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Friday, March 20, 2015

New Release: 2015 BBM Softbank Hawks 10th Anniversary

The first of this year's team anniversary sets features the Hawks, which have been owned by Softbank for 10 years now.
 The base cards have a fairly standard design with the player's name, jersey number, and position at the bottom. Team colors are very visible, and the Hawks' colors go well on cardboard. The base set has 72 player cards with no checklists or subsets. 63 cards have retired players with black bottom borders on the front, while the remaining 9 cards are of active players with yellow bottom borders.
 There are two inserts. One is a non-premium subset-style insert titled Memories of the Decade. The nine cards in the set feature team highlights. Four cards feature on-field events (winning games, essentially) with the other five cards mentioning managers being appointed or retiring, and the creation of the team. This set is separately numbered (with an M prefix) but appears in packs at the same rate as regular cards.
 The second nine-card insert is Best 9 of the Decade. This is a premium insert with a foil background; two photos (full body and close-up) are on the front, with the full body shot cropped and put on a yellow-tinted background on the reverse side. As usual, the cards don't have any stats or text to explain why the players were chosen as one of the Best 9.
There are 28 autographed cards randomly inserted into boxes, with print runs usually around 120 cards each. Some have about 30 copies each. Of the 28 autograph subjects, eight are mascots like Helen Hawk above (print runs of 105 copies each).

It appears that BBM chose not to make any form of parallels for this set. For Hawks fans this will be a nice set, but there isn't much to the set to pique the average collector's interest.

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