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

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Wednesday, August 7, 2013

New Release: 2013 BBM All-Star Game Memories 80's

Recently released, BBM's new All Star Game Memories set commemorates some of the legends that played in the 1980s All Star Games. The card fronts have a nice bottom logo and seem to feature images from the actual All Star games.
 The backs give All Star game stats. Cards are numbered in the white box towards the bottom, and the set is identifiable by the [80's ALL STAR] notation on the copyright line. There are 90 cards in the base set; nine of those are subset cards.

I know of one parallel for the set, serial numbered to 80 with gold foil signatures on the front. I'm not sure if it's a partial parallel or full parallel.
 The lone insert set is titled The Star Of Stars, with nine cards in the set. Insert cards are printed with a foil background.
Backs reuse the same image as the front and contain a limited amount of text. They're numbered SS##, and again [80's ALL STAR] appears on the copyright line.

I don't know of any memorabilia cards in this issue, but there are several autographed cards (up to 100 of each card inserted) plus one dual-autograph card with 10 copies inserted

I think it's nice that historical sets are becoming topical - No-Hitters and All Star games from BBM and Rookie of the Year awards from Epoch. Now to look at the history of the Japan Series and other awards and events (record holders, hitting for the cycle, etc)...

2 comments:

  1. This is one of the sets I'm waiting on - I'll do a post on it when I get in it (probably early September).

    I was kind of disappointed that they were only doing events from the 1980's. Hopefully they'll do other sets for other decades. There were a couple amusing events in the 1990's - Ichiro pitching to a batter (supposed to be Hideki Matsui but Katsuya Nomura pinch hit Shingo Takatsu for Matsui) in 1995 and there was a game in 1990 that went extra innings and the Pacific League ran out of position players due to an injury so Hideo Nomo ended up batting and Kimiyasu Kudoh played in left field. And then there's that time the CL no hit the PL in 1971. Love to see cards for those events.

    I really like your idea of a Nippon Series history set. The annual sets BBM puts out shows all the players who played but doesn't really address the actual game events. And there's 40 years of Nippon Series that have never had any cards (at least not from BBM - Calbee has covered some of them).

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  2. Yeah, I wasn't too happy that the set only covers 1980s games, but that does open up the door for more sets. I think you mentioned recently that Ichiro and Nomo hanve't been in any Japanese issues since leaving - Ichiro I think I can see because he's still an active player (didn't the same thing happen with Matsui before his retirement this year?). Though there's no reason they can't go back in time while they wait for Ichiro to retire. I would totally own a card of Ichiro pitching, and Nomo batting.

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