Calbee posted information the other day about their first series for 2012. As usual, they've put the checklist on line. The unusual thing about this year's "regular" Calbee cards is that there are 73 of them which is NOT evenly divisible by 12. Typically, the normal Calbee (and BBM) issues have the same number of cards per team. This Calbee series has six cards for each team EXCEPT the Swallows, who have seven. The extra Swallows card is of manager Junji Ogawa.
Calbee is celebrating their 40th Anniversary this year and they've added a subset of reprints of old Calbee cards. The subset contains 13 cards and features Shigeo Nagashima, Sadaharu Oh and 11 of the 12 current NBP managers. The reprinted cards aren't necessarily their rookie cards, simply cards from when they were players. The one manager who is not in the subset is Junji Ogawa, which (according to a note at the bottom of the checklist page) is why he's included in the regular set.
The other subsets (or insert sets) for the set are the Title Holder (T) which features 22 2011 statistical leaders (and pointedly does not include a card for PL Strikeout leader Yu Darvish) and the Star Card (S) which feature 24 cards (2 for each team, no Ogawa) of star players. There's also a four card checklist subset that appear to feature highlights of the 2011 post season.
The cards will be released around March 26.
5 comments:
Thanks for the heads-up, these have been added to the SCF database. I should probably start checkling for Konami and Bandai sets, too.
Hi,
I am want to start collecting Japanese baseball cards but have no clue where to start could you give me a few pointers?
I think it really boils down to what you want to focus on with your collection. If you want to focus on getting Japanese cards of the NBP players who've come to the US, eBay is probably your best bet. If you just want to get some NBP cards, I'd recommend buying unopened boxes from AmiAmi. But if you want to try to get complete sets, I'd check with Prestige Collectibles, Rob's Japanese Baseball Cards (although he's really not focusing on new cards) and take a look at the Yahoo Japan auctions and see if there's anything you want to pick up using kuboTEN.
Thanks for an excellent question. I hope my answer is helpful.
I have a baseball card For Takayoshi Nakao, a Chunichi catcher. It looks like it probably from the 80's. I was thinking it was a Calbee card, but its about 2.5" tall by 2" wide. Do you think that it is Calbee or something else? Are the commerative cards all the current standard size for Calbee?
Yes, that's probably a Calbee card - they were roughly that size during the 80's. The website doesn't say anything about the size of the commemorative cards but if they do the same thing they did in 2002 for their 30th Anniversary, the cards will be the same as the current size with the reproduced card being reduced in size with a border around it.
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