It was Sugano who caught my eye because I noticed that not only had he not had a "regular" Calbee card in 2019, he didn't have one in 2018 or 2017 either. Before this year his most recent "regular" Calbee card had been in the 2016 set. I've never really looked all that hard but I don't know of any case where that big of a name didn't have a regular Calbee card three years in a row.
Now to be fair - 2017 was an unusual year since Calbee only issued two Series instead of the usual three due to the Hokkaido Potato Crisis so there was a larger than than normal number of players who didn't have "regular" player cards that year including Shohei Ohtani, Tetsuto Yamada, Yoshitomo Tsutsugoh, Hayato Sakamoto, Takehiro Norimoto, and Yuki Yanagita. Sugano had a "Title Holder" card that year, an "Exciting Scene" card in the 2018 set and "Title Holder" and "Starting Pitcher" cards in 2019.
I thought I'd share his last two "regular" Calbee cards - one from 2016 and the other from this year:
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| 2016 Calbee #046 |
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| 2020 Calbee #039 |
4 comments:
Interesting, crazy that you were able to catch that!
I've said it before and I'll say it again, Calbee needs to get in on the sumo wrestling market sooner than later. There is a ton of demand for sumo wrestling cards these days and BBM is not able to satisfy the market.....can't believe they don't notice!
At the end of every year I do a post summarizing the year's Calbee releases. One of the things I usually do in those posts is list the players who were in the subsets but didn't have regular cards. I was looking at those the other day and realized that I had listed Sugano several times.
I wonder if BBM somehow has an exclusive license for sumo cards. Wild that neither Calbee or Epoch or anyone else do sumo cards.
That is really crazy, I'd never really noticed that there were big names who appeared on subset cards but not regular set cards before.
Maybe the thinking is "Well, he's already on a subset card, so we should use the spot in the regular set for a player who otherwise wouldn't be in the set."
This sort of flies in the face of the logic of having subsets in the US (to increase the number of cards of star players) but I could see that being the logic Calbee would follow.
>Maybe the thinking is "Well, he's already on a subset card, so we should use the spot in the regular set for a player who otherwise wouldn't be in the set."
I'd agree with that except that there are usually multiple "regular" cards for other players. There were 24 players with two regular cards in each of the last two year's sets.
I don't know how long Calbee's been doing this but I do know it's been at least since 2012, the first year I have a complete Calbee set for.
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