RIP Jose Capellan

Former major league pitcher Jose Capellan passed away earlier this week.  In addition to playing for the Braves, Brewers, Tigers and Rockies, he also spent a season with the Hanwha Eagles of the KBO.  That season was 2010 which happen to be a year that someone did a Korean baseball card set that included foreign players.  Here's the front back of his card from that set (#AH-007):

Gurriel

I don't have a whole lot to add to the discussions that have been going on regarding DeNA's decision to void Yulieski Gurriel's contract and place Lourdes Gurriel on the restricted list.  I think it's a shame that the elder Gurriel will not be in the Baystars lineup this year and I can't help feeling that the possibility of Gurriel being able to move to MLB in the near future is a factor in all of this somehow. But what do I know?

Actually what I do know is that despite the voiding of his contract, there will most likely be cards of Yulieski Gurriel in Japan this year.  The BBM 1st Version checklist that appears in SCM 110 lists two cards for him - his "regular" card (#286) and a Cross Plasma card (#CP32).  (The Cross Plasma card appears on the webpage for the set at BBM's web site).  I suspect that it's unlikely that BBM will remove the card from the set as it's probably too late to do so - the set will be released in less than two weeks.

2015 BBM Softbank Hawks 10th Anniversary

BBM put out a set celebrating the 10th Anniversary of Softbank buying the Hawks from Daiei about a month and a half ago.  This set was a pack based set and featured 81 cards in its base set that were split between three groups - OB players, 2014 players and "Memories Of The Decade".

There are 63 cards for OB Softbank Hawks players.  As usual this includes both retired players as well as former Hawks who are still active either in NPB (like Toshiya Sugiuchi) or MLB (Munenori Kawasaki, Tsuyoshi Wada).  The only two managers that the Softbank Hawks have had - Sadaharu Oh and Koji Akiyama - are included in this group.  The rest of the players include pretty much every one you'd expect - Kazumi Saitoh, Hiroki Kokubo, Nagisa Arakaki, Arihito Muramatsu, Julio Zuleta, Naoyuki Ohmura and Jose Ortiz for example.  There really isn't anyone I could think of who is missing from the set.  I thought there were a few players who were included that were kind of odd picks - both Kenji Johjima and Tony Batista only played one season for Softbank (both in 2005) but at least both were significant contributors that one season.  There's a couple other guys who I'm really wondering why they were included - Yudai Deguchi (6 ABs in 10 games in 2005), Tetsuya Matoyama (40 games in 2008) and Masanori Taguchi (10 ABs in 6 games in 2005).  I wonder if BBM was scrambling to get enough players to fill in 63 cards.  The photos on the cards are nice but fairly unremarkable:

#20

#45

#49

There are nine cards for the 2014 Hawks.  It's not quite a Best 9 for the 2014 team - there are two pitchers (Kenji Ohtonari and Tadashi Settsu) but no catcher.  The other seven players are Yuya Hasegawa, Yuichi Honda, Kenta Imamiya, Nobuhiro Matsuda, Nobuhiko Matsunaka, Seiichi Uchikawa and Yuki Yanagita.

#70

The "Memories of The Decade" subset is also nine cards.  Instead of being numbered with the rest of the set, they are numbered M01 to M09.  The "memories" being commemorated are the official introduction of the Softbank Hawks in January 2005, the Interleague Championship in June 2008, Koji Akiyama taking over as manager from Sadaharu Oh in October of 2008, clinching 1st place in September 2010 (I think), the 2011 Nippon Series Championship, their walkoff win against Orix last October to clinch 1st place, their 2014 Nippon Series Championship, Kimiyasu Kudoh being named manager in November 2014 and Daisuke Matsuzaka being signed in December 2014.

#M09

I'm not going to lie - this is an odd little set.  First of all, it's kind of strange that this set came out this year rather than last year since 2014 was Softbank's 10th season (the Eagles started in 2005 as well and their 10th Anniversary set came out last year).  It's also kind of odd that 44% of the most memorable moments for the Hawks happened between October and December of last year.  It's also extremely odd that all the player cards show the players in their home white uniforms - no away jerseys, none of the colorful alternate jerseys, nothing but white tops.  I kind of get the feeling that the Hawks and/or BBM decided that they needed to get a card out of Matsuzaka in a Softbank uniform as quickly as possible and worked backward from there.  This set just seems kind of superfluous, especially considering that there was a 75th Anniversary set for the Hawks just a few years ago.

You can see all the cards at Jambalaya and Ryan has a post describing the set as well.

Card Of The Week April 5

The Giants beat the Tigers yesterday by a score of 9 to 5.  This was significant because it was the 1000th time that the Giants had beaten the Tigers in the two team's history going all the way back to 1936.  If I'm reading the translation of this Nikkan Sports article correctly, it looks like the Giants' first ever victory against the Tigers was Eiji Sawamura's no-hitter against them on September 25, 1936.  This was also the first no-hitter in Japanese professional baseball history.

BBM commemorated this no-hitter (as well as almost all the others in Japan up until 2012) with a card in the 2012 No-Hitters set.  Since it was the first no-hitter, it's the first card in the set:

H/T Yakyu Baka for the link to the Nikkan Sports article

Orix Team Issued Sets

Some more team issued sets, this time from Orix.

I've got six cards from the 2011 BsClub set:

These are actually numbered and the numbering implies that there's only 19 cards in the set.  Here's what I have:

#2 - Yoshihisa Hirano
#3 - Mamoru Kishida
#4 - Chihiro Kaneko
#5 - Satoshi Komatsu
#8 - Shinji Shimoyama
#9 - T-Okada

I've also got 16 cards from the 2013 BsClub set (I'm going by the Ebay seller's description for the year as the card themselves don't say what year):

These cards are unnumbered other than the uniform number.  Here's the list of what I have:

#11 Takahiro Matsuba
#17 Shun Tohno
#19 Chihiro Kaneko
#30 Taiki Mitsumata
#31 Shunichi Satoh
#34 Shinya Nakayama
#38 Shuhei Kojima
#46 Takayoshi Kawabata
#48 Makoto Yoshino
#57 Nobuyoshi Yamada
#58 Ryo Toda
#59 Shohei Tsukahara
#61 Kohdai Matsumoto
#63 Issei Nakamura
#115 Daiki Hara
#119 Shoki Kakihara

I thought that the seller I bought this from had two other auctions for cards from this set that I did not bid on but I've been searching completed auctions on Ebay and not finding them.

Actually now that I do some looking around, Kohdai Matsumoto was only with Orix in 2013 so that would pretty much confirm the year.

Eagles Team Issued Sets

Here's a couple card sets for the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles.

I've got seven cards from a 2006 set that Jason has identified as the "Seat Holders Club" card set.  Here's the front and back of one of them:

Jason has a list of around 50 cards from this set over at his post on team issued sets that includes all seven of the cards I have.

I have four cards from the 2009 Seat Owners Club set, another set that Jason has an extensive checklist of (along with the 2007, 2008 and 2010 sets and partial checklists for the 2011 & 2012 sets).  Again, I'll just show the front and back of one of the cards I have:

Ryan picked up a card from what may be another 2009 Eagles issued team set a couple months back.

I also picked about nine cards from a 2013 Eagles issue:

What's nice about this set is that we actually know a lot about it.  For starters, Ryan picked up a pack of it a few years back, so we know it was sold in six(?) card packs.  Even better, however, is the fact that Jambalaya has the full set up at their site.  There are 74 player cards in the base set plus two "SS" subsets - one of 11 cards and one of three cards.  There are also 12 insert cards and (according to Ryan), three jersey cards and 34 autograph cards.

Jambalaya is located in Fukushima, Tokohu, so they've been selling the Eagles team issues the last few years.  Last year's set contained 69 player cards in the base set plus sixteen additional subset cards along with a 10 card insert set.  This year's set was apparently just released this week (in time for their home opener Tuesday?) and contains 76 player cards plus 17 subset cards in the base set along with another 10 insert cards.  Not sure of the details about memorabilia or autograph cards for either set but Jambalaya does have a couple autograph cards from the 2014 set for sale.

1991 BBM Box Break

I've had some correspondence lately with a reader named Jay who told me that he had recently picked up an unopened box of 1991 BBM off of Ebay.  I asked if he'd be willing to contribute information and photos for a "box break" and he graciously agreed.

The 1991 BBM set featured 399 cards in its base set plus 12 "team logo" hologram cards as the only chase cards.  The cards were sold in boxes of 30 10 card packs.  According to Engel, the hologram cards were inserted into the boxes at a rate of 2 per box.  The set was also available as a factory set which did not include any of the holograms.

Here's the photos Jay sent me:

Jay was very impressed by BBM's decollation - "The amazing thing was I got NO duplicates".  So out of 30 packs of 10 cards, he got 299 unique cards plus one team logo hologram (for the Fighters).  What's more, each pack contained the cards in numerical sequence - for example, the cards in a pack were numbered from first to last as "7, 28, 45, 77, 98, 130, 179, 230, 283, 321" while the next would be "6, 27, 44, 76, 97, 129, 178, 229, 282, 320".  I've opened boxes from 1992 and 1994 in the past and did not see this behavior (and I'm pretty sure I got duplicates) so I suspect it was only for 1991.  I would guess BBM realized pretty quick that something like that would make it possible for someone to predict what cards would be in unopened packs simply by opening the top pack in the stack of packs.  (This is assuming that I'm not misunderstanding what Jay sent me and the two example sequences he sent are actual pack sequences and not just something he put together for an example).

Besides the 10 cards, each pack also contained what I think is a promo for the 1991 set - it has a breakdown of the cards in the set (30 cards per team, 23 Leader cards, 10 Nostalgic Stars and the 12 team hologram logos) although it does not mention the 6 checklist cards.

Jay was understandably pretty pleased with his take - for $34.95 (plus free shipping), he picked up about three quarters of BBM's inaugural set.

Thanks for sharing the photos and the information Jay!