Japanese Baseball RC's

[21Pittsburgh58]

For those that have collected BBM rookie cards of Japanese ballplayers:

1. How do you know which ones are the true RC's?

2. Like Topps, would anything produced in that year, as long as it's not an insert, be considered a RC?

3. Is there a place to follow Japanese baseball?

Yes, I'll use Google to look this up, but just curious what you follow?

Thank you in advance!

[sauceboy]

Originally Posted by 21Pittsburgh58

2. Like Topps, would anything produced in that year, as long as it's not an insert, be considered a RC?

I would say so, yes. They've started putting "RC" symbols on a lot of cards.

Originally Posted by 21Pittsburgh58

3. Is there a place to follow Japanese baseball?

r/NPB is a great community. I believe they have a fairly active Discord server, too. Check out the Gaijin Baseball YouTube channel, as well.

[vwnut13]

4. How do you know if it's a 1/1?

[hammertime]

1 and 2. Like here, basically everything from a player's rookie year are considered "rookie cards" these days. BBM 1st Version (the equivalent of Topps Series 1) is probably the closest to a "flagship" rookie card equivalent.

3. NPB has 2 leagues, Central and Pacific. They're quite separate, more like how the AL and NL were 50+ years ago. The Central League isn't super accessible outside of Japan, but the Pacific League has a good Instagram account (pacificleaguetv), as well as a couple YouTube channels. They also have a streaming service you can pay for that lets you watch the Pacific League games in full, including the farm teams. No English commentary of course. For the game itself, Yakyu Cosmopolitan is another great resource, although unfortunately he had to delete all his old YouTube videos awhile back.

As far as cards go, japanesebaseballcards.blogspot.com is a great resource, as is Prestige Collectibles on YouTube (although he mostly deals with vintage).

[corockies]

Good questions. Supposedly none of them apply to Roki Sasaki.