2015 Calbee Series Three

Calbee's Third and final Series for the year was released a few weeks back and I must confess that I was a little disappointed in it.

The first reason I was disappointed in it was that it was smaller than the first two Series this season.  The base set only contained 88 cards, 15 cards fewer than Series One and 12 cards fewer than Series Two.  There are 72 player cards (six per team), 12 "Exciting Scene" cards and four checklist cards.  The difference in size between this set and the other two is entirely accounted for in the player cards - the previous two sets had 84 player cards (7 per team).

My second reason for disappointment in the set was that after there was duplication of players in the player cards between Series One and Series Two, 40 of the 72 players in Series Three appeared in the earlier two sets.

These are minor complaints, however, as the for the most part this is simply another fine effort from Calbee.  The set boasts the great photography that is a staple of Calbee sets:

#183

#205

#221

#189

#211

(In case your wondering, the player cards are numbered in continuation of the earlier sets.  Series One had cards 1-84, Series Two had cards 85-168 while this Series has cards 169-240.)

I usually don't get hung up on who appears in a particular Calbee Series since it's only a third of the total set for the year but I'll mention that this one has Shohei Ohtani, Tetsuto Yamada, Shintaro Fujinami and Kenta Maeda among many others.

The Exciting Scene subset is a continuation of the same subset in Series One.  It's numbered ES-13 to ES24.  As you could probably guess, there's one card dedicated to each team.  Each card highlights some "exciting scene" from earlier this season.  Like the earlier Series, I'm not entirely sure what all the events are but the set includes Sho Nakata, Takeya Nakamura (I think this has to do with him setting the grand slam record), Yuki Matsui, Hiroki Kuroda, Yasuaki Yamasaki, Hayato Takagi and Kazuhiro Wada (for his 2000th hit).  There's also a card for the Tigers' 5000th victory.  But my favorite card is for Yuki Yangita of the Hawks - it commemorates him breaking the Baystars' scoreboard on June 3:

#ES-13

Back of #ES-13

The four checklist cards show additional highlights from the beginning of the season - Tomoya Mori's two homer game on June 3, Kiyoshi Nakahata celebrating the Baystars win over the Tigers on May 22,  Kazuo Matsui stealing his 350th base in NPB and Shohei Tateyama making his first start for the Swallows for two and half seasons on June 28.  Here's the Matsui card:

#C-11

All the cards can be seen here.