Discovery: 2011 Pro Yakyu Data File Weekly Baseball Reprint and Rookies Card Set

BBM doesn't just make cards. Their name is "Baseball Card Magazine" after all. They are responsible for the now-defunct SCM, several magazine specials a year, and Weekly Baseball (週刊ベースボール, Shuukan Baseball).

The first issue of Weekly Baseball had a cover date of April 16, 1958, though it was released in March. It actually was a rebranding of Baseball Magazine (ベースボールマガジン), which was first released in April 1946. The company Baseball Magazine gets its name from this periodical. Weekly Baseball passed the 3000-issue milestone back in 2010.

Bonus fact: in 2015, BBM bought the naming rights to a baseball stadium in Niigata Prefecture for 1 million yen per year (about $10,000/year). 

In August of 2011, BBM reprinted the first issue of Weekly Baseball. The magazine was included in this box:

The top says "Pro Yakyu (Baseball) Data File". Pro Yakyu Data File is another magazine published by BBM. If I understand correctly, this box was a gift for subscribing to Pro Yakyu Data File.

Here's the cover, featuring Shigeo Nagashima and Tatsuro Hirooka.

For the most part, the magazine was replicated exactly like the original, down to the photos and ads. Phone numbers and addresses have been removed, but prices remain intact.

There's a lot of focus on Giants players, but there are some articles on the other teams.

A large portion of the artwork is hand-drawn. Vintage Japanese publications have a lot of hand-drawn design elements. It was fun to flip through and enjoy the vintage, black and white pages, even if I can't really read it.

The inside of the box also held a set of special baseball cards split into two subsets.

The first subset is 2011 Big Hope Rookies, featuring the top rookies of, well, 2011. Yuki Saitoh was probably the biggest name then, but Yudai Ohno also makes an appearance in this series.

The second subset is titled Legend Super Rookies and features retired players who had outstanding rookie seasons. Naturally, Shigeo Nagashima is included.

 I didn't know about the existence of this set until NPB Card Guy came across it and asked me to find one for him. I was able to get another for myself soon after! I've had this for a few months, but I'm just now getting around to posting it.

As always, I must wonder how many other sets are out there which remain uncatalogued. 

Until next time...

I'm Still Learning

You can't collect everything. It's impossible. With the existence of 1/1 cards, that should be pretty obvious, but even ignoring those parallels, there are about 45,000 different MLB sets out there. Add in around 7500 minor league team sets and over 10,000 Japanese sets. Oh, that's my type collection goal. Over 60,000 cards. I am approaching 20,000 cards, but the other 40k aren't going to be easy.

The same can be said for knowing all the sets. It's possible to be familiar with major releases, or be an expert on vintage gum cards, but stuff will always slip through the cracks. In Japan, a lack of documentation makes it even harder to know details about sets released even a few years ago.

Sometimes the information is out there, but I've forgotten, misremembered, or misinterpreted it. And I'm not talking about translation and language barriers. The above card of Koji Akiyama is an insert card found in the 1995 BBM All-Stars set. I had it labeled as "All Stars Inserts" in my list, but I never properly attached it to the box set, instead believing it came from regular packs. Since I never came across one in the wild, I recently reviewed Engel's last guide containing modern cards, and realized that the inserts were, in fact, found in the box set. Knowing that, I could quickly hunt one down, and now I have a full 1995 All-Stars set to go with it!

The Seibu Lions celebrated their 25th anniversary in 2003 (25 years of being the Seibu Lions, not the overall franchise anniversary). BBM reprinted cards from their 1991-2003 sets, adding a special logo on the front, and a second copyright line, second card number, and special stamp on the back. 

There are actually two different sets of this type. The above card, with the number L2, comes from a 25-card "limited" set. A second series, with LP card number prefixes, uses the same design, but only has 10 cards, and seems to be less rare.

Both sets are mentioned on the backs of the promo cards below. These three cards reproduce the covers of past Weekly Baseball magazines, with the backs advertising a special event for the release of a "mook" for the Lions anniversary. The event took place at Seibu Dome and one Seibu department store location. With the purchase of the book, you could receive an LP promo set, and it appears that the 25-card set could also be purchased for an additional 1500 yen. The 25-card set was limited to 1000 copies; that's not a big number, but I'm surprised I haven't seen more of them around.

Here are the three promo cards, front and back:

Finally, this card is a promo for the Chiba Lotte Marines issued in 2004. It's numbered MP9.

If you're interested in the details, check out NPB Card Guy's post about this set. Basically, it was sold with a particular snack at a small chain of convenience stores in a small part of Japan. Despite discovering this set in 2019, I didn't actually get my own card from the set until a couple weeks ago. 

How many other uncatalogued cards and sets are floating around out there? I'm still learning, but I'll never know. Until next time...

Vintage Baseball: Learn To Read Japanese

A popular card game here in Japan before video games and TCGs were all the rage was karuta. Kids still play it; it's a great educational tool and it's fun. I'm pretty sure I've explained this before, but for newbies, karuta involves two sets of cards: picture cards and reading cards. The two sets run parallel to each other like so:

The card on the left has a picture of, in this case, a player, with the Japanese character "ra" inside the circle. The right-side card has text. The "ra" is repeated in the upper-right corner, forming the beginning of a word, phrase, or sentence. In this case, it says "raito uchino Chiba senshu", which means, essentially, right fielder, (Shigeru) Chiba. ("uchino" means "our", and "senshu" means player.)

As you can see here and in the rest of this post, the artwork is very attractive. The backs are blank on both reading and picture cards. The background for the reading cards is red with a white catcher line drawing. A similar set is JK 17: 1949 Marumon Karuta, which instead has a right-handed batter in one of two poses. The checklist corresponds to that issue, so it's my belief that this catcher back set is a third parallel or variation.

The cards I got were in pretty poor condition, many missing corners or having some discoloration. They might have been stored in an album of some sort.

Left: a (Hiroyoshi Tsukamoto). Right: to (Toshio Kawanishi).

Left: wi [archaic kana!] (Sadayuki Minagawa). Right: hi (Kazuo Kasahara).

Left: nu (Fumio Fujimura). Right: u (Tsuguo Goto).

Left: wo (Korakuen Fans). Right: no (Zenzo Hasegawa).

Left: ko (Noboru Aota). Right: i (Tokuji Iida).

Left: so (Satoru Sugiyama). Right: o (Hiroshi Oshita).

The "ra" card went into my type collection, while the rest I'll keep in my collection of random vintage Japanese cards. One of these days, I'll pick up a complete old baseball karuta set.

I have a bonus for you in this post. I also picked up a pair of vintage menko. One was really just a milk cap, but I knew that going in. I wanted this card:

It's a cute airplane diecut menko featuring a baseball player in the cockpit. 

The back has the image of the bottom of an airplane, including a Pokeball-looking pair of wheels. I think those are wheels. 61257 is the menko number. It's an uncatalogued menko, but that may because it's a cartoon character instead of related to any particular player or team. It might be related to JDM 3: 1949 Airplane Diecuts, given the basic design. It's a cute addition to my collection, regardless of its origin.

That's all for today! Until next time...

They Aren't Baseball: More Non-Sport and Multi-Sport

 Depending on your tastes, you might not like my posts for the next couple of days.

I'm really working hard to finish off several of the sets on my want lists. For US cards, those are basically baseball, but here in Japan, I've come across several non-sport and non-baseball sets that I've been working on tracking down. 

This is no easy task. Finding major-issue singles, like from the 1995 and 1996 BBM sets, is hard enough. But looking for relatively obscure cards from random issues from the same period is even more difficult.

If you don't know what Evangelion is, you probably don't know modern Japanese culture. It's one of the most well-known anime of all time, and after an initial one-series run, has seen multiple movies released over the past 20 years or so. The latest one should be in Japanese theaters this year. When it was originally released, several different card sets, some with multiple series, were rushed out in varying formats. The Death/Rebirth Widevision series might have actually been printed by Topps' factories, though it doesn't carry any logos from them. For the longest time, I've been one card short of a full set, including the SPs. Finally, I made a bit of a revelation. There is a second Widevision set, and distinguishing the two can be a bit tough. But one of my identifiers turned out to be wrong, and after checking that Rei wasn't in the other Widevision set, I grabbed this card as fast I could. One card, one set crossed off the list.

These two cards have holographic backgrounds. It's hard to tell on the white card, but it's there. Sega (yes, the game company) was involved in this issue; it might have been two series or just one, but either way it's a 108-card set. I thought I was missing only three cards: these two and one more higher-numbered card. But after getting these and checking my collection, it seems as though I might be missing four more instead of just one. I believe the three I'm missing are regular cards, and it's possible I have at least some of them in a box back at my apartment (yes, I'm still on the road). 

At least one of these next two cards might look familiar to you.

These two essentially unnumbered cards were included in a 2006 issue of SCM magazine, and were the last two I wanted for my collection. I picked this Reiko Shiota up earlier this year, but I now have  second copy, which came with this:

Kumiko Ogura makes my SCM collection complete. The Shiota card has a #0 on the front, while this has a #11, but I'm not so sure those are meant to be card numbers, as I had first guessed. Instead, I think they might be "jersey" numbers. Eitheer way, I'm happy this multi-year adventure has finally drawn to a close.

While searching for the Tough & Smile cards, I came across two promo cards from the Badminton box set "Be Active" issued in 2008. 

The cards have identical backs. There are two things advertised on each card: a photo book titled "Ogushio!" that was sold for 1000 yen, and the Be Active box set, sold for 3990 yen. I didn't know about the existence of these promos, but I figured they would be a nice accompaniment to the base Be Active set I already have.

While I wasn't able to finish all three sets, two are done, and the other may need more cards, but it needs easier-to-find cards. So, until next time....

Breaking Bad Bromides (No, Not "Breaking Bad" Bromides)

I love coming across new vintage Japanese cards. It's definitely not easy! Many of the menko and bromide cards in my collection came from US collectors helping me out, so what's left are unknown cards and rare finds. These blank-backed bromides were pretty cheap, but they did come at a price.

I don't know exactly where they were stored, but at least one of them smells like death. Like, seriously rank, God-awful stench. I left them sitting out for several weeks, but even so, after being in a sleeve or box for a while, the smell returns. I might need to leave them out in the sun for a few hours. Thankfully, they're all blank-backed so I can leave them face-down to avoid too much damage. On to the cards.

1950 Marutoku Large Black & White Third Prize Bromide - JBR 9a - Chusuke Kizuka. He's throwing so hard his feet left the ground.

Probably 1950 B&W Type 2 3rd Prize - JBR 2a. Shigeya Iijima. The fans look almost fake, like the Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover.

1950 Game Bromides Premiums - JBR 87a -  Akiharu Tezuka. This is one of three cards from this set I got. I put this one in my type collection.

1950 Game Bromides Premiums - JBR 87a - Tetsuharu Kawakami. Seeing a bit of the dugout made this a pretty cool card. This set has at least a few great photos.

1950 Game Bromides Premiums - JBR 87a - Takashi Kouchi. Here's another card from the Game set, this time showing some action on the basepaths. Kouchi is the runner, facing the camera. I think the umpire is levitating. And there are some spectators off in the background!

Black and White Small Text Bromides - JBR 124 - Hiroshi Nakao. This fairly standard card also went into my type collection.

Unknown card. Hiroshi Hagiwara. None of Hagiwara's cards match this description. So I have no clue which set it's from.

Unknown card and player. I love the image, but I don't know where it comes from. This card has a slightly glossier top, but it may be from some form of glue or something added by the collector. This has those odd printing/cutting crosshairs, which means it most likely was cut from a larger sheet at a shop or at home.

Probably 1950 B&W Type 3 3rd Prize Premiums (JBR 7a) - Tetsuharu Kawakami. Sadly, this card has some paper loss, but it still has a great image of the stadium in the background. And Kawakami is a legend.

1950 Color with Handwriting Bromide - JBR 89a - Shigeo Ueno. Another card with an interesting background, this one also is colorized! And it has an interesting stylized handwritten-style font. This card also made it to the type collection.

That's all for today! My favorite is probably the Kawakami with the scoreboard in the background. I'm a sucker for scoreboard shots. What's your favorite? Until next time..