2024 Calbee Series Two

Calbee initially announced that this year's Series Two set would be released at the end of June but it actually wasn't until late July that the cards started showing up in stores.  It was just one more in a line of odd things that I feel has plagued Calbee's releases over the past two years with last year's Series Two getting delayed until August, Series Three being cancelled altogether and the oddball Hawks set apparently also being delayed by a few months.  Not to mention the distribution issues that prevented people from being able to find the chip bags for last year's Series One in stores for a while.  Then there's all the errors with Series One this year - "Kaiju" Itoh, the sparkle-less Star and Legend cards and the misprint on the chip bags themselves. 

But enough about that, let's talk about the cards.  The set contains 60 "regular" player cards, 12 "Player's Association President" cards and six checklist cards for a total of 78 cards.  This makes it one of the smallest Calbee sets in recent memory - the only smaller one I can think of was last year's Series Two set since it only had four checklist cards.

The 60 "regular" player cards are numbered 61-120 in continuation of the numbering from the Series One set.  The cards continue the same design that Series One used, with the player names in Japanese one them (the Calbee standard for even-numbered years since 2016).  

In my post about Series One, I had mentioned that it didn't have "regular" player cards for a number of NPB's biggest stars such as Kazuma Okamoto, Shugo Maki, Yuki Yanagita, Kensuke Kondoh, Roki Sasaki and Munetaka Murakami.  Series Two makes up for this a little with cards for Murakami and Sasaki but the other four are still missing.  With Series Two likely being the final Calbee baseball set for 2024, it means that there will be no "regular" Calbee cards for Okamoto, Maki, Yanagita and Kondoh this year (and this will make it the second year in row that Kondoh doesn't have a "regular" Calbee card).

Besides the afore-mentioned Sasaki and Murakami, the big names in the set are probably Chusei Mannami, Takeya Nakamura, Koji Chikamoto, Tomoya Mori, Teruaki Satoh and Hayato Sakamoto.  Unlike Series One, Series Two contains players who changed teams over the winter like Yuito Mori, Hiroski Kaino, Ryoma Nishikawa and Hotoka Yamakawa and a couple rookies - Ryuki Watarari and Shunsuke Sasaki.  There's also a fair number of Western players including Gregory Polanco, Adam Walker, Ariel Martinez, Sheldon Neuse and Cy Sneed.

I usually beat up on Calbee a lot for their photo selection being pretty dull and this set gives me no reason to stop.  For the most part, it's the usual collection of dull "pitchers pitching, batters batting" poses without even a single "catchers catching" shot.  On the plus side, there is one horizontal oriented card to break up the monotony a little and Watarai's photo is pretty good.  And I will repeat my comment from Series One that despite the dull photos, the cards themselves look good.  Here's some example cards:

#099 Roki Sasaki

#084 Munetaka Murakami

#061 Shota Morishita

#103 Adam Walker

#071 Ryuki Watarai

#118 Kenya Suzuki

If it wasn't clear, I'm somewhat puzzled by the decisions that Calbee made on player selection for this set.  I'm also puzzled by the theme of the one subset.  It's getting translated as something like "Player's Association President" in the set's checklist although the text on the card itself translates as "Player Chairman".  I think these are each team's representative to the Player's Association.  While I am a firm supporter of organized labor, I think it's kind of an odd theme for a subset.  The subset includes cards for players like Ukyo Shuto, Yutaro Sugimoto and Shota Tonosaki.  The cards themselves have kind of an ugly design with big triangles taking up the upper left and lower right corners of the card.  The photos are all pretty dull, continuing the "pitchers pitching, batters batting" theme.  Here's the card for Dragons rep Yuya Yanagi as an example:

#PL-06

The backs of the cards have each team's ichi-gun Opening Day roster which seems somewhat unrelated to the fronts of the cards so it's another oddity about the set:

#PL-06

The six checklist cards also continue the numbering established in Series One.  They're numbered C-07 to C-12.  The cards all feature events from the first week or so of the season - the first victories for new managers Shinnosuke Abe and Toshiaki Imae; Norichika Aoki getting his 2,706 NPB-MLB hit, moving him into fifth place all time; Hideaki Wakui getting his 2000th strikeout; Natsuki Takeuchi getting his first win and Chusei Mannami hitting the 100th home run at the Fighters new stadium.  Usually the checklist cards have some of the better photos in Calbee's sets but I feel like they picked the dullest shots for this set.  Four of the cards (Abe, Wakui, Imae and Takeuchi) just show the player (or manager) basking in the post-game recognition of their honor and the Aoki card shows him just holding up his hands at first base (although admittedly that might be a better photo than that of almost all the "regular" player cards).  I think the only checklist card with a photo I like is the Mannami one:

#C-12

You can take a look at all of the cards over at Jambalaya and decided for yourself if I'm being too picky about the set.  As I said, I'm somewhat puzzled by it as well as kind of disappointed again.