2018 Calbee Series Two

Calbee's second set (or the second part of Calbee's annual set) was released just about a month ago.  It's called Series Two and it contains 88 cards in its base set - 72 player cards, a 12 card manager subset and a four card checklist subset. 

This is of course the follow to the Series One set that came out back in late March/early April.  The 72 player cards (evenly divided between all 12 teams as usual) are numbered 073 to 144 in continuation of the numbering from Series One.  I had mentioned in my post on the earlier set that it lacked many of the big names from NPB - most of them are in this set.  Tetsuto Yamada, Yoshitomo Tsutsugoh, Hayato Sakamoto, Yuki Yanagita, Takehiro Norimoto and Shogo Akiyama are all in this set.  The biggest names that have not had a Calbee card so far this year are Tomoyuki Sugano, Koji Uehara, Norichika Aoki and Daisuke Matsuzaka. 

This set also has nine players who did not appear in BBM's 1st Version set this year - the biggest names of this group are Shingo Kawabata of the Swallows, Seiya Inoue of the Marines and Yuichi Honda of the Hawks.  The set also has one player who's not in the Epoch NPB set - Brian Buchanan of the Swallows.

Calbee's been in a bit of a rut of late in their photo selection on their cards.  There's way too many shots of batters batting, pitchers pitching and catchers catching.  There are no photos of runners running, fielder fielding or just guys hanging out.  As Sean points out in his post about the set the only card that breaks this pattern is the Norimoto card - he's shown holding up a sign for his 1000th strikeout.    One thing that might have helped a little bit is mixing it up with some cards with horizontal layouts.  But there's only one player card with a horizontal layout - Daichi Ohsera.  Here's some sample cards:

#074 (Yuki Yanagita)

#080 (Shuta Tonosaki)

#110 (Daichi Ohsera)

#089 (Motohiro Shima)

#139 (Tetsuto Yamada)

The 12 card "Manager" subset features...uhh...the 12 NPB team managers.  This is as of May 1st so Masataka Nashida is included as manager of the Eagles as he was not replaced by Yosuke Hiraishi until mid-June.  Like the player cards the manager cards do not have English names on them. 

#M-06 (Tadahito Iguchi)

The four checklist cards feature scenes from the first few weeks of the season - Kazuya Fujita's game winning RBI single in the top of the 12th of the Eagles opener against the Marines on March 30th, Baystars rookie Kazuki Kamizato's first career home run on April 12th, rookie Orix pitcher Daiki Tajima's first career win on March 31st and Giants' pitcher Hirokazu Sawamura's first victory in 537 days on March 31st.  Here's the Sawamura card:

#C-8

As always you can see all the cards (including the Star insert cards and the "Wins Leader" Lucky card redemption set) over at Jambalaya.

I need to thank Sean for getting me my set while he was getting one for himself.  He saved me probably $10 to $20 in auction fees.  I really appreciate it Sean!