Japanese Baseball Cards: 2020 Epoch Carp & Buffaloes Rookies & Stars sets

Friday, March 19, 2021

2020 Epoch Carp & Buffaloes Rookies & Stars sets

After a couple years of issuing "comprehensive" team sets for a subset of the NPB teams in 2018 and 2019 under the "Rookies & Stars" label Epoch last year changed course a little and instead issued 36 card team sets under that label. Obviously with only 36 cards the sets are no longer "comprehensive" (i.e. they don't include all the players on the 70 man roster).

I had bought the Lions set last spring on my own but I asked Ryan to pick up the Carp and the Buffaloes sets for me when they came out later. My reasons for picking them up were different for the two sets.

I wanted the Carp set for two reasons. Number one I liked how it looked and number two I wanted another card of Masato Morishita as he's been a favorite of mine since I saw him pitch for Meiji University a couple years ago. Besides Morishita the set contains the rest of the non-ikusei 2020 Carp rookie class along with the bigger name players on the team like Seiya Suzuki, Daichi Ohsera, Ryosuke Kikuchi, Yusuke Nomura and Kris Johnson. It also includes a card for Emailin Montilla who did not appear in any of the flagship sets from BBM, Calbee or Epoch last year (although he is in the BBM Carp set). The set does not contain a card for manager Shinji Sasaoka.

I got the Buffaloes set for a different reason. BBM no longer includes the ikusei players in their team sets so I try to get cards of them whenever I can. The Buffaloes set included cards for ALL the 2020 Orix rookies, including the ones on the ikusei roster. That does make the set a little rookie heavy however as 13 of the 36 cards feature one of the 2020 rookies! Eight of those 13 are ikusei players*. The rest of the set includes who you'd expect - Masataka Yoshida, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Shunta Gotoh, Taisuke Yamaoka and Adam Jones. Like the Carp set, the Buffaloes does not include a card for the team's manager (which I think was still Norifumi Nishimura when the set came out).

*I should mention that the rookie ikusei players are all also in last year's Rookie Edition set but I wanted cards showing them playing baseball rather than standing around making "guts" poses at their press conference

Both sets suffer from the usual unimaginative player photos although there are a few detours from the standard "pitchers pitching, batters batting, catchers catching" poses. Here's some sample cards: