2012 Calbee Series Three

Calbee released Series Three about two months ago but I just got my set the other day.  Like the two previous series, this series features 72 "regular" player cards (six per team).  The cards are numbered 146 to 217, so there are (obviously) 217 "regular" cards in the entire Calbee run for this year.  (Well, really 216 plus a card of Swallows manager Junji Ogawa representing his Memorial Card since he never appeared on a Calbee card when he was a player.)  The odd things about the Series Three cards is that I count about 32 of them that are cards for players who already had cards in the first two Series.  So there's only 40 new players showing up in the Series Three "regular" cards.  The cards have the same design and feature the same great photography of the earlier Series.  Here's some examples:

#205

#159

#197

#165

Calbee continued their celebration of their 40th Anniversary with the inclusion of another 12 "Memorial Cards" in Series Three.  An earlier year's card of one player from each team is featured in this subset.  The oldest card included is Masahiro Yamamoto's rookie card from 1990.  The most recent card is the 2002 Hirotoshi Kitagawa card.  Here's an example - card #M-35 featuring Shinjiro Hiyama's 1997 card:

#M-35

The other big subset in Series Three is the All Star cards.  This subset features the 22 players who were selected to the All Star rosters via the fan voting.  It looks to me like the photos were taken at the games themselves.  Here's an example:

#AS-14

I might not have noticed this if I hadn't gotten both this set and the new BBM All Star set at the same time but there's three guys from the Fighters who have almost identical poses on each of their All Star cards:

#A28 (left) and #AS-10 (right)

#A06 (left) and #AS-03 (right)

#A29 (left) and #AS-11 (right)

Like the two previous Series, this set includes four checklist cards.  The cards feature events from earlier in the 2012 season.  Three of these events - Senichi Hoshino's 1000th managerial victory, Kenta Maeda's nohitter and Norihiro Nakamura's game winning home run from April 15th - also appeared as events on the team checklist cards for the BBM 2nd Version set this year.  The other event is Saburo Ohmura's home run against the Giants on May 26th.

I couldn't decide which checklist to show since I really like both the Nakamura card and the Saburo card so I thought I'd use both:

#C-11

#C-12

All the cards in the set can be seen here.