2021 In Review - Calbee

Calbee did their usual thing in 2021, issuing their flagship set in three separate Series.  As Sean has pointed out to me in the past, the timing of the release of each series corresponded to the beginning of a season - Series One came out right around the beginning of spring in March, Series Two came out in June at the beginning of summer and Series Three came out in September as autumn began.  

Each of the Series had an 88 card base set consisting of 72 "regular" player cards (six per team), a 12 card subset of some kind and four checklist cards.  The subset for Series One was "Exciting Scene" while the Series Two subset was "Opening Pitchers" and the Series Three subset was "Interleague Play".  Series One had two insert sets - a six card "Legend" set for 2020 retirees and a 25 card "Title Holder" set - while the other two Series each had a 24 card "Star" insert set.  Each set had a limited edition 12 card box set associated with it that could only be purchased through Calbee's Amazon.co.jp store.  The sets were "Strikeout Leaders" for Series One, "RBI Leaders" for Series Two and "Victory Leaders" for Series Three.

I always feel one of the oddities about the "regular" player cards in Calbee's sets each year is their player selection.  As usual, there's a handful of players who have multiple cards in the set so instead of there being 216 unique players in the "regular" cards there's only 189 because 27 players have two cards.  These players include Tetsuto Yamada, Seiya Suzuki, Teruaki Satoh, Sosuke Genda, Nobuhiro Matsuda, Neftali Soto and Dayan Viciedo.  On the flip side, there's another handful of players who have cards in the subsets but don't have a "regular" player card.  This includes Yasunobu Yamamoto, Hideaki Wakui and Shintaro Fujinami, who both appear in all three subsets as well as Roki Sasaki (Interleague Play), Kosuke Fukudome (Interleague Play), Shuta Ishikawa (Opening Pitcher), Ryosuke Kikuchi (Exciting Scene and Interleague Play) and Po-Jung Wang (Interleague Play).  

For only the second time since 2016, Calbee did not issue a set for Samurai Japan.  Typically their Samurai Japan sets have come out in November and featured players who played for the team in the second half of the previous year and the first half of the current year.  For example, the 2016 set had cards for players on the Premier 12 team from November of 2015 and the friendlies against Taiwan in March of 2016.  I'm hoping that this means that Calbee will issue a Samurai Japan set in November of 2022 which will include the Olympic team as well as the team that suits up to play Taiwan this March.  The downside is that any player who spends 2022 in MLB (like Seiya Suzuki is hoping to) will not be in the set.