2014 Calbee Series Two

Lately Calbee's sets are all very similar to each other.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, it just limits the amount of interesting things I can say about them.

So I'm not going to say much about this year's Series Two.  Like Series One, it contains 100 cards in the base set - 84 player cards and 16 cards split between two subsets (or non-premium insert sets).  The 84 cards were split evenly between the 12 teams so there are 7 cards per team.  They are numbered in continuation of Series One, so the numbers run from 85 to 168.  As always, the photography is outstanding:

#120

#113

#140

#148

#088

#129

I really like the way that the orange jumps out on Abe's card.

One minor complaint I have with the set is that 20 of the players appeared in Series One as well -Shunichi Nemoto, Yudai Ohno, Yuya Hasegawa, Yuichi Honda, Takahiro Arai, Shintaro Fujinami, Takashi Toritani, Kenta Maeda, Eishin Soyogi, Masaru Takeda, Yoshihisa Hirano, Yoshio Itoi, Takeya Nakamura, Ginji Akaminai, Takashi Saitoh, Motohiro Shima, Yasuhiro Ogawa, Sho Aranami, Daisuke Miura, and Hayato Sakamoto.  Just seems kind of odd to have almost a quarter of the Second Series repeat players in the First Series.

The 16 subset cards are split between the 12 card Opening Game Starting Pitcher set and the 4 card checklists.  The Opening Game Starting Pitcher set is pretty much self explanatory - it contains the starting pitcher from Opening Day for each of the twelve teams.  The checklists feature scenes from the first week of the season - Motonishi Tanishige's first win as Dragons manager, Seichi Uchikawa's hero interview from Opening Day, and the first wins for two rookie pitchers - Allen Kuri of the Carp and Ayumu Ishikawa of the Marines:

#OP-09

#C-5

#C-6

As always you can see all the cards (plus the Star inserts, the "Special Box Limited Edition" AVG Leader cards and the mail-in Lucky cards over at Jambalaya.  Ryan did a post on the set a while back as well.