Cards From Kenny

On Saturday, I received another envelope that Kenny (aka Zippy Zappy) was kind enough to send me from Japan.  As I always say, I'm not sure why Kenny has decided to be so generous to me but I'm happy and grateful that he has.  

This latest envelope contained three cards.  The first two were two more of the Calbee "Pro Yakyu Spirits A" cards like he had previous sent me.   Both of these cards were from the set that came out at the end of January (as opposed to the beginning of last December):

2025 Calbee Pro Yakyu Spirits A #PS-49 (Trey Cabbage)

2025 Calbee Pro Yakyu Spirits A #PS-68 (Kota Tatsu)

The final card was from last year's Topps NPB set and is of Nikita Moiseev, the second pick of the Swallows in the 2024 draft.  Moiseev is kind of an interesting story.  My first thought when I saw this card was that, like Louis Okoye and other players with Western names, one of his parents must have been Japanese.  That's not the case, though, Moiseev's parents are both Russians living in Aichi prefecture.  I don't think he's a Japanese citizen, but because he attended a Japanese high school, he was subject to the NPB draft.  

2025 Topps NPB #197

Moiseev made his ichi-gun debut on Friday, the day before I got his card.

Thanks again for the cards, Kenny!

Calbee And More Team Sets

It's only been two weeks since the last time I did a round up of new set announcements but I figured that it'd be a good time to do another one.  Maybe writing this post will make me feel better about South Korea getting eliminated by the Dominican Republic...

- Calbee's Series One set will officially be released on April 27th but it'll likely start appearing in card shops both in person and on line a few days before that.  The checklist for the set is online already and it unfortunately confirms that Calbee's continuing to produce sets that are smaller than they were just a few years ago.  There are 89 cards in the base set, split between 60 "regular" player cards (five per team), 23 "Title Holder" cards and six checklist cards.  The theme of the checklist cards is mascots which is distressing for two reasons - in previous years the checklist cards featured some of the best photography in Calbee's sets and Calbee did mascots as the theme of their checklist cards last year too.  The fact that there's six checklist cards implies that there will again be only two Calbee "flagship" sets this year with Series Two coming out sometime in the summer - Calbee's intent every year is to include twelve checklist cards across all of their Series - one checklist card featuring each NPB team (although not a list of the cards for that particular team).  There are the usual 24 "Star" insert cards as well as four "Legend" cards featuring players who retired last year - Yuito Mori, Sho Nakata, Hisayoshi Chono and Shingo Kawabata.  There are gold facsimile signature parallels of both the "Star" and "Legend" cards.  There are also 12 "Team Home Run King" cards listed but I'm not sure if these will be available in packs or as some sort of "special box".  Calbee used to have 12 card box sets that were associated with each Series and sold through some on line retailer (most recently Amazon.co.jp) but the equivalent cards from last year's sets were available in packs. 

- BBM has announced two more of their "comprehensive" team sets.  As usual, each set has a base set of 81 cards, most of which are "regular" player cards featuring the manager and the players on the 70 man roster plus a couple subsets (which may not be fully defined yet) to fill out the set.  Each set also has 18 non-premium insert cards split into a variety of sets which also may not be fully defined yet (or may have title that doesn't translated to something that makes any sense).  The sets also have two or three types of premium inserts that are serially numbered - Treasure, Esperanza and Admirar.  There will be rare parallel versions of some of the "regular" player cards that will feature photo variants or different backgrounds.

Release Date	Team	Regular Cards	Subsets	Non-Premium Inserts	Treasure	Esperanza	Admirar	Other
Late May	Carp	63	2025 Topics(4),  Promising New Forces(4), Born In Setouchi(5)	Paramount(9), Tough Enough(3), Carp Nova(3), Promising Future(3)	20	9	6	Autograph cards
Late May	Giants	63	Mascot Gathering(1), Promising Young Players(5), Strongest Unit(2), Three Arrows(3), Grand Slam Trio(3), Reliable Veterans(4)	Giants Pride 2026(15), Rookies(3)	24	9	6	Additional Premium Insets of Cross Foil Signing (15), Combo Cross Foil Signing (2), Triple Cross Foil Signing (1), Triplex 2026 (3), My Fave (12), Super Metallic Giants (9) plus memorabilia cards

Remember that the Giants don't allow their players to have authentic autographed cards.

- Epoch announced the second of their 2026 "Premier Edition" team sets - this one is for the Swallows.  The base set will 40 cards - 38 cards for active players (and manager Takahiro Ikeyama) plus OB cards for Norichika Aoki and Shingo Kawabata.  There's a "hologram" parallel available for each of the base set cards.  The set has the usual large batch of inserts that the "Premier Edition" sets have- three varieties of "Regular Foil Signature" ("silver", "gold" and "hologram") (18 cards each), two varieties of "Regular Decomori Signature" ("hologram" and "hologram parallel") (18 cards each), five varieties of "Time To Shine" ("A","B","C","D","E") (six cards each) and three varieties of "Decomori Signature" ("gold","green" and "hologram") (six cards each).  I think all the inserts are serially numbered.  There are also the "GEM" and "BLACK GEM" "special insert cards" (nine cards in each) that I think are much more limited.  Finally, there are five different types of autographed cards that are available - "Authentic" (37 different), "Star" (6), "Rookie" (7), "Legendary" (2) and some undetermined as yet number of "Combo" autographs.  The set will hit the shelves on April 25th.

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:

2025 Epoch NPB #167

2025 Epoch NPB #107

2025 Epoch NPB #121

2025 Epoch NPB #038

2025 Epoch NPB #075

2025 Epoch NPB #144

2025 Epoch NPB #211

2025 Epoch NPB #229

2025 Epoch NPB #181

2025 Epoch NPB #096

2025 Epoch NPB #002

So once again, thanks for the cards, Kenny!

More 2026 Releases

There's been a couple new set announcement recently, with one of the sets actually being scheduled for release next week, so I figured it was time to do a quick round up of them.

- Calbee is releasing yet another "Pro Yakyu Spirits A" set next week on January 27th.  "Pro Yakyu Spirits A" is a mobile game and this will be the third set that Calbee's done as a tie-in.  This looks like it's a follow-on to the set Calbee released at the beginning of December as the card numbers in the new set are starting where that set ended (and now that I look more carefully at the card from that set that Kenny sent me, I see it says "Series 1" on it).  This new set will have 49 cards - 24 "2025 Prospi Selection", 24 "2025 Anniversary Players" and one "secret" card.  I think the "2025 Prospi Selection" cards (which I assume is something from the game) have kira parallels available while the "2025 Anniversary Players" cards have kira and/or facsimile signature parallels.  Not counting the "secret" card, there are four cards per team.  There's some big names in the set including Yuki Yanagita, Kensuke Kondoh, Hayato Sakamoto and Teruaki Sato.  It somewhat surprisingly includes Munetaka Murakami who I would have thought couldn't be a on an NPB card set for active players but clearly the licensing details aren't what I thought they were.  The checklist is kind of surprisingly heavy on foreign players with ten total including Raidel Martinez and Livan Moinelo.  What's a bit odd is at least three of those foreign players are, like Murakami, no longer the property of the teams they are listed with.  Tayron Guerrero is no longer a Chiba Lotte Marine and Tyler Austin and Trevor Bauer are no longer Yokokama DeNA Baystars.  I believe that this is the first time Bauer has appeared on a card in any of the major Japanese card manufacturers and I suspect it will be the last, at least as an active player.

- The Eagles annual team issued set has been issued by Epoch the past few years and I'm starting to wonder if it should still be considered a "team issued" set.  When the 2025 edition of this set was announced, I assumed it was the 1st Version set with a 2nd Version set to be released later in the year.  That turned out to not be the case so I won't make that mistake with this year's edition which will be released on February 11th.  The base set will contain 77 cards of active players, including development players.  I believe that the 2025 draft picks/2026 rookie class are included.  There are silver and gold facsimile signature parallels of each of these cards.  There are three insert sets - "Key Performances", "Mound Star" and "My Routine" and autographed cards of all the players with the exception of any development players who were not 2025 draft picks (if that makes sense).  There are also Rui Muneyama uniform cards along with the somewhat ubiquitous "GEM" premium insert cards in both "White" and "Black" varieties. 

- TIC (aka "Hits" or "Produce 216") is issuing their first "mini colored paper" or "mini shikishi" team set since their Hawks set last year and, not surprisingly, it's again for the Hawks.  Once again, there's 32 oversized cards available - 16 "normal" and 16 "special with foil autograph".  There's 16 players listed so everyone has a "normal" and a "special" card.  There are real autographs available as well.  This year's edition will be released on March 28th.

First Zippy Zappy-ing Of The New Year

Kenny - aka Zippy Zappy - had given me a heads up a few weeks back that there was a new envelope on its way across the Pacific to me and it showed up at my house today.  It contained two cards, neither of which I already had.  Kenny's always had a pretty good knack for sending me cards that I don't already own which is pretty impressive considering I have a LOT of Japanese cards.  In fairness, however, it's gotten a little easier over the last year since I stopped buying new cards.

Case in point this first card of Koki Kitayama from the Calbee "Pro Yakyu Spirits A" set that was just released about a month ago:

2025 Calbee Pro Yakyu Spirits A #PS-20

It was a little more of a gamble that I didn't have this Bushiroad DreamOrder card of Orlando Calixte from 2024.  But I didn't.

2024 Bushiroad DreamOrder Central League Booster Pack Vol. 4 #CBP04-D05

Thanks again for the cards, Kenny!

2025 In Review - Calbee

Calbee's 2025 output was unfortunately much the same as their 2023 and 2024 output.  Once again, Calbee issued their "flagship" set in only two Series rather than the three that they had done for much of the previous twenty years.  

Series One came out in May - two months later than Calbee has published it in previous years.  My guess is that they decided if they were only publishing two Series instead of three, they could schedule them evenly throughout the baseball season rather than starting just before the season started.  The base set contained a total of 87 cards - 60 "regular" player cards (five per team), 21 "Title Holder" cards and six checklist cards.  There were three associated insert sets.  Two of these were ones that had been included in previous years - "Star" and "Legend" (for players who retired at the end of the previous season) but the third was a 12 card set called "Strikeout Leader".  In the past, Calbee had special 12 card box sets that were only available from their Japanese Amazon store but it appears that they have shifted these to being available in packs now.

Series Two was released in August and contained a 78 card base set - 60 "regular" player cards, 12 "Opening Game Cleanup Hitter" cards and six checklist cards.  There were two insert sets - "Star" and "Opening Day Pitcher" with the latter again being cards that would have previously only been available in the Amazon.co.jp Calbee shop box sets.

Calbee bookended these releases with a pair of sets that were a tie-in with the "Pro Yakyu Spirits A" mobile game.  The first of these sets was released in January and I'm pretty sure Calbee had originally intended to issue the set in 2024 as the set had 47 cards - one less than would be expected.  The missing player appears to have been Roki Sasaki who they would have been able to include in a 2024 set but not a set released in 2025.  The second set, containing only 24 cards, was released in December.  It's a little confusing, as both sets have the same name - "Pro Yakyu Spirits A" - and look very similar.

A Couple Surprises

I was away for work last week when I learned about a couple new items that I hadn't been expecting so here's a quick post to get us all up-to-date...

- Steve, a trading partner from years gone by, sent me an email last week to let me know that Topps had issued Topps Now cards for the Samurai Japan team that played a couple friendlies against Korea a few weeks ago.  There are six cards in all, four from the game on November 15th (Tai Sasaki, Misho Nishikawa, Seishiro Sakamoto and Isami Nomura) and two from November 16th (Yumeto Kanemaru and Kazuma Okamoto).  The cards are each 1485 yen (around $9.50) and will be on sale until December 26th.  It does not appear that Topps will ship these cards to the US.  It would not surprise me a lot if Topps also issued a team set after these cards have sold out.  (I am surprised that Topps is doing Samurai Japan cards since both Epoch and DreamOrder did them earlier this year.)

- Speaking of surprises, Calbee issued a set last week.  This would be the third off season in a row that Calbee has issued a set following the Hawks set in the 2023-24 off season and the "Pro Yakyu Spirits A" video game tie-in set from last year.  The new set is another tie in to the "Pro Yakyu Spirits A" video game but, unlike the set from last January, this set only has 24 cards instead of the 47 that the earlier set had (it was originally planned to be 48 cards but apparently the set was delayed which caused them to have to remove the Roki Sasaki card from the set since he had signed with the Dodgers).  Calbee managed to get this set out before the end of the year which allowed them to not have to pull the Munetaka Murakami from it.  You can see all the cards (including some of the kira parallels) over at Jambalaya - they look very similar to the earlier set, just with a different background.

More Cards From Kenny

The other person that I got cards from recently was Kenny, aka Zippy Zappy.  Kenny, of course, has been very generous to me and other bloggers over the past few years and he had sent me four(!) separate envelopes full of cards over a couple week period back in late August and early September.  At this point, I don't remember what was in which envelope but it doesn't matter all that much.  Let's go through what he sent...

First up was two cards from the 2025 Calbee Series Two set:

2025 Calbee Series Two #064 (Taisei Ota)

2025 Calbee Series Two #S-36

Next up is a 2018 Epoch One card of Raidel Martinez.  This commemorates his first win in NPB in what I think was his second appearance.  I'm pretty sure this was his first card (unless he had a team issued card in 2017 when he was a development player):

2018 Epoch One #190

There were some random Calbee and BBM cards:

2022 Calbee Series Two #080 (Teruaki Sato)

2007 BBM 2nd Version #723

2010 BBM 1st Version #049

I know the Nakamura card says "1st Version" on it but it was from the "1st Version Update" subset from that year's 2nd Version set.

There was a OB card of Tetsuharu Kawakami from one of Bandai's Owners League sets from 2014:

2014 Bandai Owners League 04 #133

The last ten cards were from various Konami sets between 2006 and 2012.  Most of them - eight in all - were cards of Kyuji Fujikawa for some reason.  As was the case with my post about Konami a few months ago, I have very little faith that I have gotten the set names right here:

2006 Konami Baseball Heroes 2 Black Edition #B06B123

2007 Konami Baseball Heroes 3 Black Edition #B07B144

2007 Konami Baseball Heroes 3 Black Edition #B07S029

2007 Konami Baseball Heroes 3 Power Up Edition #C07S009

2008 Konami Baseball Heroes Black Edition #B08B046

2008 Konami Baseball Heroes Power Up Edition #C08S029

2009 Konami Baseball Heroes Black Edition #B09B144

2009 Konami Baseball Heroes Black Edition #B09S028

2012 Konami Baseball Heroes Black Edition #B12RB223

2012 Konami Baseball Heroes Black Edition #B12SP004

Thanks for the cards, Kenny!

Cards That Finished Sets And Others

That big box of goodies that Ryan sent me a few weeks back contained a number of cards that were the last ones I needed to complete some sets.  I thought I'd do a post talking about them, along with some other cards in the box that don't really fit into an easy category.  I was going to say "a quick post" but I don't think it'll be that quick.

Many if not all of these cards are ones that I found either on Yahoo! Japan Auctions or Mercari and asked Ryan to grab for me.

We'll go through the cards that completed sets first.  The box had the nine cards I needed to complete my 1999 BBM Mr. Giants set.  I'm going to dedicate a post to this set in the next few months so I'll just say that this is a set dedicated to Shigeo Nagashima that's different from any of the other "biographical" sets that I've seen BBM do for a player.  Here's two of the cards:

1999 BBM Mr Giants #G36

1999 BBM Mr Giants #G81

I got the last six cards I needed to complete the 1999 BBM/Yomiuri Shinbum Giants set.  Here's two of the cards:

1999 BBM/Yomiuri Shimbun Giants #15

1999 BBM/Yomiuri Shimbun Giants #S4

I've been trying for a few years to complete several BBM team sets from the 00's that I had opened boxes for in the past.  I think there were 15 sets in all between 2003 and 2007.  Ryan had found me a bunch of the cards in the past and I picked up most of the remainder on my trip last year.  But there were four cards from three sets that had still eluded me.  With those four being in the box, I've now completed the 2004 Giants and Tigers sets and the 2007 Tigers set:

2004 BBM Giants #G62

2004 BBM Giants #G10

2004 BBM Tigers #T41

2007 BBM Tigers #T013

I came back from last year's trip needing just two of the "Great Record" insert cards from BBM's Fusion sets and now I have them:

2016 BBM Fusion "Great Record" #GR20

2017 BBM Fusion "Great Record" #GR19

One of the few disappointments I had with last year's trip was being unable to track down the remaining 15 cards I needed from the 2023 Calbee Hawks set.  I fully expected to find them at some of the card shops I went to (especially Mint Hakata) but no one had any.  All have now been acquired and that set is now complete.  Here's two of the cards:

2023 Calbee Hawks #SH-03

2023 Calbee Hawks #SH-02

 The rest of the cards don't complete sets but were cards I was interested in for one reason or another.

I had been toying with the thought of getting all the "Best 9" insert cards from the 2011 BBM Tohto 80th Memorial set - a set dedicated to former players from the Tohto collegiate league.  I ultimately decided against it but not before I asked Ryan to grab this card of Shinnosuke Abe depicting him in his days with Chuo University:

2011 BBM Tohto 80th Memorial #BN11

I mentioned the other day that I had picked up a lot of Norichika Aoki cards to get the 2005 Shukan Baseball Season Memorial card of him.  Here are the other cards from that lot:

2010 Calbee Series One #017

2010 BBM 1st Version #BN09

2010 BBM 1st Version #GG07

I picked up the last base card I didn't have that depicted Hideki Irabu as a Hanshin Tiger:

2003 BBM Victory Road #17

I don't remember where I first saw this Calbee card of Nobuhiko Matsunaka but I found the photo interesting.  The lighting is really odd and I can't imagine that it's from an actual game.  But I don't know what it's from:

2007 Calbee Series One #019

It wouldn't be a box from Ryan without a bunch of unexpected cards.  He included a bunch of 2025 Calbee Series One cards:

2025 Calbee Series One #T-04

2025 Calbee Series One #T-05

2025 Calbee Series One #T-09

2025 Calbee Series One #T-13

2025 Calbee Series One #S-14

2025 Calbee Series One #S-17

2025 Calbee Series One #SO-05

Ryan also included a bunch of promo cards for the 2023 and 2024 Epoch NPB sets, keeping our ongoing joke about someone being able to build a complete set using the promo cards alive.  He only sent one 2023 card but included 15 2024 ones.  I'll only show one of the 2024 ones to go with the 2023 one:

2023 Epoch NPB Promo #314

2024 Epoch NPB Promo #288

The box included a bunch of Epoch One cards.  I'll be doing a post soon on the 2024 ones I got but I figured I'd go ahead and show off the two 2018 ones - they're both for Nazo No Sakana, the Mysterious Fish mascot the Marines had had between 2018 and 2021.  These are the last two cards that I'm aware of for the Fish that I didn't already have:

2018 Epoch One #208

2018 Epoch One #282

I'm trying to complete the 2013 Konami Samurai Japan set but it's going painfully slow.  There's 11 cards in all and this Yoshio Itoi card is only the third one I've found at a not terribly expensive price:

2013 Konami Samurai Japan #B13SJ011

And finally, I saw this autographed card of Futoshi Nakanishi for sale for 3000-ish yen (about $20) last summer which seemed very reasonable for an autograph of a Hall Of Famer who had passed away so I asked Ryan to grab it for me.  It's from the 2021 BBM Legendary Rookies set and is /117: