I had yet another surgery recently (hip replacement this time) and I picked up an unopened box of BBM's Tigers team set from 2001 about a month or so earlier to give me something fun to open while I recovered.  I thought I'd do a quick post with a box break and a description of the set.

The 2001 BBM Tigers set had a base set of 99 cards that were broken down into several subsets.  There were 68 "regular" player cards (which included cards for manager Katsuya Nomura and coach Akinobu Okada), four "Best Result" cards (which appear to be team leaders from 2000 but with an odd selection of categories - wins, ERA, saves and triples), eight "Memorial" cards featuring milestones from the 2001 season (Nomura's 1200th managerial win, Takashi Yoshida's 1000th game, Keiichi Yabu, Shoji Tohyama and Tomochika Tsuboi making the All Star team), 1 card for the Tigers' 2001 rookie class (i.e. players taken in the 2000 draft), nine OB Tiger player cards (including Minoru Murayama, Koichi Tabuchi, Fumio Fujimura and Tadashi Wakabayashi), seven "New Wave" cards featuring young Tiger players and two checklist cards.  18 of the "regular" player cards have a purple facsimile autograph parallel.  Nine player cards have an "R. C." parallel which uses a different sepia tinged photo.  Six player cards have both types of parallel which means there are 12 that only have the facsimile signature parallel and three that only have the "R. C." parallel.  (And I don't know what "R. C." stands for although it wouldn't surprise me if it was "Rare Card".)

There were also two 9 card insert sets.  One of these was the "Specialist" set which highlights a skill of a player (Nobuyuki Hoshino's curveball, Shinobu Fukuhara's fastball, etc) and the other is a nine card set dedicated to Tigers legend Masayuki Kakefu.  There were two premium chase cards available as well - a Kakefu autographed card (numbered to 31) and a Keiichi Yabu Glove card (numbered to 50).

Each box contained 20 packs that contained 8 cards each, so there was a total of 180 cards available in a box.

I'll hit the highlight of the box first - I pulled a Yabu Glove card in the very first pack I opened:



The last guide Engel did that had values for BBM cards lists this as a $500 card.  However that guide was issued when Yabu was actually pitching in the US so that's a very inflated value.  The last Sports Card Magazine with a price guide for BBM cards (SCM #116) lists the card at 3000 yen and trending downward.

Here's how all 160 cards I got in the box panned out:

139 base - 88 unique, 51 doubles
3 Kakefu Special inserts
3 Specialist inserts
5 "R. C." parallels
9 Purple facsimile autograph parallels
1 Yabu Glove card

#T72

#T73

#T81

#T88

#T93

#T98 & #T99

#SP4

#KS5

For the third year in a row I've used the Amazon gift cards I got for my birthday to pick an unopened box of Bandai's Owners League cards.  This year I picked up a box of the "02" set from 2013 - my hope was to get a Shohei Ohtani card since this was the only Owners League set that had a card of him in his rookie year.

Bandai issued four Owners League sets a year from 2010 to 2015.  They were labelled "01", "02", "03" and "04".  They were some sort of collectible card game - there's a unique code on the back of each card to be used on-line somehow.   I had picked up boxes of the "04" editions from 2011 and 2013 previously - this was my first box of the "02" edition.

The set has 156 total cards available but the base set is actually only 144 cards.  The additional 12 cards are "Legend" cards which features an OB player from each team.  The base set is split into six separate card types - four of which I believe are short printed.  The four short printed types are "Super Star" (12 total - 1 per team), "Infinity" (12 total - I believe all of these are the 1st round picks from the 2012 draft), "Great" (12 total - 1 per team) and "Star" (24 total - 2 per team).  The remaining cards are split between 36 "Black" (3 per team) and 48 "White" cards (4 per team).  This is very similar to how the other sets I've opened boxes for are organized.


The box contained 20 packs which contained three cards each so there was a total of 60 cards in the box.  As with the other two boxes I opened, the box contained no duplicate cards.  Here's a breakdown by card type of what I got:

Legend - 1
Super Star - 1
Infinity - 2
Great - 2
Star - 5
Black - 21
White - 28

I was disappointed that I did not get the Ohtani card from the Infinity cards but I did get a Tomoyuki Sugano card from the same subset so that's almost as good.  Here's an example card from each subset:

#L001 (Legend)

#133 (Super Star)

#002 (Infinity)

#051 (Great)

#017 (Star)

#091 (Black)

#131 (White)

 One of the attractions for the "04" sets for me has been that since they're issued late in the year they are able to feature players who signed too late to be included in BBM's flagship sets (1st & 2nd Version).  I was surprised to discover that a large percentage of the players in this set were also not in BBM's flagship sets from 2013 - 29 of the 59 non-Legend players in the set did not appear in either the 1st or 2nd Version sets that year.  Probably the most interesting player who's in this set and not BBM's is Wil Ledezma, who appeared in 26 games for the Chiba Lotte Marines that year.  His only other Japanese card that I know about is from BBM's Marines team set from that year.

Jay Shelton recently bought a box of 2018 BBM 1st Version cards and sent me some stats and photos from his box break.

The box contained 20 packs and each pack contained 10 cards so (obviously) each box contained 200 cards.  Jay's cards broke down as follows:

1 Japanism insert card
2 Gemstone insert cards
19 Cross Universe regular cards (17 unique)
1 Cross Universe "Gold Foil" parallel card (084/100)
6 team cards
1 Green Signature Parallel card (Takeya Nakamura 09/10)
4 Silver Parallel cards
1 Gold (or "Foilboard") Parallel Rookie card (Etio Tanaka 138/200)
1 "Secret" parallel card (Hideto Asamura)
164 regular cards (150 unique)

Jay mentioned that the Nakamura Green Signature parallel had a matte finish on it rather than the normal glossy finish that the other cards have.  He also mentioned that each pack had a Cross Universe card in it - either a regular one or a parallel.

Here's the photos Jay sent me:






Thanks for sharing Jay!

Like I did about a year ago, I recently picked up an unopened box of one of Bandai's Owners League sets from Amazon.com (the US one, not Amazon.co.jp).  Jay Shelton had tipped me off a while back that the boxes could be picked up relatively cheaply so I need to thank him for the heads up.

This time around I bought the "04" set from 2013.  Just to give a little history - Bandai used to issue four sets a year called "01", "02", "03" and "04".  I don't know when during the year the cards were released but the "04" sets came out later than BBM and Calbee's final sets and would frequently feature players who had signed too late to make their flagship sets.  Since I like getting cards of as many different players as I can, the "04" sets are very appealing to me.  And as we'll see in a minute, the 2013

The 2013 "04" base set contains 144 cards - 12 per team.  I believe that some of these cards are short-printed - there are 12 "Super Star" cards, 12 "Clutch" cards, 12 "Great" cards and 24 "Star" cards.  The remaining 84 cards are split between "Black" (36 cards) and "White" (48 cards).  In addition there are at least two insert sets that are not reflected in any checklists that are included with the box - 12 "Legend" cards and 12 "New Star" cards.

Pack

The box had 20 packs containing 3 cards each.  Like the box I opened last year I got 60 unique cards.  Here's the breakdown of insert, short print and regular cards:

Legend - 1
Super Star - 1
Clutch - 1
Great - 2
Star - 5
Black - 22
White - 28

Here's examples of each type of card:

#L001 (Keishi Suzuki)

#109

#038

#063

#100

#007

#021

You might notice that the cards for Ginji and Yoshitomo Tani sport "bonus" team logos that reflect the Eagles winning the 2013 Nippon Series and the Giants winning the 2013 Central League pennant.  Since the 2013 Nippon Series didn't end until early November, this set probably didn't come out until December of that year.

The set contains a number of players who didn't make it into any of BBM or Calbee's main sets in 2013.  What I was most interested in was that I picked up cards of a couple foreign players who only pitched in NPB during the second half of 2013 and did not have any other Japanese cards that I'm aware of.  They are Justin Thomas of the Fighters and Tim Corcoran of the Baystars:

#084

#071

One thing you might of noticed - I mentioned that I thought there were two insert set - Legend and New Star.  I got a Legend card in the box but I didn't get a New Star card.  Since Bandai didn't list either set with the checklists in the box, how did I know there was a New Star set?  Not a huge mystery - I had picked up a handful of cards from this set before getting the box and one of them was this New Star card:

#NC005

I received my box of the latest KBO set last weekend.  This is the third edition of the "Baseball's Best Players" set overall and the second to be published this year.  Dan Skrezyna has made the suggestion that we start calling these sets by their fully translated names so the first set (from late 2015) should be called "Hell's Fireball" and the second set (from early 2016) is called "Diamond Winners".  This set is titled "Forever Ace".

Like the two previous sets, this set has 100 cards in its base set - 10 per team.  The cards for each team are numbered separately - the Doosan Bears cards are numbered DO001 to DO010 while the Samsung Lions cards are numbered SA001 to SA010 and so on.  There are parallel versions of 30 of the cards.  All 10 cards that are number 003 have a "kira" parallel, all 10 cards that are number 002 have a "gold kira" parallel while all 10 cards that are number 001 have a "gold signature" parallel and a "clear" parallel.  This makes a total of 40 parallel cards.  And to be "clear" (so to speak), the "clear" parallels in this set are not actually the transparent plastic cards that they were in "Hells Fireball".

As in the two previous sets, the cards are intended for use in some collectible card game.  The backs of the cards are all identical to those of the previous two sets.

The box I bought had 20 packs in it.  Each pack had 8 cards - 7 base set cards and 1 parallel card.  As has been the case with the previous boxes, my box was actually short a little - I should have had 140 base cards but instead I only had 139.  I was keeping track when I opened the packs and I noticed that the pack that was short a card was also the pack that had the "clear" parallel card in it.  That might not be a coincidence since the "clear' parallel is the rarest of the parallels.

I was a little disappointed that I did not get the entire base set in the box.  I ended up short one card.  Here's the breakdown of what I got in the box:

Here's what I got:

139 base set cards (99 unique)
10 "kira" parallels (8 unique)
5 "gold kira" parallels (4 unique)
4 "gold signature" parallels (2 unique)
1 "clear card" parallel (1 unique)

#PA03-HA006 Seong-Hyuk Shin

#PA03-NC008 Seong-Wook Kim

#PA03-LG010 Jae-Wook Park

#PA03-LO003 Jun-Woo Jeon (Kira parallel)

#PA03-LO002 Ah-Seop Son (Gold Kira parallel)

#PA03-SK001 Gwang-Hyun Kim (Gold Signature parallel)

#PA-03-DO001 Geun-Woo Park (Clear parallel)