2023 Calbee Series One

I got my copy of Calbee's Series One set for this year earlier this week.  It's an 82 card base set split between 60 "regular" player cards (5 per team), 18 "Title Holder" cards and four checklist cards.  The 60 "regular" player cards is a drop from the 72 that's been a standard for Calbee for the last seven or eight years.

The drop of in cards notwithstanding, the set's pretty much what we've come to expect from a Calbee set which is good and bad.  The good is that the cards have the usual simple design without much distractions.  The design actually is pretty much what Calbee cards have looked like since roughly 1997.  And since it's an odd numbered year this year the player names on the front of the cards are in English.  The bad is that the photos are somewhat predictable although they're slightly better than last year's photos.

It's always hard to judge player selection for a Calbee set since this is really only a third of this year's set.  I always feel that Series One is a little short on the big names, at least when it comes to the "regular" player cards, because usually Calbee doesn't like to have multiple cards of a player in an individual series and there's a bunch of stars in the "Title Holder" subset.  This one does have Masahiro Tanaka, Tetsuto Yamada, Hayato Sakamoto, Kazuma Okamoto, Yudai Ohno and Yutaro Sugimoto.  There are no rookies in the set and no players who changed teams over the winter.  In fact, all the photos appear to be from last year - the Baystars players are in their old uniforms.  

As I mentioned earlier, I think the photos are a little better than last year but that's not saying much - I really felt like Calbee was mailing it in last year.  There's a little more variety of poses beyond the standard "pitchers pitching, batters batting and catchers catching" - several "fielders fielding" and one "runner running".  There's only one card that uses a horizontal format but that again is a welcome change from last year where there were none in all three sets combined.  Here's some examples:

#024

#039

#054

#010

#030

#020

#047

The "Title Holder" subset is Calbee's version of BBM's Leader subset from the Fusion set.  It has cards for last year's MVP and Rookie Of The Year awards as well as the major statistical categories - batting average, home runs, wins, ERA, etc.  As I mentioned before, this subset includes several of the bigger stars in NPB right now - Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Munetaka Murakami and Hotoka Yamakawa.  It's missing the Pacific League OBP Leader from last year since Masataka Yoshida is not in NPB this year.  Oddly enough, the subset includes the Central League Holds Leader Yariel Rodriguez from the Dragons who will also not be playing in NPB this year - he defected from Cuba in late March after the set went to press.  It will likely be his only Japanese baseball card this year.  Here's an example card of Yamamoto - you can see the front of the card lists the categories he led the PL in last year (wins, ERA and strikeouts) as well as his MVP award:

#TH-01

Lastly there are the four checklist cards that show action from late last season.  I feel kind of silly that after all these years, I had never noticed before that Calbee's twelve checklist cards (four per Series) show a scene from each of the twelve teams.  The Series One cards always feature last year's first and second place finishers from each league so this time around they have the Buffaloes (celebrating winning the Nippon Series), the Swallows (Murakami's 56th home run), the Hawks (Tsuyoshi Wada getting his 150th NPB victory) and the Baystars (Masaya Kyoyama doing something in August).  Here's the Swallows one (which means Murakami actually has two cards in the set):

#C-02

To sum it up - it's a Calbee set.  There aren't any real surprises but it's a nice looking (if a little bland) set.  You can see all the cards (including the "Star" and "Legend" inserts) over at Jambalaya.