Despite their immense popularity and longevity (the team has existed since 1936), the Hanshin Tigers have only been Central League champions five times, winning the Japan Series only once. This card set honors that single victory.
Clocking in at 45 cards, all but two of them feature members of that team - coaches and players. The biggest name as far as my interest in the team goes is Randy Bass, who, as NPB Card Guy mentioned in his post about this set, is the first foreigner in an Epoch box set in over five years. I chose the player above, Masahiro Tanaka, because of the name connection to the current Yankees pitcher.
The last two cards in the set are horizontally situated. #44 features a composite shot of the heart of the 1985 Tigers lineup (Bass, Kakefu and Okada) while the final card of the set shows the victory celebration.
The backs of the last two cards serve as checklists.
Each box comes with 52 cards. The seven extra cards include five parallels and two autographs. The parallels only have border color changes; black is not serial-numbered, while gold is numbered to 45 copies each.
All 43 subjects have regular, horizontally-aligned autograph cards in three tiers: silver is the most common, followed by gold and a 1/1 parallel. (The images above are enlargeable.)
Yoshio Yoshida, manager of the '85 Tigers, has a pair of autographs (horizontal and vertical) numbered to 10. Both cards feature images of victory celebrations.
The "Starting Lineup" nine-card autograph set has gold foil, with cards limited to 5 or 10 copies each.
"Combos" is an eight-card set with dual autographs, limited to 10 copies each.
There are three triple-signed cards also limited to 10 copies each, with a gold version with a print run of only five copies. (Again, the images are enlargeable.)
Some images in this post from Epoch.
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