2020 Calbee Series Three

 The latest set from Calbee, Series Three, was released a few weeks ago.  As the name implies, this is the third part of Calbee's regular set this year.  It was preceded by Series One in March and Series Two in early July.

The set contains 89 cards - one more than Series One and two more than Series Two.  The 89th card kind of makes up for a deficiency in Series Two which I'll get to in a minute.  There are 72 "regular" player cards (6 per team), 12 "First Win" cards and five checklist cards.

Player selection usually doesn't mean much with a Calbee set since it's only a third of the total set but this set seems a little light on stars.  Probably the biggest names in the set are Yuki Yanagita, Hotaka Yamakawa, Ryosuke Kikuchi, Yoshiharu Maru and Shota Imanaga.  There's are several foreign players - Jose Lopez, Dayan Viciedo, Alcides Escobar, Tyler Austion, Kris Johnson, Gerardo Parra, Cory Spangenberg and Adam Jones - and one rookie - Yuya Sakamoto of the Baystars.  34 of the players had cards in either Series One or Series Two.

The photos are OK.  Calbee still has way too many "pitchers pitching, batters batting" photos but there's some good photos in the set.  There's a handful of photos using a horizontal format which I always like.  Here's some example cards:

#147 Sosuke Genda

#189 Yuya Sakamoto

#211 Alcides Escobar

#202 Tsubasa Aizawa

#176 Shunta Gotoh

#165 Shogo Nakamura

The 12 card "First Win" subset celebrates the first win of the 2020 season for each of the NPB teams.  The front of the card features a player who (I assume) was instrumental in the win including Tetsuto Yamada, Sho Nakata, Takahiro Norimoto, Zach Neal, Brandon Laird and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.  The player names are not in English on them.

#FW-09 Koyo Aoyagi

The checklist cards as usual feature highlights from the season.  What's unusual in this case is that there are five of them instead of the standard three.  This looks to me to be Calbee's way of making up for the fact that Series Two only had three checklist cards.  The players featured on the checklists are Yusuke Ohyama of the Tigers, Seiya Inoue of the Marines, Haruki Nishikawa of the Fighters, Takaya Ishikawa of the Dragons and Yu Suzuki of the Buffaloes.  Here's the Ishikawa card - I think it commemorates his first hit in NPB on July 12th:

#C-11

Ishikawa and Sakamoto bring the count of cards of rookie players in the 2020 Calbee set to six.  This is the lowest number of rookie cards since the 2015 set which also only had six.  Ishikawa had a card in Series Two as well so there's only five rookie players, the fewest since I started getting the complete Calbee sets since 2012.

As always you can check out all the cards over at Jambalaya, including the Star insert cards and the "Special Limited Box Set" featuring all 12 Opening Day cleanup hitters which was available for sale on Calbee's Amazon Japan store.