The Rookie Story

I was intrigued by something that Larry Fuhrmann had told me a while back regarding how card companies treated rookies before BBM came along so I decided to do a little research.  Larry had said that the card companies (Calbee in particular) pretty much refused to print cards of rookie players as they felt they needed to "earn their stripes".  One of the things that Larry insisted that BBM do when they started publishing cards was to include rookies.

Larry had pointed out Hideo Nomo as a prime example of Calbee refusing to print cards of rookies.  Nomo was the Pacific League Rookie Of The Year in 1990, going 18-8 with 287 strikeouts but Calbee did not include a card for him in the 1990 set.  Calbee's 1990 set was issued in four series and it looks like the last series is made up entirely of players from the two 1990 Nippon Series teams so it's not like the player selection was set in stone before the season started.  I did a little looking around at some of the "hot rookies" of the 1980's and confirmed that Larry was mostly correct about Calbee - Tatsunori Hara and Masumi Kuwata's and Kazuhiro Kiyohara's first Calbee cards came the year after their debut season.  Hara and Kiyohara had Takara cards in their rookie seasons as did Nomo.  (NOTE - Kiyohara had cards in the Calbee set in 1986, his rookie year)

I got curious then about the early BBM sets.  I've always found it curious that while the 1993 BBM set contains the rookie cards of both Hideki Matsui and Ichiro Suzuki, only Matsui is labelled by BBM as a rookie (i.e. the word "Rookie" appears on the front of the card).  So I started looking into which cards were labelled "Rookie" in the first few BBM sets.

What I found was not particularly surprising once I started thinking about it.  In the 1991 BBM set, there are by my count 30 players that are labelled as "Rookie".  All 30 players were drafted in the fall 1990 draft.  Six teams (Blue Wave, Buffaloes, Carp, Fighters, Swallows and Whales) have their top three draft picks represented in the set.  The Giants, Hawks, Orions and Tigers had just their top two picks included while the Dragons had their first, second and fifth picks included and the Lions had only their second round pick included.

1991 BBM #259

The 1992 BBM set contained 35 rookie cards - the top three picks for each team from the fall 1991 draft with the exception of the Lions who only included their top two picks.  The Lions fell into line for the 1993 set as all twelve teams had their top three picks from the fall 1992 draft included (for a total of 36 rookie cards).

So why is Matsui's 1993 card labelled a rookie card but Ichiro's isn't?  Matsui was taken with the Giants first pick in the 1992 draft but Ichiro was taken in the fourth round of the 1991 draft.  (This actually brings up a whole new category of "lost cards" - guys from the 1990-1992 drafts who did not appear in the 1991-1993 BBM sets.  Right off the top of my head there would be 1991 cards of Tsuyoshi Shimoyanagi, Arihito Muramatsu and Takanori Suzuki and 1992 cards of Ichiro, Norihiro Nakamura, Tomoaki Kanemoto, Shinjiro Hiyama and Daisuke Miura (Ichiro, Nakamura, Kanemoto and Hiyama were all fourth round picks that year - what an incredible round!).  This would be a great addition to the next BBM Classic set.)

For the 1994 set, BBM included cards of all the players taken in the fall 1993 draft and they've pretty much included all the players from the previous fall's draft in every flagship set (at least the 1st Version ones) since then.  One implication of this is that BBM now rarely has a rookie card for a player that is not labelled as such.

Card Of The Week February 15

NPB Reddit posted a link the other day to a mostly complete broadcast of the Tigers/Giants game at Koshien on April 17, 1985.  This particular game is memorable for what happened in the bottom of the seventh after the Giants were up 3-1 and the Tigers got two on with two out.  If you want to watch what happened next, fast forward to about the 1:20:00 point in the video.





Randy Bass hit a three run home run to put the Tigers up 4-3 and both Masayuki Kakefu and Akinobu Okada followed him with solo home runs to get the lead up to 6-3.  The Tigers would need all those runs to hold off the Giants who scored another 2 runs in the top of the ninth to bring the final score to 6-5.  This game is viewed as a sign that 1985 was going to be a magical season for Hanshin and it was as they won their first (and so far only) Nippon Series that year.

Here are cards of the back-to-back-to-back home run hitters:

1984 Takara Kids Tigers (Bass)

1980 Calbee Small #53 (Kakefu)

1980 Yamakatsu JY12 (Okada)

BBM Preview

I saw a post at the Shlabotnik Report the other day speculating that the player cards in the Topps Opening Day set this year might feature different pictures than the player cards in the regular Topps set.  This got me thinking about BBM's similar set from around the turn of the century - the Preview set.

I'm not sure it's a coincidence, but BBM introduced the Preview set in 1999, a year after Topps had started doing the Opening Day set.  Like Opening Day, the BBM Preview set was a smaller set that (at least the first few years) used a similar design to that of the flagship set.  Unlike Opening Day, however, Preview was released two months before BBM's flagship set.  I believe Topps has always released Opening Day after Series One was released but I may be wrong.

As I mentioned, BBM released the first Preview set in 1999.  It featured 122 cards - 120 player cards plus two checklist cards.  The 120 player cards were split evenly among the 12 teams.  I don't have any cards from this set so I'm not entirely certain but I believe that the cards looked identical to the regular 1999 cards except that "Preview" appeared on the front of the card.  The backs were identical except for the card number.  There was a facsimile autograph (in pink!) parallel available for half the player cards.  There were also four insert cards that served as preview cards for the Leader subset of the regular set - they featured the 1998 MVP and Rookie of the Year winners.

The 2000 Preview set was very similar to the 1999 variety.  Again there were 120 player cards that were nearly identical to the cards in the flagship set along with two checklist cards.  Here's a comparison of the fronts and backs of the Preview and flagship cards of Jong Boom Lee:

2000 BBM Preview #P68 (left) and "flagship" #404 (right)

Backs of 2000 BBM Preview #P68 (left) and "flagship" #404 (right)

As you can see, the fronts are identical except for the "Preview" text and the vertical line.  The backs appear to differ only in the card number and the portrait.

The big new thing for the 2000 was the addition of 12 more cards depicting the first round pick from the fall, 1999 draft for each of the teams.  This would bring the total for the set to 134 cards.

2000 BBM Preview #P127

Once again the Preview set featured a facsimile signature silver parallel but this time all 120 non-draft pick player cards had a parallel.  In addition, there was a super rare gold facsimile signature set for all 11 (including the draft pick) players from the Tigers.  It's not clear to me that these were available in packs - they may have been some special promotion for BBM with the Tigers.

2000 BBM Preview #P38 Facsimile Signature Parallel

There was also a six card insert set that again was a preview for the Leaders subset from the flagship set.  This time the cards featured the 1999 batting leaders, victory leaders and Rookie of the Year awatd winners.  The big difference between these cards and the "flagship" version is that these cards have the leader category in gold foil.

Big changes were in store for the 2001 set.  The set shrunk down to 124 cards, broken down into 120 player cards (10 per team - nine "veterans" plus the top pick in the fall 2000 draft for each team) plus four checklist cards.  While the design of the front of the card was similar to the flagship set, the photo of the player was different.  The backs were completely different:

2001 BBM Preview #P68 (left) and "flagship" #164 (right)

Backs of 2001 BBM Preview #P68 (left) and "flagship" #164 (right)

2001 BBM Preview #P30

Additionally, the leaders on each team in batting average, home runs, RBIs, victories, ERA and strikeouts had a notation on the front of their card indicating this.  (With certain adjustments - the batting leader for Orix in 2000 had left for the US for the 2001 season so the acknowledged team leader in the set was Yoshitomo Tani who's .284 average was over 100 points lower.)

2000 BBM Preview #P81

The four checklist cards formed a puzzle featuring the Giants celebrating the 2000 Nippon Series championship:

2001 BBM Preview #P121-P124

There were no signature parallel cards for the 2001 BBM Preview set but there were two insert sets.  One was a four card Leader preview set featuring the 2000 MVP and Rookie Of The Year award winners with silver foil text.  The other was the nine card Century Best 9 set featuring the winners of the 20th Century Best 9 balloting.

BBM shifted from a single flagship set in 2001 to having two separate flagship sets (1st and 2nd Version) in 2002 and the final Preview set shifted to reflect this.  The front design of the Preview set contained elements of both the 2002 1st and 2nd Version sets but was a completely separate design:

2002 BBM Preview #P85 (left) and 1st Version #258 (right)

2002 BBM Preview #P61 (left) and 2nd Version #628 (right)

Note that the Preview and 1st Version cards share the baseball diamond in the upper right of the card while the Preview and 2nd Version cards share a batters box outline (although from different perspectives) towards the bottom of the card.

The 2002 Preview set contained 123 cards - 120 player cards (10 per team) plus three checklist cards.  The ten cards per team included each team's top draft pick from the fall 2001 draft - these cards may have been short-printed.  (These cards were titled "The Brightest Hope" as opposed to "Draft #1 Pick" because several of the players featured were not taken in the draft but rather in something that I don't understand that's getting translated as "freedom acquisition frame".  Anyone know what this is?)

2002 BBM Preview #P40

Once again there were no parallel cards but there were two insert sets.  The first was the usual four card Leader preview set featuring the 2001 MVPs and Rookies of the Year with silver foil on the front.  Here's how the Masanobu Ohkubo card from this insert set compares to the corresponding 1st Version leader card:

2002 BBM Preview #L4 (left) and 1st Version #402 (right)

Backs of 2002 BBM Preview #L4 (left) and 1st Version #402 (right)

The second insert set (that could actually be considered two separate insert sets) took its cue from the "team leader" annotations from the 2001 Preview set.  This included the batting average and ERA leaders from each team, for a total of 24 cards.  (The batting average leaders were numbered separately from the ERA leaders which is why they could be considered separate insert sets).

2002 BBM Preview #A2

2002 BBM Preview #E1

The 2002 set would be BBM's final Preview set.  In 2003, BBM replaced this set with the Rookie Edition set which would expand Preview's draft pick subset to include all the players taken in the annual draft.

Not that this will be a surprise, but I used Gary Engel's "Japanese Baseball Card Checklist and Price Guide" (7th Edition) extensively in researching this post.

Kosuke Tomita Of The Texas Rangers

I missed this when it happened a month ago, but the Texas Rangers signed former Yokohama DeNA Baystars farmhand Kosuke Tomita to a minor league contract.  Tomita appears to be the only Japanese player coming to North America this offseason.

Tomita was drafted by the Baystars from the Kagawa Olive Guyners of the Shikoku Island League Plus (the plus is for the teams in Kyushu) in the 1st round of the ikusei draft in the fall of 2011.  He was placed on the 70-man roster ("registered") in mid 2013 and made his only ichi-gun appearance that season, going two thirds of an inning facing four batters, giving up one hit, one walk and two earned runs.  He spent all of 2014 at the ni-gun level and was released by DeNA at the end of the season.

The Rangers were apparently interested in him based on his performance with Ponce in the Puerto Rican Winter League in December of 2012.  He faced 33 batters in nine innings over the course of five games and only gave up three hits and two walks while striking out nine and not allowing any runs.

As you might expect from his career description, he doesn't have a lot of cards.  He's in the 2012 BBM Rookie Edition set (#096) and the 2012-14 BBM Baystars sets.  He's never made one of BBM's flagship sets.  He might have made it to one of the Baystars fan club sets but I've never seen a checklist for any of them.  Here are the only two cards I have of him (one of which I received today from some 2013 Baystars packs I won off Ebay):

2012 BBM Rookie Edition #096

2013 BBM Baystars #DB38

Norihiro Nakamura

Unable to attract any teams this offseason, Norihiro Nakamura formally announced his retirement this past week.  I did a post on him a few years back when he reached 2000 hits that kinda-sorta was a biography so I'm just going to show a bunch of cards of him today:

1997 BBM Diamond Heroes #291

2000 Epoch Stickers #6SP

2000 Upper Deck Japanese Olympic Team #218

2001 Upper Deck Pacific League Best 9 #P5

2002 Calbee Sayanora Home Run #SH-5

2006 BBM Buffaloes #Bs83

2007 BBM Dragons #D077

2010 BBM 20th Anniversary #214

2012 BBM Strongest Generation #073

2014 BBM 1st Version #371

I'm not sure what surprised me more about this group of cards - that I was able to show him with every team he played for without using a regular BBM flagship card or that I was able to find ten cards of him that don't show his bat flip.

Card Of The Week February 8

News came out yesterday that 56 year old Julio Franco has been named player-manager for the Ishikawa Million Stars of the independent Baseball Challenge (BC) League.  Franco played for the Chiba Lotte Marines for two non-consecutive years in the 1990's (1995 and 1998) and also spent a season in Korea with the Samsung Lions (2000).

1995 BBM Late Series #628

Card Of The Week February 1

I realized after I had done my post on newly elected Hall Of Famer Atsuya Furuta last week that I had neglected to include any cards for the "single player" set dedicated to Furuta that BBM had published in late 2007 after he retired (and I wrote about a l-o-n-g time ago).  I thought I would correct that here.  Here are cards showing Furuta when he was drafted in 1989, playing first base (in a game in 1997 according to Baseball Reference) and working out in Yuma, Arizona (I'm guessing the Swallows did spring training in Yuma one year but I have no idea of when):

2007 BBM Furuta Memorial #1

2007 BBM Furuta Memorial #12

2007 BBM Furuta Memorial #17