Rookies and Players On New Teams In Calbee Series One

Calbee released this year's Series One last week, about six weeks later than the set usually comes out.  I had wondered back in March when I had learned from Calbee what their release plan for the set was whether they'd take advantage of the delay to include rookies and/or players who had changed teams over the winter in the set.  From what I can tell looking at the cards over at Jambalaya, I don't believe that they did.  

I was pretty confident that Calbee had included rookies and players who had changed teams - let's call the "newcomers" because I'm going to get sick of typing out that phrase pretty quick - in the Series One sets from past years.  I was also pretty confident that they hadn't done so in a while.  But I didn't have a sense for how often they had done it so I decided to do some research.

I decided the best way to do this would be to brute force it.  I have complete Calbee sets from 2012 to 2024 so I basically looked at each card from each set to see if (a) it was from Series One and (b) if the player on the card was a "newcomer" to their team.  This turned out to be a little easier than it sounds due to a feature of Calbee's card backs.  Like BBM's card backs, you can see the teams that a player has belonged to by looking at Calbee's card backs.  It's probably easiest to show an example:

2012 Calbee Series One #038

This card is for Takeshi Yamasaki.  The text I highlighted in the red oval lists that he was an infielder taken in the second round of the 1986 draft and then lists the teams he played for - Aikodai Meiden High School, Chunichi, Orix, Rakuten and then, starting in 2012, Chunichi again.  Only the player's current team has a year associated with it.  This made it pretty straightforward - I just had to check the card backs and look for the year the set was released in this section.  So I looked for "2012" in the 2012 card backs, "2013" in the 2013 card backs, etc.  Then I just had to verify that the card was in Series One which I could tell by the card number (001-072 in 2012-13, 2016-22; 001-084 in 2014-15 and 001-060 in 2023-24).  

What I found didn't really surprise me a lot.  I found a total of 45 "newcomer" cards between 2012 and 2019.  There were five each in 2012 and 2014; nine in 2015; five in 2016; four in 2017; 13(!) in 2018 and four in 2019.  That 13 in 2018 is mostly due to the "Dora-Ichi" subset that included the first round draft picks from the 2017 draft.  Other Calbee sets have had similar subsets (most notably 2013 which has Shohei Ohtani's first Calbee card) but they're usually included the Series Two set (although the 2011 Series One set also had this subset so that Calbee could get a card of Yuki Saitoh out sooner).  If we don't include that subset, the 2018 set would only have one "newcomer" card.

I came up with three categories for the players on the cards - "Rookie", "New Team" (a player who switched teams over the winter via either free agency or a trade) and "Overseas Return" (a player returning to NPB after playing in North America). I discovered that there was the same number of "Rookie" cards as "New Team" cards - 20 each.  Once again, though, the number of "Rookie" cards includes all twelve of the "Dora-Ichi" cards from the 2018 set.  There were only five "Overseas Return" players which kind of surprised me - it had felt like there were more when I was compiling the list.

I was also surprised that there were no "newcomer" cards in the 2013 set which seemed kind of odd.  It did not surprise me, however, that there have been none since the 2019 set.  As I said above, I'd felt pretty confident that it had been a while since a Series One set had had any of these cards and I think five years (six if you include this year) counts as "a while").

Here's a list of all the cards I found:

Year	Player	Card Number	Type
2012	Lee, Dae-ho	024	New Team
2012	Yamasaki, Takeshi	038	New Team
2012	Sugiuchi, Toshiya	053	New Team
2012	Murata, Shuichi	055	New Team
2012	Ramirez, Alex	070	New Team
2014	Matsui, Yuki	001	Rookie
2014	Mori, Tomoya	010	Rookie
2014	Wakui, Hideaki	017	New Team
2014	Ibata, Hirokazu	043	New Team
2014	Ohsera, Daichi	059	Rookie
2015	Matsuzaka, Daisuke	004	Overseas Return
2015	Nakajima, Hiroyuki	008	Overseas Return
2015	Koyano, Eiichi	012	New Team
2015	Tanaka, Kensuke	015	Overseas Return
2015	Arihara, Kohei	019	Rookie
2015	Anraku, Tomohiro	038	Rookie
2015	Arai, Takahiro	060	New Team
2015	Ohbiki, Keiji	078	New Team
2015	Naruse, Yoshihisa	081	New Team
2016	Wada, Tsuyoshi	004	Overseas Return
2016	Imae, Toshiaki	033	New Team
2016	Okoye, Louis	034	Rookie
2016	Sakaguchi, Tomotaka	041	New Team
2016	Fujikawa, Kyuji	053	Overseas Return
2017	Kishi, Takayuki	027	New Team
2017	Yoh, Daikan	043	New Team
2017	Yamaguchi, Shun	047	New Team
2017	Itoi, Yoshio	057	New Team
2018	Matsui, Kazuo	009	New Team
2018	Yoshizumi, Haruto	D-01	Rookie
2018	Saito, Hiromasa	D-02	Rookie
2018	Kondoh, Hiroki	D-03	Rookie
2018	Tajima, Daiki	D-04	Rookie
2018	Kiyomiya, Kotaro	D-05	Rookie
2018	Yasuda, Hisanori	D-06	Rookie
2018	Nakamura, Shosei	D-07	Rookie
2018	Baba, Kosuke	D-08	Rookie
2018	Azuma, Katsuki	D-09	Rookie
2018	Kuwahara, Takuya	D-10	Rookie
2018	Suzuki, Hiroshi	D-11	Rookie
2018	Murakami, Munetaka	D-12	Rookie
2019	Kaneko, Chihiro	016	New Team
2019	Fujiwara, Kyota	025	Rookie
2019	Neo, Akira	062	Rookie
2019	Nishi, Yuki	069	New Team

One thing that struck me as I was looking at the cards was that it sometimes it became obvious that a card was a "newcomer" card just by looking at the card front.  Since most of the photos on Calbee cards are action shots from games, any photo that looks different really stands out.  For Calbee to get a photo of a "newcomer" into a set being released in mid to late March, that photo would have to be taken at training camp in early February, before even any practice games would be played.  As a result, a lot of the photos show the player practicing or, in a couple cases, just standing around.  Here's an example "newcomer" card from each year:

2012 Calbee Series One #024

2014 Calbee Series One #043

2015 Calbee Series One #004

2016 Calbee Series One #041

2017 Calbee Series One #057

2018 Calbee Series One #009

2019 Calbee Series One #016

Note - I had done a post on Calbee rookies a few years back which is why I decided against using any cards of rookies in this post.