained 19 cards - the 18 card base set plus one "special" card that could be a 3D card, a jersey card or an autographed card.  I think this is the first "single player" set that BBM has done since the 2018 "Grateful Days" set celebrating Shohei Ohtani as he left for the Angels.

I had dithered for a while about whether or not I was going to pick one of these sets up.  I was hoping to get an opened set that just had the base set for 500 yen but I finally gave up after a couple of months and paid 700 yen for one.  It was actually a little more than that since I used ZenMarket to get it (instead of asking Ryan to get it for me) so I had to pay their 300 yen service fee on it.  I got it in the mail yesterday along with my 2022 BBM Rookie Edition set which I'll be writing about in the next few days.

It's a nice looking little set.  The first 12 cards cover his time with the Lions from 1999 to 2006, including cards of his being drafted, his moving into the team dormitory, his first game, him winning an award for most wins by a rookie high school draftee, him playing for the National Team in either the 1999 Asian Games or the 2000 Olympics, his return to Koshien Stadium in interleague play in 2005, him hitting a home run at Koshien in 2006, his 100th win and his departure for MLB along with a reprint of his 1999 BBM rookie card.  The remaining six cards include one card of him with the Hawks after his return to Japan, three cards of him with the Dragons and two cards from his retirement game in October with the Lions.  I guess my only gripe is that it would have been nice if they could have included cards of him with Yokohama High School as well as the Red Sox, Cleveland and the Mets but I imagine that the licensing rights would have been difficult and/or too expensive to obtain.

Here's some of the cards from the set.  As always you can see all the cards over at Jambalaya:

#04

#08

#09

#10

#13

#15

#18

The back of card #18 shows his career statistics in both NPB and MLB:

Shinya Tsuruoka

It turns out that there was one more player I needed to do a retirement post for.  Long time Fighters and Hawks catcher Shinya Tsuruoka announced back in December that he was retiring.  Tsuruoka was the Fighters' eighth round pick in the 2002 draft from the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Yokohama industrial league team.  Oh, and that's the "Nippon-Ham Fighters" who drafted him, NOT the "Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters".  If I am not mistaken, Tsuruoka is the last active player to have worn a Fighters uniform when they still played in Tokyo although he didn't make his ichi-gun debut until 2005, their second season in Sapporo.  

He was the backup catcher to Shinji Takahashi for three years but became the starter in 2009 and won a Golden Glove that season.  He and Shota Ohno pretty much split the catching duties over the next four seasons but he played well enough the make the All Star team in 2012 and 2013 and win a Best 9 award in 2012.  He left the Fighters as a free agent after 2013 and signed with the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks.  He was pretty much the backup to Toru Hosokawa his first two years with the Hawks but stepped in when Hosokawa was injured in 2016.  By 2017 Hosokawa was in Sendai but the Hawks were committing themselves to younger catchers (like Takuya Kai) and Tsuruoka's playing time dwindled.  He left as a free agent after the 2017 season and returned to the Fighters.  He was a player/coach his last three seasons and the Fighters asked him to become a full time coach after the 2021 season but he declined as he initially wanted to continue playing.  He'll be a TV commentator this season.

Tsuruoka's first cards were in the 2003 BBM Rookie Edition (#83) and 1st Version (#341) sets.  He didn't appear in a Calbee set until the 2007 Series One set.  Here's a bunch of his cards:

2003 BBM Rookie Edition #83

2003 BBM 1st Version #341

2006 BBM Nippon Series #S13

2007 BBM 1st Version #15

2010 BBM 1st Version #236

2012 Calbee #AS-04

2013 BBM 1st Version #371

2014 Calbee #107

2016 BBM Hawks #H39

2018 BBM 1st Version #120

2019 BBM 1st Version #066

2021 BBM Fighters #F32

Topps NPB Inserts

When Topps first announced that it had an NPB license I felt that the only really interesting thing that Topps could bring to the Japanese card collecting world was their old designs.  Once their 2021 set was released it became apparent that, yeah, one of the most interesting things about it was the insert set using a slightly modified version of the 1986 Topps design.  I didn't get any of these cards when I picked up my set but I got a couple off of Ebay recently:

#86-TK

#86-YUY

#86-KA

I say "slightly modified version of the 1986 Topps design" because the original design did not have the team logos in the lower right corner of the photo.  The backs aren't quite the same desgin as the oringal - these show almost the same attention to detail that the backs of the base set show:

#86-YUY Back

In addition, I got a couple of the "Team Program" inserts.  There are 12 of these in all, one for each team.  Each one shows two of the player for the team - they're basically mug shots and some of them have struck me as vaguely creepy-looking.  Here's the ones I got:

#GP-5

#GP-3

Here's the back of the Hawks card, again showing the level of effort Topps put into this set:

#GP-5 Back

Calbee Anniversaries

I had mentioned a few weeks back that 2022 is the 50th year that Calbee has published baseball cards.  I'm assuming that they will be doing something to commemorate this in this year's sets although I don't know what it will be yet - while they announced the Series One set last month they're not going to release the set's checklist for another couple weeks.  I thought it might be interesting to see what they've done in the past to commemorate previous anniversaries.

As far as I can tell, Calbee didn't do anything to commemorate any anniversary until their 30th Anniversary in 2002.  What they did that year (besides every card having a special "30th Anniversary" logo on it) was have a "Memorial" subset that featured reproductions of cards from a previous Calbee set.  There were 24 "Memorial" cards in Series One and 12 in Series Two (there were only two Series that year).  Now if you've been paying any attention to how Japanese cards work you'll immediately assume if the number of cards in a subset is a multiple of 12 then the cards in that subset are evenly divided between the 12 NPB teams and you'd be right.  Calbee's plan was that the "Memorial" cards in Series One would feature a reprinted card for the manager and one player from each team while the ones for Series Two would featured a reprinted card for another player from each team.  But there was a problem with this plan - Lions manager Haruki Ihara had never had a Calbee card.  In fact, as far as I can tell, Haruki Ihara had NEVER had a baseball card at all before he became the Lions manager in 2002.  Calbee's solution was to just to pick an additional player from the Lions to feature in the subset.

Here's a table listing all the reprinted cards from the subset.  I believe, although I'm not positive, that each card was the first Calbee card for the player in question.  If a player had multiple cards in a set (like Sadaharu Oh in the 1973 set, the card used was the lowest card number for that player in the set).  If the player was on a different team (or the team had a different nickname) in 2002 than he was shown with on the original card, I listed his team on the original card (and for the 2002 cards "Buffaloes" means the Kintetsu variety).  I only own about half of this set (for now - Ryan just won an auction for the complete subset on Yahoo! Japan Auctions for me) so I'm making somewhat educated guesses on some of the cards - and avoiding making one at all on the Masataka Nashida card:

Team	Card #	Manager	Original	Card #	Player	Original	Card #	Player	Original
Swallows	M-01	Tsutomu Wakamatsu	1973/74 #195 (Atoms)	M-02	Atsuya Furuta	1991 #132	M-25	Shingo Takatsu	1994 #99
Giants	M-03	Tatsunori Hara	1982 #51	M-04	Kazuhiro Kiyohara	1986 #81 (Lions)	M-26	Hideki Matsui	1993 #1
Baystars	M-05	Masaaki Mori	1973 #25 (Giants)	M-06	Takashi Saitoh	1994 #20	M-27	Takuro Ishii	1994 #19
Carp	M-07	Koji Yamamoto	1973 #61	M-08	Shinji Sasaoka	1991 #6	M-28	Tomonori Maeda	1992 #99
Dragons	M-09	Hisashi Yamada	1973 #89 (Braves)	M-10	Kazuyoshi Tatsunami	1988 #75	M-29	Masahiro Yamamoto	1990 #64
Tigers	M-11	Senichi Hoshino	1973/74 #223 (Dragons)	M-12	Keiichi Yabu	1995 #47	M-30	Shinjiro Hiyama	1996 #60
Buffaloes	M-13	Masataka Nashida	1979 or 1980	M-14	Motoyuki Akahori	1993 #10	M-31	Norihiro Nakamura	1995 #70
Hawks	M-15	Sadaharu Oh	1973 #7 (Giants)	M-16	Koji Akiyama	1985 #366 (Lions)	M-32	Kenichi Wakatabe	1992 #81
Lions	M-17	Kazuo Matsui	1996 #177	M-18	Fumiya Nishiguchi	1996 #121	M-33	Tsutomu Itoh	1986 #170
BlueWave	M-19	Hiromichi Ishige	1981 #43 (Lions)	M-20	Yasuo Fujii	1989 #151 (Braves)	M-34	Tetsuya Shindoh	1993 #64
Marines	M-21	Koji Yamamoto	1975/76/77 #753 (Giants)	M-22	Kiyoshi Hatsushiba	1991 #136 (Orions)	M-35	Tomohiro Kuroki	1997 #088
Fighters	M-23	Yasunori Ohshima	1973/74 #219 (Dragons)	M-24	Makoto Kaneko	1997 #011	M-36	Yukio Tanaka	1989 #43

And yes, there were two guys named Koji Yamamoto who were managing NPB teams in 2002.  

As you can see, the originals of the reprinted cards came from a range of sets between the earliest set in 1973 and the 1997 set.  The year that the card was published in is identified both on the front of the card and in the fine print on the back although Calbee doesn't list the early sets that spanned multiple years as "1973/74", "1974/75" or "1975/76/77" - they just list which ever year the card was actually published in.  So the Wakamatsu card for example just says "1973" while everyone following Engel's lead considers that the "1973/74" set.

OK, enough talk - what do the cards look like?  Basically the front and back of the cards show the front and back of the reprinted cards sitting on a grey (for the Series One cards) or beige (for the Series Two Cards) background.  Here's a couple examples:

#M-02

#M-02 Back

#M-09 (Hisashi Yamada)

#M-09 Back (Hisashi Yamada)

#M-33 (Tsutomu Itoh)

#M-33 Back (Tsutomu Itoh)

One thing about Calbee doing the reprints this way is that you get some sense of the relative sizes of the original cards - the Itoh card is smaller than the Yamada card which is wider but shorter than the Furuta card.  

Here's a direct comparison of the Wakamatsu reprint with the original card:

#M-01 & 1973/74 Calbee #195

#M-01 & 1973/74 Calbee #195 Backs

For their 40th Anniversary in 2012, Calbee went with the reprints again, using a similar theme as before.  Once again they would have a "Memorial" subset.  The subset contained 13 cards in Series One and 12 cards each in Series Two and Three.  The plan was to again feature reprints of cards of all 12 NPB managers in Series One along with cards of Shigeo Nagashima and Sadaharu Oh but once again there was problem - Swallows manager Junji Ogawa never appeared on a Calbee card as a player.  This time, however, Calbee didn't replace him in the "Memorial" subset although they did do something to account for him which I'll get to in a minute.  The 12 cards in the Series Two "Memorial" subset featured a reprinted card of a coach for each team and the 12 cards for Series Three featured reprints of cards for a player on each team.

Here's a table showing all the reprints from 2012.  Unlike the 2002 cards, there are not necessarily the first cards of these players (although a number of them are).  Once again if the player was on a different team (or the team had a different nickname) in 2012 than he was shown with on the original card, I listed his team on the original card (and for the 2012 cards "Buffaloes" means Orix).  

Team	Card #	Manager	Original	Card #	Coach	Original	Card #	Player	Original
Hawks	M-03	Koji Akiyama	1990 #124 (Lions)	M-14	Daijiro Ohishi	1993 #113 (Kintetsu)	M-26	Hiroki Kokubo	1997 #083
Fighters	M-04	Hideki Kuriyama	1989 #249 (Swallows)	M-15	Yukio Tanaka	1990 #151	M-27	Makoto Kaneko	1999 #122
Lions	M-05	Hisanobu Watanabe	1991 #95	M-16	Masahiro Doi	1973/74 #257 (Kintetsu)	M-28	Fumiya Nishiguchi	1997 #045
Buffaloes	M-06	Akinobu Okada	1989 #292 (Tigers)	M-17	Hirofumi Ogawa	1993 #85 (BlueWave)	M-29	Hirotoshi Kitagawa	2002 #052 (Kintetsu)
Eagles	M-07	Senichi Hoshino	1975/76/77 #524 (Dragons)	M-18	Koichi Tabuchi	1975/76/77 #329	M-30	Kazuo Matsui	1997 #077 (Lions)
Marines	M-08	Norifumi Nishimura	1989 #49 (Orions)	M-19	Yoshihiko Takahashi	1980 #73 (Carp)	M-31	Kazuya Fukuura	1999 #069
Dragons	M-09	Morimichi Takagi	1974/75 #724	M-20	Masaru Uno	1981 #125	M-32	Masahiro Yamamoto	1990 #64
Swallows				M-21	Daisuke Araki	1987 #314	M-33	Shinya Miyamoto	2000 #054
Giants	M-10	Tatsunori Hara	1988 #1	M-22	Masaki Saitoh	1990 #49	M-34	Yoshinobu Takahashi	1998 #084
Tigers	M-11	Yutaka Wada	1994 #83	M-23	Keiichi Yabu	1997 #012	M-35	Shinjiro Hiyama	1997 #149
Carp	M-12	Kenjiro Nomura	1991 #53	M-24	Yutaka Ohno	1987 #229	M-36	Tomonori Maeda	1992 #99
Baystars	M-13	Kiyoshi Nakahata	1987 #94 (Giants)	M-25	Yutaka Takagi	1991 #122 (Whales)	M-37	Daisuke Miura	1997 #076
	M-01	Shigeo Nagashima	1973 #1
	M-02	Sadaharu Oh	1973 #7

I found it kind of interesting that a third of the people included in the 2002 "Memorial" subset also appear in the 2012 version - Koji Akiyama, Tatsunori Hara, Shinjiro Hiyama, Senichi Hoshino, Makoto Kaneko, Tomonori Maeda, Kazuo Matsui, Fumiya Nishiguchi, Sadaharu Oh, Yukio Tanaka, Keiichi Yabu and Masahiro Yamamoto.  Oddly enough, the same cards are used for Maeda, Oh and Yamamoto.

The range of years represented in the subset starts in 1973 again and goes to 2002.

Calbee took a different approach to the cards in 2012 than in 2002.  Instead of showing the card on a background, they resized the image of the original card to fit the current card size.  In some cases this meant going back to the original photo and recropping it or moving the text on the front of the card.  For example, compare the 2012 version of Nagashima's iconic 1973 Calbee #1 to the original:

#M-01 & 1973 Calbee #1

Notice on the 2012 card that there's a smidge more of the "3" on the front of his uniform visible.  Also note that the "(巨人)" has been moved up and to the right a little on the 2012 card.

Here's a couple other examples (without the original cards as comparisons):

#M-10 (Tatsunori Hara)

#M-18 (Koichi Tabuchi)

#M-26

And just for grins, here's the front and back of Masahiro Yamamoto's original 1990 card with both the 2002 and 2012 versions:

1990 Calbee #64, 2002 #M-29, 2012 #M-32

1990 Calbee #64, 2002 #M-29, 2012 #M-32 Backs

Notice again that the text got moved on the front of the 2012 card but not the 2002 one.

So as not to leave Junji Ogawa out completely, Calbee issued a "regular" player card for him that used a picture of him from his playing days with the Swallows (1982-91).  It kind of screwed up the checklist that year as the Series One set then had 73 "regular" cards - six per team except for the Swallows having seven.  Here's the front and back of Ogawa's card:

#043

#043 Back

So what do I expect Calbee to do for their 50th Anniversary?  Probably something along the lines of what they did in 2002 or 2012 (and, hey, all 12 current NPB managers had Calbee cards although it was a close thing - I think Hawks manager Hiroshi Fujimoto only had one).  It'd be nice if the reprinted cards weren't tied to the current NPB managers, coaches, and players so that there could be reprints of Ichiro, Hideki Matsui, Hideo Nomo and others.  A lot of the older Calbee cards have similar fronts but maybe they could do cards with current players using some of the few unique Calbee designs - the 1976 pink borders or the 1984 hats or the 1992-95 designs.  But again, my expectation is that it'll be something like what they did before.  I guess we'll know for sure in a week or so.