Card Of The Week February 9

Former Saitama Seibu Lion Ryan Spilborghs announced last week that he was retiring from baseball to become a broadcaster for the Colorado Rockies.  Spilborghs played seven years in the majors from 2005 to 2011 and signed with the Lions after a 2012 season that he spent in AAA in the Indians and Rangers organization.  He played just the one season for the Lions.

2013 BBM 1st Version #210

The open-sen game I went to last March at Seibu Dome was the Lions' first home game of the exhibition season.  They did an on-field introduction of all the new Lions players before the game started.  I'm not positive, but I think Spilborghs is the third from the left.

RIP Toru Mori

Toru Mori passed away from liver cancer last week at age 78.  Mori debuted with the Dragons in 1958 after attending Waseda.  He hit 75 home runs in his first three seasons but after his homers dropped to 13 in 1961, he was shipped off to the Taiyo Whales (possibly in a trade for Takeshi Honda).  He hit over 20 home runs in each of his first two seasons with the Whales but after two more sub-20 home run seasons, he moved on to the Tokyo Orions where he fnished his career in 1968.  As an odd footnote to his career, Mori was the manager of the Tokyo entry (the Tokyo Dragons) in something called the Global League, an attempt in 1969 to create an international major league with teams in Japan, the Philippines, Venezuela, Mexico and the US.  As you might of guessed by the fact that you've never heard of it, it failed.  (I'm pretty sure though that the uniform of the Tokyo team appears in "The History Of Uniform".)

Here's some cards of Mori.  He had some menko cards with the Whales but as far as I can tell, the only OB cards produced of him show him with the Dragons.

1958 Doyusha JCM 30b

2011 BBM Legend Of Tokyo Big Six #005

2006 BBM Nostalgic Baseball #098

2006 BBM Dragons 70th Anniversary #28

Yet More New Stuff

BBM released information about a couple new sets last week:

- Orix is going to be celebrating their 25th season since they bought the Hankyu Braves in the 1988-89 offseason and BBM is going to help them do it by releasing an Orix 25th Anniversary set in late February.  This will be a pack based set (as opposed to the box set BBM did for Orix's 20th Anniversary) with a base set of 72 cards, a nine card OB Best 9 insert set and possible autograph cards.  The base set will include 61 cards of OB Orix players, 11 cards for team managers and 9 cards for the current (2013?) team.  Since there are 10 former Orix managers plus the current one, it looks like everyone of them will have a card - Toshiharu Ueda, Shozo Doi, Akira Ohgi, Hiromichi Ishige, Leon Lee, Haruki Ihara, Katsuhiro Nakamura, Terry Collins, Daijiro Ohishi, Akinobu Okada and Hiroshi Moriwaki.  No idea if Ichiro Suzuki will be included or not (he was included in the 20th Anniversary set).

- BBM is also issuing some sort of box set entitled the "People's Honor Award" set.  The set will contain 19 cards - 18 base cards plus 1 special card which will I think be featuring the players who have won the eponymous award.  The web page lists Sadaharu Oh, Sachio Kinugasa, Shigeo Nagashima and Hideki Matsui.  I don't know if the set will only contain them or if there are other players who have been given the award over the years.  The set will be out in early March.

2014 Japanese Winter Olympians

With the WInter Olympics kicking off this week, I thought I'd check to see if any members of the Japanese team have appeared on First Pitch Ceremony cards in BBM's 2nd Version sets in the last few years.  I found two, both from the 2010 set - speed skater Keiichiro Nagashima and figure skater Daisuke Takahashi:

2010 BBM 2nd Version #803

2010 BBM 2nd Version #809

2013 Baystars Fan Club Set

Ryan had a post today on the four different card sets put out by the Baystars fan club last season.  Reading the post, I realized that I'd seen the first set before - there was a display showing them at Yokohama Stadium at the open-sen game I went to last March:

I obviously didn't look at this too closely last year because I had just assumed that the cards were from 2012.  Looking at it now, I see that Tony Blanco's included which should have told me that the cards were new.

More New Stuff

As we move into the second month of 2014 there are a couple new sets that have gotten announced:

- for the first time ever, BBM is putting out a box set dedicated to a player who is currently playing in the US - Hiroyuki Nakajima.  It's a 19 card set including 18 base cards and one "special" card - looks like autographed and a t-shirt memorabilia cards are possible.  I think the name of the set is something like "Next BBM Baseball Card Portraits Hiroyuki Nakajima" although it's possible that those words should be rearranged somewhat.  I'll be curious what the images on the cards look like - in the sample images there is one picture of him in a Lions uniform and all the rest show him in street clothes.  The set will be released in early March.

- Apparently BBM's Classic set last year was successful enough that they are re-using the theme with a small box set called "Rookie Edition Classic".  This will be a 25 card box set featuring 24 base cards and one special card - possible autograph and die-cut cards.  The 24 base cards are split between 12 cards of active players and 12 cards of OB players (I'd assume one per team for both groups).  All the base cards use the design of the 2003 Rookie Edition set (which was the inaugural one of those sets).  Despite the name, it does not look like the active players are current rookies - the two sample cards are Kazuo Matsui and Shinnosuke Abe - although it looks like the picture is from the player's rookie year.  The set comes out in late February.

- Frontier International is back this year with three new "Rookie And Young Star" sets (so far).  Like last year, the Lions and Buffaloes are featured in sets along with the Carp (instead of the Baystars) - although there's no reason to believe there won't be more sets released as the year goes on.  Each box set contains one autograph card along with either 24 (Lions and Carp) or 25 (Buffaloes) base cards.  The autograph cards could be either active or OB players from the team.  The base cards will contain active players only although they won't necessarily be rookies or young stars.  The Buffaloes and Carp sets are listed as coming out in March while the Lions set (despite being originally listed first) is apparently not getting released until the beginning of May.

BBM Pack Busting

I don't buy a lot of unopened material as I like to collect complete sets and it's been frustrating in the past to attempt to build BBM sets via packs and boxes.  I also don't usually buy BBM's team sets - mostly because I have to draw the line somewhere (I can't get EVERYTHING).  A couple of weeks ago, however, I noticed a guy on Ebay selling some 2013 team set packs at about half of face value (~$2 for a pack with a face value of 420 yen) and decided to pick some up.  With my first order, I picked up two packs each for the Hawks, Marines and Lions.  A couple of days later, he put up some Fighters packs and I bought five of them, trying to maximize my Shohei Ohtani rookie cards.  I got the Fighters cards yesterday and discovered that the seller had thrown in a bonus Marines pack as well.  (He'd also included some 2011 & 2013 1st Version cards in both orders.)  I thought it might be fun and instructive to show off the packs and what I got in them.

First the Hawks:

Unopened Hawks Pack

Contents of pack 1

Contents of pack 2

Each pack has seven cards, including one parallel foil card.  I'm not generally a big fan of the foil cards but I kind of like the Hawks ones because of the Hawks silhouette on it.  The Hawks set had 99 cards in it of which 90 were player/manager/mascot cards (all with the same background).  There were also three combination cards, five "Newcomer" cards and a checklist.  With that breakdown, it's not surprising that I got almost all player cards.

Unopened Lions pack

Contents of pack 1

Contents of pack 2

The Lions set also contained 99 cards but only 72 of them were "regular" cards for players/manager/mascots.  The other 27 cards were made up of several subsets - two checklists, a "Title Holder" card, two three card subsets containing a sequence of pictures of a player ("Lifeline"), three cards labelled "Idol", three cards labelled "Origins", three cards labelled "New Power" and a nine card "Spirit of Lions" subset.  I did a little better with variety with these cards picking up four subsets cards as well as an insert card - "Lead To Victory".

Unopened Marines pack

Contents of pack 1

Contents of pack 2

Contents of pack 3

Like the Lions set, 72 of the 99 cards in the Marines set were for the players, the manager and the mascot.  There was also a nine card puzzle subset featuring Naoya Masuda and Katsuya Kakunaka, a four card "Hopeful Rookies" subset, a two card "Moving Up" subset, a three card "Newcomer" subset, an eight card "Reliable Veteran" subset and one checklist card.  I like the fact that the back of the puzzle card shows you where that particular card goes so you can see what the whole picture looks like even if you don't have all the cards:

My luck with the first two sets' packs did not hold out with the Marines - I ended up with two doubles along with both the parallel version and non-parallel version of one card.  That's kind of frustrating given that I only opened three packs but given what I've experienced before with BBM, not terribly surprising.

Unopened Fighters pack

Contents of pack 1

Contents of pack 2

Contents of pack 3

Contents of pack 4

Contents of pack 5

The Fighters set was a little different.  Once again it was a 99 card set although it was only numbered 1 to 98.  There were two different versions of card #2 - #2a showed Shohei Ohtani pitching and #2b showed Ohtani batting.  71 cards depicted either a player, the manager or a mascot.  The remaining cards included a checklist card, a six card "Best Scenes 2012" subset, a five card "Newcomer" subset, a seven card "Rookie" subset and a nine card Shohei Ohtani puzzle subset.

I was a little disappointed with these packs.  If you look above, you'll see that the contents of pack 1 and pack 3 were identical except for the parallel card.  I also ended up getting triples of Kensuke Kondoh.  On the plus side, I got four different Ohtani cards, an insert card ("Keep Evolving!") of Daikan Yoh and, best of all, no mascot cards.  Still though, having the equivalent of one of the five packs you buy be all doubles is kind of annoying.  (Although two of those doubles are Ohtani so maybe it pays off in a few years...)

In addition to the 2013 team packs, I also recently picked up an unopened pack of 1995 BBM:

Unopened 1995 pack

Half the pack contents

The rest of the pack

Hmm, opening a pack and getting an Ichiro card and a Sadaharu Oh card - not too shabby.  Of course, the downside is that I already had both of those cards and as 1995 is one of the BBM sets that I don't have many cards from, I really would have preferred new cards.  But still, those are nice cards I can sell or trade.