I Bought A Takara Set?

This post is going to feature a couple of things that I rarely do.  The first is that I rarely post about something I've picked up on Ebay on the day I receive it.  The second is that the item in question is a Takara set, something I rarely buy anymore.

If you're not familiar with them (and even if you are), a Takara set is a collectible card game set featuring 30 cards for one particular team.  Takara issued these sets between 1978 to 1998.  They only did the six Central League teams their first three years but expanded to do all 12 NPB teams starting in 1981.

I had a long-ish discussion about Takara sets about six months ago with Dan over Facebook Messenger in which I expressed that I was pretty much burned out on Takara sets.  I felt that the ones from 1991 and later are somewhat redundant since BBM's sets feature most of the same players and while the earlier ones feature players who may not have appeared on other cards in the year of issue, the photos are all "mug shots" so they're kind of boring.  I've picked up a handful of single cards in recent years, mostly from the late 1970's and early to mid 1980's, but I can't remember the last time I bought a complete 30 card team set.  But I saw this available as a $39 "Buy-It-Now" on Ebay last week and decided to get it:

The year and the team may tell you why I was interested in picking this set up, even though I don't think I've EVER spent that much on a Takara set before.  It's because it includes this card:

Ichiro Suzuki had rookie cards in three 1993 sets - BBM, Tomy and Takara.  This was the only one of the three that I didn't have.  

Obviously the Ichiro card was the main attraction of the set but here's a couple of the other cards:

Yasuo Fujii

Shigetoshi Hasegawa

Satoshi Nakajima

So Taguchi

I should mention that my discussion with Dan was driven by his getting a bunch of 1993 Takara sets, including this one and the Giants one which featured a Hideki Matsui rookie card.  Because I have pretty much stopped paying attention to what I have in the way of Takara sets, I had completely forgotten I had that Giants set!  I suspect I will not forget I have this one.

Card Of The Week November 15

 The 2020 NPB regular season drew to a close yesterday.  There have been two managerial changes already announced.  The Rakuten Golden Eagles announced that Hajime Miki would be going back to his old job as farm team manager and that General Manager Kazuhisa Ishii would take over as manager (H/T NPB Reddit)*.  Miki is now the fourth guy to manage the Eagles for just a single season in the 16 years the team has existed (Yasushi Tao 2005, Marty Brown 2010 and Hiromoto Ohkubo 2015 - I assume the next one will be in 2025).  Ishii had a 22 year career with the Swallows (1992-2001, 2006-07), the Dodgers (2002-04), the Mets (2005) and the Lions (2008-13).  He's been the Eagles GM since August of 2018.

*The article incorrectly states that the Eagles didn't make the playoffs last year.

Additionally it appears that the rumors that Daisuke Miura would be the new Baystars were true and he's expected to be formally announced soon, now that Alex Ramirez managed his last game.  Miura pitched for the Baystars from 1992 to 2016 - he was actually the final active Yokohama Taiyo Whale.  We should have seen this coming.  After all his nickname was "Hama no Banchō" and now he really is the boss of [Yoko]Hama.

Here are cards of both new managers back when they were players:

2001 Calbee #069

2013 Front Runner Baystars Season Summary #15

Jose Lopez

Jose Lopez of the Baystars reached a couple milestones a few weeks back.  On October 24th he got his 2000th career hit between MLB and NPB and a week later he got his 1000th hit in NPB.  He became only the third player ever (and first non-Japanese player) to get 1000 hits in both MLB and NPB - Ichiro and Hideki Matsui were the other two players.

Lopez originally signed with the Seattle Mariners in 2001 out of his native Venezuela.  He made his major league debut in 2004 and was a regular with the team by 2006.  He was traded to the Rockies after the 2010 season and spent the next two seasons bouncing between Colorado, the Marlins, the Indians and the White Sox.  He moved to Japan in 2013, joining the Yomiuri Giants.  He signed with the Baystars as a free agent before the 2015 season.  He's a four time All Star (once in MLB and three times in NPB), a five time Golden Glove winner and a one time Best 9 winner.  He led the Central League in hits and RBIs in 2017.  

He played for Venezuela in the 2009 World Baseball Classic and made the "All Tournament" team.  In fact, his first ever Japanese cards are from the 2009 Konami "Baseball Heroes WBC" set:

2009 Konami Baseball Heroes WBC #W09R244

Here's a bunch of his cards from his time in NPB:

2013 Bandai Owners League 02 #006

2014 BBM Giants #G042

2015 BBM 1st Version #284

2016 Baystars #2

2017 Calbee #049

2018 BBM Baystars #DB41

2019 Epoch NPB #343

2020 BBM 2nd Version #485

Hayato Sakamoto

Last Sunday Giants shortstop Hayato Sakamoto became the latest player to reach 2000 hits in Japan and I believe the first since Kazuya Fukuura in 2018.  At 42 years and nine months Fukuura was the second oldest player to get his 2000th hit while at 31 years and 10 months Sakamoto is the second youngest player to reach the milestone.  Sakamoto is young enough to possibly become the second player in NPB history to get 3000 hits and make a run at Isao Harimoto's NPB record 3085 hits.

Sakamoto's been a star for the Giants pretty much ever since they drafted him out of high school with the first pick in the 2006 high school draft.  He made the Opening Day lineup at shortstop in 2008 and has been there ever since.  His first home run was a record setter - he became the youngest player to ever hit a grand slam in Central League history on April 6, 2008.  He's an 11 time All Star, a five time Best 9 winner and a three time Golden Glove winner.  He led the Central League in hits in 2012 and batting in 2016 and was the league MVP in 2019.  He's played in five Nippon Series and won two of them.  He's suited up for Samurai Japan four times - twice for the World Baseball Classic (2013 & 2017) and twice for the Premier 12 (2015 & 2019).  He hit the first home run in Premier 12 history and also had the first home run of the Reiwa Era on May 1st, 2019.

Here's a bunch of his baseball cards including his BBM rookie cards from the 2007 Rookie Edition and 1st Version sets:

2007 BBM Rookie Edition #67

2007 BBM 1st Version #352

2008 SCM #98

2009 BBM All Stars #A55

2010 Giants Pride #6

2011 BBM 1st Version #231

2012 BBM Nippon Series #S20

2013 Topps Tribute WBC #64

2014 Front Runner Giants Stars & Legends #7

2015 Bandai Owners League 01 #021

2016 Calbee #187

2017 BBM Giants #G43

2018 Konami Baseball Collection #201810-N-G006-00

2019 Epoch One #148/YG-020

2020 Epoch NPB #236

Card Of The Week November 8

The last playoff spot in NPB was wrapped up today as the Chiba Lotte Marines beat Saitama Seibu Lions 8-2 to clinch second place in the Pacific League.  Due to the delay in the season starting the Pacific League decided to change their playoff format so that only the first and second place teams would make the postseason.  The Marines will play the Hawks in the Climax Series starting next Saturday in Fukuoka with the winner of the best of five series going on to meet the Giants in the Nippon Series starting a week later.

The Lions had actually taken a 2-0 lead in the second inning of the game before the Marines tied it in the third.  Then in the bottom of the fourth, Yudai Fujioka came up and did this:

Fujioka's solo shot put Lotte up for good and the Marines added on another five runs in the seventh and eighth just to make sure.  It was Fujioka's fourth home run of the year.

As a Lions fan I'm not particularly happy with this outcome but given how happy I am with some non-baseball news this week, I think I'm good with this.  I'll be pulling for Lotte in the postseason and am hoping to be love, love, love, loving the Marines for the next few weeks.  Here's Fujioka's Calbee card from last year (#037):

2020 Calbee Series Three

 The latest set from Calbee, Series Three, was released a few weeks ago.  As the name implies, this is the third part of Calbee's regular set this year.  It was preceded by Series One in March and Series Two in early July.

The set contains 89 cards - one more than Series One and two more than Series Two.  The 89th card kind of makes up for a deficiency in Series Two which I'll get to in a minute.  There are 72 "regular" player cards (6 per team), 12 "First Win" cards and five checklist cards.

Player selection usually doesn't mean much with a Calbee set since it's only a third of the total set but this set seems a little light on stars.  Probably the biggest names in the set are Yuki Yanagita, Hotaka Yamakawa, Ryosuke Kikuchi, Yoshiharu Maru and Shota Imanaga.  There's are several foreign players - Jose Lopez, Dayan Viciedo, Alcides Escobar, Tyler Austion, Kris Johnson, Gerardo Parra, Cory Spangenberg and Adam Jones - and one rookie - Yuya Sakamoto of the Baystars.  34 of the players had cards in either Series One or Series Two.

The photos are OK.  Calbee still has way too many "pitchers pitching, batters batting" photos but there's some good photos in the set.  There's a handful of photos using a horizontal format which I always like.  Here's some example cards:

#147 Sosuke Genda

#189 Yuya Sakamoto

#211 Alcides Escobar

#202 Tsubasa Aizawa

#176 Shunta Gotoh

#165 Shogo Nakamura

The 12 card "First Win" subset celebrates the first win of the 2020 season for each of the NPB teams.  The front of the card features a player who (I assume) was instrumental in the win including Tetsuto Yamada, Sho Nakata, Takahiro Norimoto, Zach Neal, Brandon Laird and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.  The player names are not in English on them.

#FW-09 Koyo Aoyagi

The checklist cards as usual feature highlights from the season.  What's unusual in this case is that there are five of them instead of the standard three.  This looks to me to be Calbee's way of making up for the fact that Series Two only had three checklist cards.  The players featured on the checklists are Yusuke Ohyama of the Tigers, Seiya Inoue of the Marines, Haruki Nishikawa of the Fighters, Takaya Ishikawa of the Dragons and Yu Suzuki of the Buffaloes.  Here's the Ishikawa card - I think it commemorates his first hit in NPB on July 12th:

#C-11

Ishikawa and Sakamoto bring the count of cards of rookie players in the 2020 Calbee set to six.  This is the lowest number of rookie cards since the 2015 set which also only had six.  Ishikawa had a card in Series Two as well so there's only five rookie players, the fewest since I started getting the complete Calbee sets since 2012.

As always you can check out all the cards over at Jambalaya, including the Star insert cards and the "Special Limited Box Set" featuring all 12 Opening Day cleanup hitters which was available for sale on Calbee's Amazon Japan store.

2020 BBM 2nd Version set

2020 BBM 2nd Version Set Summary

Size: 313 cards (cards numbered 337-600, the 13 cards of "Ceremonial First Pitch History" subset are separately numbered FP01-FP13 and 36 cards for "Cross Blossom" subset are separately numbered CB37-CB72)
Cards Per Team: 16 (team card + 15 players)
Team Card Theme: Early Season Candids
Number Of Leader Cards: N/A
Checklists: 0
Subsets: 1st Version Update (36), Ceremonial First Pitch History (13), Cross Blossom (36), Proud Ace (12), Big Archist (12), Ground Master (12)
Inserts: Breaking Now (12), Soul Of Team (12), Phantom (24, #'d to 25)
Memorabilia Cards: Jersey cards for Roki Sasaki and Yoshinobu Okugawa, both of which are #'d to 200 along with patch versions that are #'d to 20 each.  There's also a combination jersey card featuring both Sasaki and Okugawa which is #'d to 15 along with a patch version of the combination card that is #'d to 5.  There are autographed cards for players that use a landscape version of the "Cross Blossom" cards that have print runs between 10 and 30 cards and other autograph cards that are #'d to 5.  There are also autographed "buy back" cards of Daisuke Matsuzaka. Tsuyoshi Wada, Haruki Nishikawa and Ryoichi Adachi.  There are autographed versions of six of the "Ceremonial First Pitch History" cards with print runs between 15 and 35 with a silver parallel autographed version that are #'d to 5.
Parallels: 12 cards (one per team) have a "Secret" version which is a short printed photo variation.  12 other cards (also one per team) have an "Ultra Secret" version which is an even shorter printed photo variation.  70-ish of the player cards have four different facsimile autograph parallels - silver (unnumbered), gold (#'d to 100), hologram (#'d to 50), and red (#'d to 25) .  Each "Cross Blossom" card has two parallels - one that's #'d to 100 and a "1 of 1" version.  There are four different parallels for the "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards - silver (#'d to 200), gold (#'d to 100), silver holo (#'d to 50) and gold holo (#'d to 25).  The "Breaking Now" inserts have three parallel versions that are numbered to 150, 100 and 50 respectively while the "Soul Of Team" cards have one parallel numbered to 100.
Notable Rookies: None

BBM tweaked their 2nd Version set a little bit this year.  While the base set was roughly the same size as it has been for the past five years or so (300 cards plus however many "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards) the arrangement of the cards is different.  All the 2nd Version sets since 2015 have only had three subsets - the "1st Version Update", the "Ceremonial First Pitch" and the "Cross Something" cards - but this one has three 12 subsets - "Proud Ace", "Big Archist" and "Ground Master".  To account for the three subsets the number "regular" player cards in the set dropped from 216 (18 per team) to 180 (15 per team), the lowest amount since the 2009 edition of the set.

About the "regular" player cards...I was hoping that BBM would continuing having a more diverse selection of photos like they did in the this year's 1st Version set.  They slid back to having more "batters batting, pitchers pitching" poses in this set although there's still some good photos.  Here's a bunch of examples:

#480

#519

#381

#449

#505

#538

I felt that Jason Bour's card had the perfect 2020 photo on it - no fans in the stands and the guys in the dugout in the background are wearing masks:

#504

I did notice one of my perennial complaints with the set - having a photo of a player that is very similar to the phoot on the player's 1st Version card.  Here's an example with Koyo Aoyagi:

1st Version #223 (top), 2nd Version #496 (bottom)

Here's what the back of the cards look like - pretty much the standard 2nd Version back.  The stats are through the end of June so they only cover the first ten or so games of the season.

Usually there's somewhere between 20 and 40 guys on the "regular" player cards who didn't appear in 1st Version.  This year there's only 17.  There's several foreign players - Rick Vanden Hurk of the Hawks, Albert Suarez of the Swallows, Nick Martinez of the Fighters and Andrew Albers of the Buffaloes - along with guys who I guess had a bigger role for their team than BBM was expecting like Kazunari Ishii of the Fighters and Ginjiro Sumitani and Naoki Yoshikawa of the Giants.  There's also a card of Daiki Masuda, the Giants' pinch running (and occasional pitching) specialist - this is his first ever BBM "flagship" card although his rookie card would be in the 2016 BBM Rookie Edition set.

As usual I have no idea why BBM chose to have some players who didn't appear in 1st Version have "regular" player cards in this set while they had others appear in the "1st Version Update" subset.  At least this year there are no players who appear in both.  The subset includes a number of big-ish names like Kazuki Yoshimi, Nao Higashihama, Atsushi Nohmi, Shota Dohbayashi, T-Okada, Tomotaka Sakaguchi, Takayuki Kajitani and Hiroyuki Nakajima.  Takeshi Toritani has his first flagship card with the Marines in this subset after signing with them back in March.  This subset also includes a couple former ikusei players who were registered to the 70 man roster this year including Koshiro Wada of the Marines, Ariel Martinez of the Dragons and Yuto Takahama of the Fighters.  

#354

There's one player in the subset who also had a card in the 1st Version set - Zelous Wheeler who was traded from the Eagles to the Giants in late June.  His 1st Version card shows him with the Eagles and his 2nd Version card has him with the Giants.

1st Version #070 (left), 2nd Version #357 (right)

For the second year in a row BBM went a team checklist photo theme that was not mascots which I heartily applaud.  I would loosely define the theme as "early season highlights".  There are several on-field celebrations plus a couple milestones like the Giants' 6000th win.  There are a couple cards that like the Bour card are quintessential 2020 photos - there's several photos of mascots by themselves in empty stands and the Tigers card shows an empty Koshien Stadium while a game is going on.

#592

#593

Each of three 12 card subsets feature one player from each NPB team.  As you've probably guessed, the "Proud Ace" subset is a top starting pitcher from each team.

#563

I'm not sure what a "Big Archist" is supposed to be but the subset includes a slugger from each team:

#572

The "Ground Master" subset includes a veteran from each team.  This subset includes several players who didn't have cards in the rest of the set including Seiichi Uchikawa of the Hawks, Daisuke Matsuzaka of the Lions and Takayuki Kishi of the Eagles.

#578

As expected the set includes the second half of the "Cross Blossom" cross set subset that started in 1st Version.  There's 36 cards numbered #CB37 to #CB72.

#CB50

BBM's been including a subset showing celebrities throwing out first pitches at games in their 2nd Version set ever since 2004.  They had a bit of a challenge this year since the season didn't start until late June and crowds weren't allowed for a few weeks after that so there really weren't any celebrity first pitch ceremonies to commemorate before the set went to press.  What they did was tie into their 30th Anniversary and did a subset called "Ceremonial First Pitch History" that highlighted first pitch ceremonies over those 30 years.  The 13 cards are actually pretty heavily weighted towards more recent events as there's only two cards from the 1990's and three cards from the 2000's.  I'm fairly certain that none of the celebrities has appeared in any of the other First Pitch subsets.  Over half of the celebrities are actresses - Naoko Iijima, Ryoko Hirosue, Saki Aibu, Saki Fukuda, Ikumi Hisamatsu, Chiaki Kuriyama, and Erika Toda.  There are also two actors (Show Aikawa and Toshiro Yanagida), a figure skater (Miki Ando), a wrestler (Saori Yoshida), a singer (Jurina Matsui) and a musician (Koji Kikkawa).

#FP07

As usual you can see all the cards (including the inserts, "secret" versions and some of the parallels) over at Jambalaya.