Chaos and Kanji is the blog where I write about my adventures through Japan!

Want Lists are located here. NPB Baseball Want List is located here.

Saturday, December 30, 2017

New Release: 2018 BBM Time Travel: 1989

Hitting shelves in the last few days, Time Travel: 1989 is the first big release of the 2018 season from BBM.
 Each pack contains six cards and retails for 400 yen. A 20-pack box costs 8000 yen.
 All of the base cards are printed on matte, vintage-style card stock. The full base set has 99 cards; numbers 1-78 are regular cards.
 Cards 79-84 are borderless and feature retired players. Backs have a long write-up along with a career statistics line.
 #85-89 are Retrospective, looking back at the baseball season.
 #90-93 feature events in pop culture history.
 Finally, #94-99 are titled Born in 1989. I'll give you one guess what all of the players in this subset have in common. Give up? They were all born in 1989.
 The two insert sets are identical: Central League Title Holder is green, while Pacific League Title Holder is blue. Central League has 10 cards, while Pacific League has 8.
 Both insert sets have parallels: Gold Foil #/60 and Pink Foil #/30.
 Finally, no BBM set would be complete without a ton of Autographs. They are serial numbered to 90 copies or less. There are 65 different autographed cards in the set.
Some of the autographs are of the pop culture icons featured in the base set.

I have to say that I love this set! The vintage card stock and retro designs on the base set are refreshing and nostalgic. And like Fusion, this set offers up some baseball history. It's a nice way to finish off 2017!

4 comments:

  1. Pop culture autographs are really cool. Wish Topps did that more. Funny that they went with 1989 right now. Seems like they should have waited until early 2019 and made it a 30 year anniversary set.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. For the most part, pop culture gets relegated to Allen & Ginter. Thankfully Panini occasionally issues Americana, and Leaf has been doing Pop Century stuff. But Pop Century is pretty limited.

      As for the '89 choice, they probably chose that year based on the "Born in '89" subset - whoever is really popular tends to drive the focus of many of the sets. (And who will sign autographs for BBM.)

      Delete
  2. I want to love this set too but I can't find a complete one on Yahoo! Japan Auctions for some reason.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's odd, but I've found similar problems with some sets in the past. I lucked out and found a cheap auction - only 500 yen plus shipping. There must not be much demand for full sets.

      Delete