Calbee Checklists

I was kind of embarrassed that it took until early last year for me to realize that Calbee's always (or nearly always) had twelve checklist cards across their full set for a reason - there's one checklist card dedicated to each of the twelve NPB teams.  To be clear, what I mean by that is not the checklist cards list each team's cards separately but that each of the twelve cards shows a photo that's related to a different team.  So for example, in the two 2024 Calbee Series, the checklists in Series One showed photos from the Tigers, Buffaloes,  Carp, Marines, Baystars and Hawks and those in Series Two showed photos from the Giants, Swallows, Dragons, Eagles, Lions and Fighters.

I got curious and wondered when Calbee started doing this.  After all, I had done a big "Calbee History" series a couple years ago and never noticed it.  So I did a little research and discovered that they started doing it in 2004 which kind of makes sense.  Calbee didn't have checklist cards with their sets until 1997 and the themes for them varied from year to year.  I don't know what all of the themes were but they were sequential photos of certain players in 1998 (Hideki Matsui in Series One, Yoshinobu Takahashi in Series Two and Kazuhiro Sasaki in Series Three) and 2000 (Daisuke Matsuzaka in Series One, Koji Uehara in Series Two and Ichiro in Series Three); six card puzzles in 2001 (Matsuzaka and Matsui in Series One, Kazuhisa Ishii and Norihiro Nakamura in Series Two); player pairs in 2002 (with one player from each team represented) and game highlights in 2003 (2002 Nippon Series highlights in Series One and early season highlights in Series Two).  2003 was the first year that Calbee started following the lead of BBM and issuing the same number of "regular" player cards for each team but it wasn't until a year later that they did the same with the checklist cards.

Here's chart showing the break down of the checklists by team since 2004:

Year	Marines	Dragons	Hawks	Tigers	Carp	Fighters	Orix	Lions	Eagles*	Swallows	Baystars	Giants
2004	C-1	C-8	C-6	C-7	C-3	C-12	C-5	C-10	C-2	C-9	C-4	C-11
2005	C-12	C-5	C-1	C-10	C-7	C-4	C-2	C-11	C-3	C-8	C-6	C-9
2006	C-1	C-4	C-3	C-2	C-12	C-9	C-7	C-5	C-11	C-8	C-6	C-10
2007	C-7	C-2	C-5	C-4	C-10	C-1	C-9	C-3	C-11	C-6	C-12	C-8
2008	C-4	C-3	C-6	C-5	C-9	C-2	C-12	C-10	C-8	C-11	C-7	C-1
2009	C-7	C-6	C-11	C-4	C-8	C-5	C-3	C-1	C-9	C-10	C-12	C-2
2010	C-10	C-3	C-6	C-7	C-9	C-2	C-12	C-8	C-4	C-5	C-11	C-1
2011	C-8	C-11	C-12	C-9	C-3	C-6	C-4	C-10	C-2	C-5	C-1	C-7
2012	C-11	C-2	C-1	C-8	C-10	C-3	C-7	C-5	C-9	C-4	C-12	C-6
2013	C-3	C-10	C-7	C-4	C-6	C-11	C-12	C-9	C-5	C-8	C-2	C-12
2014	C-8	C-5	C-6	C-9	C-7	C-2	C-4	C-10	C-12	C-1	C-3	C-11
2015	C-7	C-8	C-1	C-4	C-6	C-5	C-3	C-9	C-11	C-12	C-10	C-2
2016	C-5	C-10	C-1	C-6	C-8	C-3	C-9	C-7	C-11	C-2	C-12	C-4
2017	C-5		C-3	C-8	C-2	C-1		C-7			C-6	C-4
2018	C-11	C-10	C-1	C-4	C-2	C-9	C-7	C-3	C-5	C-12	C-6	C-8
2019	C-09	C-10	C-03	C-12	C-02	C-05	C-07	C-01	C-11	C-04	C-08	C-06
2020	C-09	C-11	C-03	C-08	C-06	C-10	C-12	C-01	C-05	C-07	C-04	C-02
2021	C-03	C-06	C-01	C-04	C-10	C-09	C-11	C-05	C-07	C-12	C-08	C-02
2022	C-04	C-09	C-08	C-03	C-07	C-10	C-02	C-12	C-06	C-01	C-11	C-05
2023			C-03	C-07			C-01	C-05	C-06	C-02	C-04	C-08
2024	C-04	C-09	C-06	C-01	C-03	C-12	C-02	C-11	C-10	C-08	C-05	C-07

*Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes in 2004

You'll notice that there's two years - 2017 and 2023 - where several teams didn't have checklists.  In both of those years, Calbee had intended to publish three sets but ultimately only issued two.  As a result, each set only had eight checklists so four teams ended up without getting represented.

One of the things that I've liked about Calbee's checklist cards over the years is that they frequently have better photos than the "regular" player cards do.  Here's a handful of examples from over the years:

2005 Calbee Series Two C-5

2007 Calbee Series Two #C-7

2008 Calbee Series One #C-2

2009 Calbee Series One #C-1

2012 Calbee Series Three #C-11

2014 Calbee Series One #C-2

2015 Calbee Series Three #C-10

2016 Calbee Series One #C-3

2016 Calbee Series One #C-4

2017 Calbee Series Two #C-8

2018 Calbee Series One #C-3

2019 Calbee Series Three #C-09

2020 Calbee Series One #C-01

2021 Calbee Series One #C-01

2022 Calbee Series Three #C-10