2021 Calbee Series Three

Calbee released this year's Series Three set about a month ago.  Like their earlier Series One and Series Two sets, the Series Three set contained 88 cards.  The 88 cards are split between 72 player cards, 12 "Interleague Play" cards and the usual four checklist cards.

As always the 72 player cards are split evenly between the 12 teams.  Player selection is always a little difficult to judge for a Calbee set since this is only one third of their full set but this set seems a bit light on stars.  Probably the biggest names are Seiya Suzuki, Tetsuto Yamada, Hayato Sakamoto, Masahiro Tanaka and Tomoyuki Sugano.  On the other hand there's seven rookies which is higher than normal - Ryota Isobata, Hiromi Itoh, Masashi Itoh, Daisuke Moriura, Takuma Nakano, Haruki Ohmichi and Teruaki Sato.  Sato had a card in the Series Two set as well.  He's not the only player who also appeared in one of the earlier sets - 27 players in this set were in either Series One or Series Two.

I complain about the lack of interesting photos in most of Calbee's sets recently and I'm happy to say that they really improved things with this set.  There's some nice departures from the standard "batters batting, pitchers pitching and catchers catching" poses.  My only real gripe is there's only three cards using a horizontal format.  Here's some examples:

#198

#192

#202

#156

#157

#149

#179

The 12 card "Interleague Play" cards feature a highlight for each team during interleague play back in June.  The backs of the cards have the results of each team's interleague game.  The players featured on the cards include Tsuyoshi Wada, Roki Sasaki, Hideaki Wakui, Kosuke Fukudome, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Norichika Aoki and Po-Jung Wang.  Here's Wang's card:

#IL-05

The four checklist cards feature highlights from May and June.  One of the cards shows the Buffaloes celebrating being interleague champions but I'm not quite sure what the other three highlights are.  I do know that they feature Kenshi Sugiya of the Fighters, Shosei Nakamura of the Carp and Masanori Ishikawa of the Swallows.  Here's Nakamura's card:

#C-10

As always you can see all the cards over at Jambalaya including the Star insert cards and the limited edition box set sold on Calbee's Amazon.co.jp called something like "Total Victory".