2013 Calbee Series Two

Got a package in the mail from my Japanese baseball card connection - six sets that have been released over the last three months.  I'll try to do some catchup here...

First up is Calbee's second series for the year.  Like Series One, the set contains 100 cards - 84 player cards, 12 "Exciting Rookie" cards and four checklist cards.  So also like Series One, Series Two only has one subset other than the checklist cards.

Unlike Series One, however, Series Two has 7 player cards per team rather than 6.  As usual, the photography is great and appears to all be from this season (and includes players new to Japan, rookies and players who switched teams last winter, pretty much nullifying one of my complaints about Series One).  Here are some sample cards:

#106

#146

#128

#151

The "Exciting Rookie" subset features the top draft pick for each team.  This is actually kind of a shame as the top draft pick isn't necessarily the best rookie from each team (for instance, Takahiro Norimoto of the Eagles is having a better season then Yudai Mori and Yashuhiro Ogawa of the Swallows is doing better than Taichi Ishiyama - as well as many other pitchers in the CL).  And from taking a look at Series Three which is already out, it appears that the guys in this subset aren't going to have regular player cards at all this season.  So no regular Calbee card for Shohei Otani this year, although this subset card is pretty cool:

D-07 Shohei Ohtani

D-10 Yudai Mori

The checklist cards continue the theme started in Series One for team mascots.  This set includes the mascots for the Eagles, Carp, Hawks and Swallows:

#C-8

I feel like I'm falling into a bit of a rut describing the flagship sets for both Calbee and BBM this season.  This is a Calbee set  - it's pretty much everything you should expect from a Calbee set so if you like Calbee sets, you'll like this one.

As usual, you can check out all the cards over at Jambalaya.

And as before with Series One, Calbee sold some sort of limited edition box set along with Series Two.  It contained 12 cards (one for each team of course) and was entitled "Speed Stars".