Team Issued Cards From Ryan

Getting back to the box of cards I got from Ryan last week...

Ryan included a bunch of team issued cards - for the most part these are either cards issued to members of a team's fan club or a stadium giveaway.  Some of these I asked him to pick up but most of these were a surprise to me.

There were two cards for the Hawks - that's "Bryant" Nelson, who briefly played in the majors with the Red Sox in 2002.  He also played in Mexico, Taiwan and Italy and spent parts of over ten seasons in the independent Atlantic League:

2003 Hawks Fan Club #044

2007 Hawks "Club Hawks" #23-RA-10

Moving on to the Fighters, Ryan got me an oversized (roughly 3x5) "bromide" card of Sho Nakata from 2011.  He had previously sent me a different card of Nakata from the same set but I think the set itself contains over players from the Fighters as well:

2011 Fighters Bromide #21

He also picked up a couple Fighters Fan Club cards from 2019 and 2020.  As you can tell, these were actually made by BBM.  I've heard of that happening - I know the Lions did a set with BBM that was sold or given away at the Lions store last year and I think there was something in an issue of SCM a few years back about BBM doing an Orix fan club set but this is the first time I've seen the actual cards:

2019 Fighters Fan Club #46

2020 Fighters Fan Club #51

2020 Fighters Fan Club #54

Interesting to see that BBM still does boring poses even when they're doing a Fan Club set.

He got me a couple cards issued by Kintetsu:

1995 Kintetsu Team Set #18 (Hiroki Sakai)

2004 Kintetsu "The Player's Number" #14 (Shinichi Katoh)

He sent me a bunch of Lions cards.  I'm not sure when this first one was issued - Kiyohara played for the team between 1995 and 1996 but it's certainly possible it was issued for him after he retired (but probably before his drug bust).  Ryan has mentioned in the past that there's at least four of these cards:

Kiyohara Bromide

He also picked me up two cards from the 2007 "Original Player Cards" set.  I'd gotten a bunch of cards from this set a few years back and it's difficult to say which side is the front of the card and which is the back.  Here's each side of each card:

I had asked him to pick up a lot of about 30 2011 Lions Fan cards.  I won't show all of them but here's four just to get a flavor for what they look like:

That lot also contained one card from the 2012 Lions Fan Club set:

I also asked him to pick up these three cards from the 2020 Lions Fan Club set:

It's probably not a surprise that I have more Lions team issued cards than any other team since they are one of my two favorite teams (the other being the Chunichi Dragons).

He picked me up an interesting card from 2006 for Adam Riggs of the Swallows.  Apparently this card was a giveaway for a "Player Day" promotion but the front is almost identical to his card in the 2006 BBM Swallows set (#TY45).  Here's the two cards side by side:

The backs don't look the same though:

I'm not positive about what year this Shinya Miyamoto card is from but I'm guessing it's 2010.  The Swallows wore that sleeve patch between 2009 and 2011 and I have Swallows cards from both 2009 and 2011 that use a different design.

2010(?) Swallows Team Set #YsK06

The final team issued card he sent me was this card for Tetsuharu Kawakami:

The "08.04.13" date on the back made me immediately think this was a stadium giveaway card for a Giants game on August 4th, 2013.  Problem was, I'd seen a bunch of SGA cards for OB Giants players from 2013 already and they didn't look anything like this.  I did a search on Yahoo! Japan Auctions and found the answer - this was actually an SGA on April 13th, 2008.  It was part of a group of cards celebrating the Giants' retired uniform numbers.  I didn't see this exact card but there was a very similar looking card of Kawakami as a player being given away with a card of Masaichi Kaneda on April 11th, 2008.

The Wyverns, the Raiders and the 2000 Teleca Set

I'm going to take a quick break from posting about the box of cards I got from Ryan last week because the SK Wyverns of the KBO are no more.  SK has sold the team to a company called Shinsegae and the team will now be called the SSG Landers.  I thought this might be an appropriate time to bring up something that I've suspected about the 2000 Teleca KBO card set.

The SK Wyverns joined the KBO in February of 2000 as a replacement for the Ssangbangwool Raiders who had folded a month earlier as a result of their parent company going bankrupt.  They were an entirely new franchise - SK did not buy the Raiders.  The Wyverns did end up with a somewhat large group of former Raiders players however.  With the Wyverns replacing the Raiders, the number of teams in the KBO remained at eight.

The 2000 Teleca set, however, contains cards for NINE teams as it contains cards for both the Raiders and the Wyverns.  I don't have any firm proof of this but I strongly suspect that Teleca issued this set in two printings in the same manner that BBM issued several of their flagship sets in between 1994 and 2001.  I think that there was an initial printing of the set that included the Raiders players but not the Wyverns players and then a second printing that was the other way around.

My main evidence for this is the wrapper from one pack of cards I bought from this set almost 20 years ago.  Notice on the front of the wrapper there are the logos of only eight teams - I'm pretty sure that the Wyverns logo is on the lower row, second from the left (between the LG Twins and Hanwha Eagles):

The back of the pack has some details about what's in the set:

You'll notice that it says that the "basic set" contains 200 cards.  However, if you look at the checklist for the set over at Trading Card DB, you'll see it lists a base set of 225 cards.  There were 24 cards for the Raiders and 25 cards for the Wyverns so removing either team gets you to 200 or 201 cards in the set.

The rest of my evidence for this is more circumstantial.  I have 198 cards of the 225 cards from this set.  Seven of those cards I got out of this pack while the rest I got from either Rob Fitts or Takashi, a Chiba Lotte Marines fan in Japan.  Of those 198 cards, I have exactly ONE SK Wyverns card which came out of the pack.  The lots I got from Rob and Takashi included all 24 of the Raiders cards and ZERO Wyverns cards.  I suspect that the two of them got their cards from the first printing of the set while my pack came from the second printing (i.e. the "Late Series").

There are 14 players who have two cards in the set - one with the Raiders and one with the Wyverns.  Here's the list of them - the first number is their card number with the Raiders and the second is the one with the SK: Pak Joung-Hyun (170/194), Kim Won-Hyong (172/195),  Kim Ki-Deok (173/197), Oh Sang-Min (176/201), Yang Yong-Mo (177/202), Kim Seong-Rae (179/205), Kim Ho (180/206), Choi Tae-Won (181/207), Lee Min-Ho (182/208), Lee Dong-Soo (183/210), Park Jae-Yong (188/212), Cho Won-Woo (189/213), Shim Sung-Bo (190/214) and Yoon Jae-Kuk (191/215).

Now normally when I do a post like this, I'd show a couple of these pairs of cards but as I said - I only have one Wyvern card and it's not one of those 14 players.  So I'll leave you with the one Wyvern card and the Raider card of one of those 14 players - Lee Min-Ho:

#199

#182

UPDATE: I forgot to mention one thing that's a bit of a counter-argument - the way the cards are numbered.  All the player cards (including both the Raiders and Wyverns) are numbered from 1 to 216.  The Raiders players are between #170 and #192 while the Wyverns players are between #193 and #216.  The final nine cards in the checklist are the team checklist cards with the Raiders card being #224 and the Wyverns card being #225.  If there was a first printing that didn't include the Wyverns cards, the cards available in the packs would have been skip numbered, 1 to 192 and 217 to 224 while the second printing cards would have been 1 to 169, 193 to 223 and 225.  This implies that including the Wyvern cards was not an afterthought for Teleca - they planned for it.

AIAIO JWBL Cards

One of the complete sets that Ryan sent was the 2015 AIAIO set for the Japan Women's Baseball League (JWBL).  Cards of the league are kind of scarce - Epoch did sets for it in 2016 and 2018 and BBM apparently did sets back in 2010 and 2011 when it was still the Girl's Professional Baseball League (GPBL).  An outfit called AIAIO has also done cards for them over the years although I think Ryan's only seen them for 2013, 2015 and 2016 (although their website shows cards from 2019).  I was kind of disappointed that I didn't see any of their cards for sale at the game I went to in 2019.

The set Ryan sent me contains 68 cards - 63 player cards, mascot cards for each of the four teams in the league and the "Special Card" above.  Unlike the two Epoch sets, there are no cards for the managers or coaches for the teams.  I still don't know the league well enough to know who the best players are but the set does contain most of the players that I've heard of - Ayami Satoh, Yuki Kawabata, Minami Takatsuka, Iori Miura, Meguna Furuya, Rina Taniyama and Mari Yamasaki.  The photos on the cards are a nice mix of action shots and posed photos.  Here's a bunch of examples:

One kind of cool thing as I was going through the cards - I discovered that the card of Yukina Izumi was autographed!  Ryan figures that whoever originally owned the set got the card autographed.

Ryan also included two cards from the 2013 AIAIO set:

Iconography

BBM has issued a box set called "Icons" every March since 2013.  Each year's edition has a different theme - in 2013 it was "Hope" (young players), 2014 was "Big Guns" (power hitters), 2015 was "Aces" (pitchers, obviously), 2016 was "Speed" (fast pitchers and base runners), 2017 was "Japan Pride" (players who had suited up for some version of the national team), 2018 was "Fanfare" (players who were drafted with much acclaim), 2019 was "Teenage Memories" (players who debuted as teenagers) and 2020 was "Fireballers" (fastball pitchers).  (The 2021 set's theme is "Progress" and supposedly features players who "made progress" in 2020.)  

The "Icons" sets grew out of some box sets BBM did in 2011 and 2012 called "Platinum Age" and "Diamond Age" that featured players born in 1988 and 1989 respectively.  I've always felt the 2011 set was an excuse to put out yet another card of Yuki Saitoh during his rookie year.  To some extent that continues to be the purpose of the Icons sets - get cards of rookies onto the market in the period of time between the publication of Rookie Edition (usually February) and 1st Version (April).  These sets are the first ones to show the rookies in action - as opposed to their staged photos from the team's draft class introductory press conferences used for Rookie Edition.  Not all the players in the sets are rookies, however.  I also feel that BBM makes an effort to get cards of players who've changed teams over the winter into these sets as well.

You may have noticed that the above list of Icons sets didn't have links for three of them.  That's because I didn't have those sets until Ryan picked them up for me during the past year.  I'll spend the rest of this post writing about those last three sets.  Also note that I'm only talking about the base sets here - each set was packaged up with a "special" insert card that could be some sort of parallel or autographed card.

As I mentioned, the 2013 set was entitled "Hope" and featured young players.  The set has 27 cards - 24 cards for individual players (2 per team) and three combination cards.  The player cards include five 2012 draft picks - Shohei Ohtani, Tomoyuki Sugano, Shintaro Fujinami, Nao Higashihama and Koji Fukutani.  Other players in the set include Tetsuto Yamada, Yusei Kikuchi, Shuhei Takahashi, Yusuke Nomura, Naruki Nishikawa and Naoya Masuda.  The three combination cards are entitled "Koshien Winners" (Shota Dohbayashi and Fujinami), "Michinoku Express" (Kikuchi and Ohtani) and "Age Of Okinawa" (Ryosuke Miyaguni and Higashihama).

2013 BBM Icons-Hope #10

2013 BBM Icons-Hope #01

2013 BBM Icons-Hope #05

2013 BBM Icons-Hope #26

The 2014 "Icons - Big Guns" set was also 27 cards and again featured 24 player cards and three "other" cards (two multiplayer cards plus a card for Wladimir Balentien setting the single season home run record in 2013).  The 2015 "Icons - Aces" set grew to 36 cards - all player cards (three per team) - which is the size the set has been ever since.

The 2016 "Icons - Speed" set included both pitchers who throw fast and position players who run the bases fast.  It included five players who were rookies in 2016 - Louis Okoye, Shinnosuke Ogasawara, Taiga Hirasawa,  Junpei Takahashi and Shun Takayama.  Other players in the set include Ohtani, Yamada, Fujinami, Kikuchi, Yuki Yangita, Shogo Akiyama, Shun Yamaguchi, Hirokazu Sawamura, Dennis Sarfate, Yoshio Itoi, Yuki Matsui, Takahiro Norimoto and Takahiro Suzuki.  Most of the position players are depicted as baserunners which is a nice deviation from BBM's constant "batters batting" poses.

2016 BBM Icons - Speed #31

2016 BBM Icons - Speed #09

2016 BBM Icons - Speed #22

2016 BBM Icons - Speed #03

The 2020 set - "Fireballers" - has nothing to do with this but instead (like the 2016 set) features players who throw fast.  It includes six members of the 2019 draft class - Roki Sasaki, Masato Morishita, Junya Nishi, Miroya Miyagi, Tetsu Miyagawa and Yasunobu Okugawa.  It also include Daisuke Matsuzaka, who appears to be the sole example of a veteran player who appears with his new team in one of these three sets (he rejoined the Lions prior to the 2020 season).  Other players in the set include Fujinami (who has appeared in seven of the eight Icons sets), Sugano, Sawamura, Matsui, Norimoto, Yudai Ohno, Kodai Senga, Kyuji Fujinami, Kohei Arihara and Yasuaki Yamasaki.

2020 BBM Icons - Fireballers #02

2020 BBM Icons - Fireballers #29

2020 BBM Icons - Fireballers #11

2020 BBM Icons - Fireballers #18

If you'd like to see all the cards in these three sets, they're all on-line at Jambalaya - 2013, 2016 and 2020.