Japanese Baseball Cards: Zippy Zapped Yet Again!

Thursday, February 19, 2026

Zippy Zapped Yet Again!

I arrived home from work Tuesday evening to discover another trans-Pacific delivery from Kenny (aka Zippy Zappy). The brown envelope contained a whopping 13 cards - two from Calbee and eleven from Epoch.

I'll start off with the Calbees. These are two more of their "Pro Yakyu Spirits A" cards although it was not immediately obvious if they were from the set that was released at the beginning of last December (which Kenny had sent me a card from earlier this year) or the one that came out at the end of last month (both sets are called the same thing - "Pro Yakyu Spirits A"). I finally realized that the card numbers indicated that they were both from the set from last month (even though the "cover date" on the cards is 2025):

2025 Calbee Pro Yakyu Spirits A #PS-41 (Naofumi Kizawa)

2025 Calbee Pro Yakyu Spirits A #PS-44 (Hiromi Itoh)

I guess had expected that these cards would have "Series2" on them since the ones from December had "Series1" but they don't. Well, actually now that I look at all the cards in the set over at Jambalaya, I see that the "Anniversary Player" cards from the set do have "Series2" on them (as opposed to these which are "Prospi Selection" cards). So cards PS-01 to PS-24 which were in the set released in December are "Series1", as are cards PS-24 to PS-48 which were in the set released in January. But cards PS-49 to PS-72 that are also in the set released in January are labeled "Series2". Make perfect sense, right?

Kenny figured out the best way to keep them straight: "I thought these were all the same set but the only difference was whether they came 1 per bag or 2 per bag." (The set from December was

The Epoch cards were much less confusing. They were all from last year's NPB set. I was really happy to get these as Epoch was the only Japanese card manufacturer that I hadn't gotten any cards from last year: