2022 Calbee Series Two

I picked up the Calbee's latest "set", Series Two, a few weeks ago.  As the name implies, this is the second of the three series of cards that Calbee is expected to issue their annual flagship set in this year.  Series One contained cards 1-72 while this Series has cards 73-144.  Well, that's the numbering of the 72 "regular" cards in this Series - there's also two subsets (or non-premium insert sets) that are considered part of the base set - a 12 card "OBP Leader" set and four checklist cards.  Between the regular cards and the two subsets, there's a total of 88 cards in the set.

Once again Calbee has really gone out of their way to pick boring photos for most of their cards.  As usual there are way too many pictures of "batters batting, pitchers pitching and catchers catching".  Like Series One, there are no horizontally formatted cards to break up the monotony either.  On the plus side, there's two cards showing significant events - Tetsuto Yamada's 250th home run and Riki Sasaki's perfect game - and at least all the photos appear to be taken this year (the Fighters are shown in their new uniforms which was not the case in Series One).

The set contains a few more stars than Series One did as it has Yamada, Sasaki, Kodai Senga, Teruaki Sato, Masahiro Tanaka, Hayato Sakamoto and Tomoyuki Sugano in it.  The set also contains rookie cards for Ko Matsukawa, Kosuke Ukai, and Chihiro Sumida along with a couple of guys who changed teams over the winter - Haruki Nishikawa and Taishi Ohta.  Like BBM and Epoch's flagship sets so far this year, no foreign players who are new to Japan appear in the regular cards of the set (although one does in the checklists - I'll get to that in a minute).

Here's some examples, including a couple of the better looking cards:

#117 (Roki Sasaki)

#086 Hayato Sakamoto

#073 Tetsuto Yamada

#122 Ryosuke Tatsumi

#100 Yudai Ohno

#143 Gakuto Wakabayashi

#134 Hiromi Itoh

I was kind of disappointed with the "OBP Leader" subset.  Usually Calbee's 12 card subset in their sets has something kind of interesting, be it the first round picks of the previous year's draft, "Exciting Moments" featuring recent events or milestones or even the Opening Day starters for each of the 12 teams.  Frequently the photos in the subset are better than the ones on the "regular" cards of the set.  But most of these cards just show a dull "batter batting" shot superimposed on a dark background with rays of light coming from behind the player.  And while supposedly these are supposed to be the OBP leader from last year for each team, there's a bit of a problem - the Carp's team leader in OBP from last year is currently a member of the Chicago Cubs.  As a result, Shogo Sakakura is featured instead, with a note on the back of the card that he was actually second on the team behind Seiya Suzuki:

#O-04

Back of #O-04

The checklist cards are probably the best cards in the set.  They're numbered from C-05 to C-08 (since Series One had C-01 to C-04) and feature highlights from the first week of the season.  Three of the cards showcase rookies Taisei Ota, Yuma Yasuda and Shota Suekane while the fourth shows Hawks infielder Freddy Galvis hitting a grand slam on Opening Day - this card of Galvis is the only flagship card from either BBM, Epoch or Calbee so far this year to feature a new foreign player:

#C-08

As you can probably guess, my feeling towards this set is kind of "meh".  This is pretty much a generic recent Calbee set which - to echo what's Sean's been saying about them lately - means it's mediocre.

As always you can check out the cards yourself (along with the inserts) over at Jambalaya.