Japanese Baseball Cards: 2020 Epoch Hawks & Swallows Rookies & Stars sets

Monday, October 25, 2021

2020 Epoch Hawks & Swallows Rookies & Stars sets

Another couple items that I had asked Ryan to pick up for me were the 2020 Hawks and Swallows "Rookies & Stars" team sets from Epoch.

Epoch started doing team-specific sets in 2017 but in 2018 they started publishing them under the "Rookies & Stars" label. They were "comprehensive" team sets in 2018 and 2019 (i.e. they contained everyone on the team's 70 man roster at the time the set went to print) but since 2020 they've only contained 36 cards each. They've never done team sets for all 12 teams in one year - they've done between seven and nine each years.

I'd picked up last year's team sets for the Lions, Carp and Buffaloes but I wasn't really all that impressed by them and wasn't planning on getting any more teams. But then I realized that the Hawks set had Carter Stewart in it and I've pretty much been getting all his cards (at least all his non-premium cards) so I asked Ryan to see if he could find a set at a good price. And then when I was looking around Yahoo! Japan Auctions, I came across someone selling the Swallows set for 50 yen (roughly 50 cents) so I couldn't resist asking him to grab it also.

The sets are similar to the other three that I have in that they are printed on thicker stock than most other baseball cards and the photos are very generic - my usual too many "pitchers pitching, batters batting and catchers catching" poses. Both sets contain the teams managers, all the 2020 rookies (i.e. the 2019 non-ikusei draft picks) and the major stars for each team - Yuki Yanagita and Kodai Senga for the Hawks, Munetaka Murakami and Tetsuto Yamada for the Swallows - along with the main 25-30 players on each team. The Swallows set also contains a card for Tsubakurou, one of their mascots.

Here's some sample cards from each set: