2022 Calbee Series Three

Calbee's third "set" of the year - Series Three - was released about six weeks ago now and I got my copy in the mail with the other sets I've been writing about lately about two weeks ago.  As you might guess from the name, this "set" is a continuation of Calbee's set for the year which was started in Series One in March and continued in Series Two in June. The base set for Series Three consists of 88 cards - 72 "regular" player cards (numbered 145 to 216), 12 "Exciting Scene" cards and four checklist cards (numbered C-09 to C-12).

If you've read my posts about the two previous Series this year then you'll know that I was pretty critical of Calbee's photo selection for their "regular" cards.  Unfortunately it really didn't improve a whole lot with Series Three - still way too many "batters batting, pitchers pitching and catcher catching" poses.  And there were no horizontally formatted cards either, meaning that none of the three Series this year had any.  Since the Series is just a third of the complete set it doesn't have all the NPB stars but it does have regular cards for Yuki Yangita, Daichi Ohsera, Koji Chikamoto, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Yutaro Sugimoto, Yuma Mune, Hotaka Yamakawa, Yasuhiro Ogawa, Shugo Maki and Kazuma Okamoto.  It also has the first card of Shogo Akiyama with the Carp, the team he signed with after he returned to Japan from the US in mid-season.  The set also includes a couple new foreign players - Gregory Polanco, Adam Walker, Jose Marmolejos and Arimendy Alcantara - and a couple rookies - Natsuo Takizawa, Shunsuke Sato, Koki Kitayama and Taisei (Ota).  It looks like there's only six players with "regular" cards in this set that also had "regular" cards in one of the two previous sets - that's a lot less than normal.  For example, last year there were 27 guys in Series Three who had appeared in either Series One or Two.

Here's some example cards - I used some of the better photos:

#164 (Shogo Akiyama)

#159 (Gregory Polanco)

#178 (Yasuaki Yamasaki)

#188 (Shogo Nakamura)

#145 (Jose Osuna)

#181 (Yuma Mune)

The "Exciting Scene" subset highlights 12 significant events (1 per team) from the first half of the season (roughly).  This includes events like Kazuma Okamoto's 150th home run, the no-hitter Yudai Ohno lost in the 10th inning and Takeya Nakamura moving into the top 15 career NPB home run leaders (he's actually in 14th place now) but my favorite cards in this subset are for the four no-hitters that were thrown before the end of June - Roki Sasaki's perfect game along with no-no's for Nao Higashihama, Shota Imanaga and Yoshinobu Yamamoto:

#ES-06, ES-07

#ES-08, ES-10

 The checklist cards as usual feature probably the best photos of the entire set.  The cards commemorate some more early season highlights including Akira Neo's pitching debut; Chusei Mannami's 10th inning home run on April 17th against the Marines which was the Fighter's only hit in Roki Sasaki's first game after his perfect game; Hiromu Ise's 21 consecutive scoreless inning streak and Tatsushi Matsuda's 150th save.  Here's the Neo card:

#C-09

All the cards can be seen over at Jambalaya.