Officially, professional baseball in Japan dates from the 1934 founding of the Yomiuri Giants (or, to be completely accurate, the Dai Nippon Tokyo Yakyu Kurabu or "Great Japan Tokyo Baseball Club"). This is not exactly the case, as there apparently were some "professional" teams in Kansai in the 1920's but two things have contributed to this being the origin story. The first is that the team lasted and there's no real gap in its history (other than the cancelled 1945 season) and the second is that Yomiuri runs a big media empire and has popularized this version of events. So whether it's accurate or not, NPB has made a big deal about celebrating their 90th Anniversary this year*.
*Even though "NPB" didn't exist until 1950 and its predecessor, the Japanese Baseball League (JBL) didn't start until 1936
BBM got into the act in late October with the release of a "Professional Baseball 90th Anniversary" set. It's a 144 card set containing both active and retired players across the history of NPB. This is not the first time that BBM has issued a set for the anniversary of professional baseball. The first time was in 2004 with
a pretty lousy 48 card box set for the 70th Anniversary. This was followed ten years later with a pair of 99 card sets for the 80th Anniversary - one for
pitchers and one for
batters. While I like the 2014 sets, I think this might be the best and most interesting of all of them.
The base set is broken up into four sections. The largest (108 cards) are the player cards but there's also an 18 card "Famous Scenes" subset, a nine card "Famous Combination" subset and a nine card "Great Ones" subset.
The 108 players featured on the player cards include, as you'd probably expect, ones from across the entire 90 years. My usual gripe with a set like this is that there's an emphasis on including players who are still capable of signing an autograph over deceased but important players. This set does suffer from that issue but I was a little surprised at the number of dead guys in the set (to put it bluntly). There's only a handful of players who were active in the JBL in the set - Eiji Sawamura, Fumio Fujimura, Tetsuharu Kawakami and Shigeru Sugishita - but there's a number of players from the 50's and 60's with, of course, most of the players being from the 70's and later. Naturally the set has the big names you'd expect to see - Shigeo Nagashima, Sadaharu Oh, Katsuya Nomura, Masaichi Kaneda, Yutaka Fukumoto and Isao Harimoto - along with lesser stars like Choji Murata, Koji Yamamoto, Hiromitsu Kadota, Hisashi Yamada, Takuro Ishii, Hideki Matsui, Kazuo Matsui, Koji Akiyama...well, you get the idea. There are a number of active players including Munetaka Murakami, Roki Sasaki, Kazuma Okamoto, Tetsuto Yamada, Hayato Sakamoto and Yuki Yanagita. There's only one player who was active in MLB in 2024 - Yu Darvish - although there's a couple who will make appearances in the inserts sets. The set only has a small handful of foreign players - Randy Bass, Tuffy Rhodes and Alex Ramirez.
My other usual complaint about these kind of sets is who's not in it but, while this set has some big names that were missing, I really was only surprised about one of the names. Hideo Nomo hasn't been in an NPB set in 30 years now and it's been 13 years for Hiromitsu Ochiai. Kazuhiro Kiyohara has been persona non grata in baseball card sets since his drug arrest in 2016 and, for whatever reason, Ichiro and Yutaka Enatsu haven't appeared in a BBM set in years and I think Shohei Ohtani has an exclusive card deal with Topps now (although I don't know if it's world-wide or just North America). The only name I was surprised wasn't in the set was Daisuke Matsuzaka who hasn't been in a BBM set since retiring in 2021.
The cards themselves are pretty nice. The design's ok but BBM seems to have dipped deep into their archives and found photos that haven't been used a billion times before (except for Eiji Sawamura, since
he appears to only have a limited number of available photos). It looks like BBM colorized the oldest photos in the set as there are no black and white photos being used. There seem to be a lot more posed shots than action ones, at least for the older players. Some of the more recent players have studio shots that are probably from their team's photo day sessions. Here's some random examples:
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| #004 |
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| #021 |
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| #041 |
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| #055 |
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| #062 |
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| #078 |
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| #084 |
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| #105 |
The "Famous Scenes" subset is kind of self explanatory - it highlights eighteen different "famous scenes" in professional baseball history. Specifically the events are
the Emperor's Game (
which they knew the correct date for); the "Trade of the Century" when the Tigers sent Masaaki Koyama to the Orions for Kazuhiro Yamauchi; Masaichi Kaneda's 400th victory; the Giants winning nine straight Nippon Series;
Shigeo Nagashima's retirement; the Carp winning their first pennant; Sadaharu Oh passing Henry Aaron in home runs; Isao Harimoto's 3000th hit; Yutaka Fukumoto's 1000th stolen base; the Tigers winning their first Nippon Series in 1985; Sachio Kinugasa breaking Lou Gehrig's consecutive games played streak; Ralph Bryant hitting four consecutive home runs; the Giants winning the 1994 pennant (which led to Shigeo Nagashima winning his first Nippon Series as manager); the ON Series in 2000 between Nagashima's Giants and Oh's Hawks; Hirotoshi Kitagawa's pennant clinching pinch hit grand slam for Kintetsu; Masahiro Tanaka's 24-0 record in 2013; Roki Sasaki's perfect game in 2022 and Munetaka Murakami becoming the youngest triple crown winner later that season (although it's REALLY celebrating his 56 home runs, the most in a season by a Japanese-born player). I don't have any major quibbles with most of these events although I might have included the Dragons having a combined perfect game to clinch the deciding game in their first Nippon Series championship in 53 years and Wladimir Balentien's 60 home run season. Here's the cards for Fukumoto and Sasaki:
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| #117 |
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| #125 |
As you'd expect, the "Famous Combination" cards are show group photos. Most of the cards are simply labeled by the names of the players on the cards but a couple have alternate titles. The cards show Masaaki Koyama and Minoru Murayama of the Tigers; the "ON Cannon" (Oh and Nagashima); Isao Harimoto and Katsui Ohsugi of the Flyers; Michiyo Aritoh and Hiroyuki Yamazaki of the Orions; Koji Yamamoto and Sachio Kinugasa of the Carp; the Whales "Supercar Trio" of Yutaka Takagi, Hirokazu Katoh and Kaname Yashiki; Masayuki Kakefu and Akinobu Okada of the Tigers; the Lee Brothers (Leron and Leon) of the Orions and "JFK" of the Tigers - Jeffrey Williams, Kyuji Fujikawa and Tomoyuki Kubota. Here are the ON and JFK cards:
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| #128 |
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| #135 |
The last subset, "Great Ones", is dedicated to great managers in NPB history. The nine ones featured are Kazuto Tsuruoka, Osamu Mihara, Shigeru Mizuhara, Yukio Nishimoto, Tetsuharu Kawakami, Katsuya Nomura, Takeshi Koba, Senichi Hoshino and Akira Ohgi. It's another subset that I don't have a major quibble with although I might have added Toshiharu Ueda. It is another example of BBM reaching a little further into the past than normal as Tsuruoka and Mihara started managing in the 1940's and Mizuhara started in 1950 (after finally getting released from a Soviet POW camp four years after the war ended). Here's Ohgi's card:
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| #144 |
I like this set a lot, even if I have minor quibbles about some parts of it. I would have been pretty happy just getting the base set. But the set had several insert sets that really kicked up how much fun the set was so I ended up getting those as well. The big thing is that there's three separate "Best 9" insert sets - one each for the Showa, Heisei and Reiwa eras.
The Showa Era Best 9 is Kaneda, Nomura, Oh, Morimichi Takagi, Yoshio Yoshida, Nasgashima, Harimoto, Koji Yamamoto and Fukumoto. Yoshida does not have a player card in the base set although he's on the card celebrating the Tigers' 1985 championship (since he managed that team). Here's Takagi's card:
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| #SB4 |
Please note that all the inserts are very shiny and don't scan well.
The Heisei Era Best 9 is Masahiro Yamamoto, Atsuya Furuta, Michihiro Ogasawara, Kazuyoshi Tatsunami, Kazuo Matsui, Norihiro Nakamura, Hideki Matsui, Atsunori Inaba and Tomoaki Kanemoto. Here's Furuta's card:
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| #HB2 |
The Reiwa Era Best 9 is Kodai Senga, Takuya Kai, Kazuma Okamoto, Tetsuto Yamada, Munetaka Murakami, Hayato Sakamoto, Yoshihiro Maru, Yuki Yanagita and Seiya Suzuki. Senga, Kai and Suzuki do not appear in the base set. Here's Suzuki's card:
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| #RB9 |
I saved the most fun insert set for last - the 12 card "Nickname Catchphrase" set. This set highlights player nicknames or catchphrases associated with a player. For example, Kazuhisa Inao's performance in the 1958 Nippon Series in which he won the last four games for the Lions after they had lost the first three games to the Giants caused the phrase "Kamisama, Hotekesama, Inaosama" (God, Buddha, Inao) to be associated with him. Inao's card in this set has the phrase in kanji on it:
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| #NC02 |
The Lions' husky infielder Takeya Nakamura's nickname is "Okawari-kun" which translates to "one more helping". He's in the insert set as well with the nickname on the card in Japanese:
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| #NC11 |
I will grant that these would probably be more fun for overseas fans if the nicknames and catchphrases were in English. But that would ruin a fun detail of Hideki Matsui's card. Matsui's nickname, of course, is Godzilla:
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| #NC10 |
The text on his card mirrors the text used in the original movie credits and posters:
The big guy also appears on the back of Matsui's card:
So again, I really like this set. I think it's fun and gives a good overview of the history of NPB (and JBL). As always, you can checkout the cards in the set over at
Jambalaya.
