Shohei Ohtani大谷翔平

The 2013 1st Version was printed in February of that year — weeks after the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters convinced a young Ohtani to sign with them instead of jumping straight to MLB. Their pitch was simple: we'll let you pitch and hit. No one else would. The card captures him in his Fighters uniform before he had thrown a single NPB pitch. By July he'd hit a 90-meter home run off Masahiro Tanaka. By 2018 he was Rookie of the Year in Anaheim. By 2023 he was the most valuable athlete in baseball. Every plate appearance since — every two-way unanimous MVP, every World Series ring, every 50/50 — refers back to this card. It is, in every meaningful sense, the prologue.

BBM's 1st Version is the company's flagship release. The 2013 set ran approximately 120,000 cases, but the Ohtani RC was distributed at 1-per-case as part of the rookie subset, putting natural-pull supply in the low thousands. PSA has graded fewer than 600 of these to a 10. Of those, the top copies are tracked obsessively by collectors worldwide.

This copy was sourced in March 2024 from a private collector in Sapporo who had held the card since pulling it from a sealed box in early 2013. The collector, a Fighters season-ticket holder, agreed to part with it only after a six-month conversation conducted entirely in person.