Wednesday, November 11, 2009

News and Notes...

A couple items:

- Following the completion last Saturday of this year's Nippon Series (is it called the Fall Classic in Japan?), BBM has announced this year's Nippon Series set. Like the 18 previous ones (every year since 1991), this year's set is a box set featuring cards for every player who appeared in the Series plus the managers for both teams. There will also be a team victory card showing the Giants celebrating, and cards for each of the five award winners (MVP Shinnosuke Abe, "Fighting Spirit" Shinji Takahashi and the three "Outstanding Player" or "Awards Of Excellence" winners Yoshiyuki Kamei, Dicky Gonzalez
and Eiichi Koyano). It does not appear that there will be a card commemorating George W Bush throwing out the first pitch in Game Three. Since I prefer to avoid politics with my baseball, I'm going to refrain from commenting on whether that's a good thing or not. The set will be out in December and will pretty much wrap up the 2009 issues for BBM.

- The announcement of the Nippon Series set was no surprise. What was a surprise was the announcement of a Kintetsu Memorial set. I think this set is meant to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Kintetsu's entry into professional baseball in 1950 with a team known as the Pearls. (BBM had done a Kintetsu Memorial box set back in late 2004 when Kintetsu merged with Orix.) It's a 99 card pack based set that pretty much follows the pattern of the recent team anniversary sets. There's a six card "team history subset", 84 cards for former players (and obviously no current Kintetsu players) and a nine card "team record" subset. There's also the usual insert cards (Kintetsu Best 9), photo cards and autograph cards. What are the chances that Hideo Nomo will appear with the OB players? And I'd expect to see at least two Tuffy Rhodes cards in this set - as an OB player and as the team record holder for most home runs in a season (if not career). The set will be out in mid-December.

- Prestige Collectibles' latest auction began this week and will run until November 19th.

1 comment:

Jason Presley said...

Ah, conspiring against me, they are! Now I've probably got at least three new team set cards of Tuffy to pick up.