2023 Calbee Hawks

It was a bit of a surprise last January when Calbee somewhat abruptly released a 36 card set for the Hawks with little advance fanfare.  The cards had a similar design to the 2023 Calbee cards and were actually labelled "2023" so it appeared that the release had been delayed for a couple of months.  Ostensibly the set was for the the 30th Anniversary of the opening of Fukuoka Dome in 1993 although there's nothing on the cards that acknowledge that.

The cards have been somewhat hard to come by.  For the longest time, all the cards I saw were selling for 300 yen which would have made a complete set cost over 10,000 yen ($66-ish).  I had found a guy on Yahoo! Japan Auctions selling a bunch of cards for around 100 yen each and asked Ryan to grab them for me.  He ended up picking up 21 of the 36 cards and, of course, these were among the cards he gave me when I met up with him during my trip.

My expectation was that I would find the other 15 cards I needed during the trip.  I half heartedly asked about the cards at various card shops in Tokyo but wasn't terribly surprised when I was told that they didn't have any.  The cards were only issued in Kyushu so it was less likely that I'd see them in Kanto.  But I had high hopes that I'd find them in Fukuoka, specifically Mint Hakata, so I was somewhat surprised to not find any there.  I was less surprised to not find them at the other two Mint stores in Fukuoka as I had lower expectations for those stores.  It was one of the few disappointments of the trip to not get any closer to completing that set.

On the plus side, since I've returned I've located the remaining cards on Mercari and YJA and Ryan has picked them up for me.  So I'll have a complete set when Ryan makes his next card shipment to me later this year or early next year.

As I said, the cards themselves resemble the 2023 Calbee cards.  Enough so that it's a little difficult to tell the difference at a casual glance.  Here's Taisei Makihara's 2023 Series One card next to his card from this set:

2023 Calbee Series One #007 & Hawks #SH-06

The only real difference I see is that the Hawks set has the card number underneath the "2023 Calbee" text in hte upper right corner.  The design of the card backs are also virtually identical:

One thing to note is that although the design is the same, the text on the back is different.  The Japanese paragraph on the bottom of the card is obviously not the same and even the statistics are different.  The statistics on the Series One card are through the end of 2022 (and that's the case for the Series Two cards as well) while the Hawks set card has them through the end of August of 2023.  The career stats are also updated.

There aren't many surprises in the player selection.  Then-manager Hideo Fujimoto is not in the set but all the big names are - Yuki Yanagita, Kensuke Kondoh, Takyu Kai, Kenta Imamiya, Tsyuoshi Wada, Nao Higashihama, Ukyo Shuto, etc.  There are three foreign players - Carter Stewart, Roberto Osuna and Livan Moinelo.  Maybe the most surprising thing is that there's only one rookie in the set - Ryosuke Ohtsu.  With the delayed release of the set there ended up at least four players in the set who were no longer Hawks when it came out - Shu Masuda, Hiroshi Kaino, Keizu Izumi and Rei Takahashi.  Obviously with there being 36 cards versus the meager 10 that were in Calbee's regular set, there's 26 guys in this set who didn't appear in either Series One or Series Two.  All 10 who were in Series One and Two are in this set.

The set unfortunately continues Calbee's recent trend of unimaginative photos.  It is 36 cards of "batters batting, pitchers pitching" poses.  Here's a handful of cards as examples but you can see all of them over at Jambalaya:

#SH-07

#SH-020

#SH-21

#SH-27

#SH-04

While it was unusual for Calbee to release at team set, it's not completely unprecedented.  They did a Tigers set in 1992 and a Dragons set in 1997 (which is rare enough that Engel never listed it - it was apparently given away in some sort of lottery in the Nagoya area, possibly as a tie-in with the opening of Nagoya Dome).  There was also kind of a Giants specific set in 1998 but it essentially was a subset in the regular set rather than a separate product.