There is nothing hotter than Shohei Ohtani right now in Major League Baseball. He is on fire and looks to make a run for MVP this year....if he keeps this stat trend through the remainder of the year, I am going to call him a shoe in. Believe it or not, Ohtani has been doing this for 8 years now and before he made an impact on the MLB scene in 2018, he was the two-way star of Japan destined for bigger and better things. He has a ton of Japanese cards and a good handful of rookie cards from 2013, but none are more iconic than his 2013 Japanese BBM Flagship Series 1 Rookie #183. Here is a guide to the 11 variations of his important, iconic, and impactful rookie card. I apologize in advance as some of the images are taken from Yahoo Japan Auctions website.
2013 BBM Series 1 Box
This is the box that could land you the Red #183, Red #183 - Silver Signature, Red #183 - Gold Signature, Red #183 - Holofoil Signature Rookies, Red #183 - Red Signature, Red #183 - Blue Signature, and Green #183 - Rookie Parallel.
2013 BBM Series 1 Red #183
Ohtani's most popular and iconic rookie card.
2013 BBM Series 1 Red #183 - Silver Signature
Affordable silver facsimile signature parallel that is unnumbered. (Photo courtesy of YJA)
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2013 BBM Series 1 Red #183 - Gold Signature #ed/100
Spendy gold facsimile signature parallel numbered to 100. Difficult to find. (Photo courtesy of YJA)
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2013 BBM Series 1 Red #183 - Holofoil Signature #ed/50
Very difficult to find & expensive hologram foil parallel numbered to only 50. (Photo courtesy of YJA)
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2013 BBM Series 1 Red #183 - Red Signature #ed/25
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2013 BBM Series 1 Red #183 - Blue Signature #ed/1
No image available.
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2013 BBM Series 1 Green #183 - Rookie Foil Parallel #ed/100
I have only seen one of these ever show up for auction. Very expensive and numbered to 100. (Photo courtesy of YJA)
2013 BBM Series 1 Green #KP2
Handed out during a family event at Kamagaya Stadium (Photo courtesy of Ameba)
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2013 BBM Series 1 Pink #SL07
Handed out at another stadium event (Photo courtesy of YJA)
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2013 BBM Series 1 Purple #183 - Sports Card Magazine (SCM)
Issue #98 of Sports Card Magazine had 5 original promotional cards including this one of Ohtani.
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2013 BBM Series 1 Purple #183 - Sports Card Magazine (SCM) Silver Signature
Randomly inserted in SCM #98 were silver facsimile signature parallels. (Photo courtesy of YJA)
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Nice work documenting those!
ReplyDeleteThough the fact that there are 11 variations of a single regular BBM card goes a long way to explaining why I don't collect BBM. Life is too short to devote the time and effort needed to untangling the complexity of all those BBM parallels (not to mention all the subsets, etc they are constantly churning out)!
For sure, I didn't have a grasp of how many there truly were until I opened up an older issue of SCM and then started browsing auction sites. I own 3 of the 11 and I missed the boat on trying to get the majority of the run when he was injured and people couldn't give away his cards.
ReplyDeleteGreat stuff! Glad to see Ohtani having this awesome season both on the mound and in the batter's box.
ReplyDeleteHe is definitely on fire!
DeleteNice round up! I had done a post on all his 2013 cards a while back but I didn't get into the parallel issues. Kind of kicking myself for not picking up the Kamagaya card when I saw it years ago for $28-ish.
ReplyDeleteBBM did a "rookie reprint" insert set with the 2017 1st Version set so there's yet another version of his 2013 1st Version card there.
Yup, that's what I'm talking about (in my above comment). Not satisfied with the 11 version of the card they put out in 2013, they have to sneak another one in just 4 years later to really mess with you.
DeleteYeah, I missed the boat on a lot of these parallels early on. I did see the 2017 Reprint Version and debated on putting it on the list and ultimately left it off.
ReplyDelete