2020 Calbee Series Two

Series Two, the second of the expected three Series of Calbee sets this year, was released just about two weeks ago.  It was a slightly later release than usual - early July instead of late June - but I don't know if the delay was related to the COVID crisis.  There's a couple things in the make up of the set, however, that are related.

The base set contains 87 cards - 72 player cards (6 per team), 12 "AVG Leader" cards (1 per team) and 3 checklist cards (instead of the usual 4).  As usual the set has the same design as Series One and continues the card numbering of the player cards (Series One had card numbers 1-72 while Series Two has card numbers 73-144).

It's always hard to talk about player selection for a Calbee Series since no Series really stands alone but I will say that this Series seems a bit light on having "regular" player cards of big stars.  Probably the biggest names in the set are Seiichi Uchikawa, Takeya Nakamura and Munetaka Murakami.  There's a number of foreign players (Wladimir Balentien, Brandon Laird, Neftali Soto, Brandon Dickson and Po-Jung Wang) included along with four rookies (Roki Sasaki, Masato Morishita, Takaya Ishikawa and Yasunobu Okugawa) - all of whom were first round picks in last fall's draft.

I thought Calbee was doing better with their photos in the Series One set this year but I feel like they back-slid some with this set.  I think they've fallen back into the "batters batting, pitchers pitching" rut a bit too much although there are a handful of decent photos.  They've also back-slid on using a horizontal foramt - there are only two horizontal cards in this Series after there were five in Series One.  Here's some example cards:

#079 Seiichi Uchikawa

#125 Ryutaro Umeno 

#138 Kento Fujishima

#144 Munetaka Murakami

#118 Haruhiro Hamaguchi

#075 Tatsuya Imai

#094 Roki Sasaki

The set includes a 12 card "AVG Leader" subset that features the top hitter from 2019 for each team.  As you'd expect there's a bunch of big names in the subset - Seiya Suzuki, Tomoya Mori, Norichika Aoki, Kensuke Kondoh, Hayato Sakamoto and Yoshio Itoi for example.   This is kind of an odd theme for a subset in a Calbee set - this is the kind of thing Calbee typically would do in one of their boxed sets that you win via a "lucky" card redemption - but I'm guessing with the season not starting until about two weeks before the set was released they didn't have a lot of options (although they COULD have done a subset featuring all 12 first round draft picks from last fall which they've done in the past).  Here's an example "AVG Leader" card:

#AL-10

While the topic for the subset might have been affected by the delay in the start of the season, the checklist cards were definitely affected.  Usually there are four checklist cards and the fronts of them show highlights from games in March and April.  Since there were no games in March and April, Calbee had to come up with something else.  What they decided on was to feature the new managers for this season - Hajime Miki of the Eagles, Shinji Sasaoka of the Carp and Shingo Takatsu of the Swallows.  Since there were only three new managers they only did three checklist cards.  Here's Miki's card:

#C-05

I should mention that the checklists are numbered 5 to 7 since the checklists in Series One were 1 to 4.

All the cards can be seen over at Jambalaya (including the Star insert cards and the limited edition box set called WINS Leaders).  And Sean wrote a little about this set the other day as well.

2020 Epoch NPB set

For the third year in a row Epoch has issued a "flagship" set called "NPB".  The set came out towards the end of May but I just received it last week.  I had purchased the set when it came out through Noppin, the proxy company I usually use to bid on Yahoo! Japan Auctions, but since shipping from Japan is a bit of a cluster---- right now I waited until I had picked up a Calbee Series Two set as well to save a little bit of money by shipping both sets together.

The previous two editions of the set each had 432 cards but this year the set has grown to 444 cards.  Once again though there are 432 "regular" player (and manager) cards in the set - the additional 12 cards are a subset called "Legendary Player" the features OB players.  The 432 "regular" cards are split evenly among the 12 teams (36 cards per team) and the 12 "Legendary Player" cards are also split evenly among the 12 teams (1 card per team).

Every year I've compared the players who appear in this set with the players who appear in BBM's 1st Version set and I'm always surprised at who is in one set but not the other.  There are 140 players who appear in the NPB set but not 1st Version which is the most in the three year history of the set.  This includes fan favorites but failed prospects like Louis Okoye, Yuki Saitoh and Shintaro Fujinami along with other players like Kenshi Sugiya, Daisuke Yamai, Atsushi Nohmi and Kazuki Tanaka.  There's a handful of Westerners - Spencer Patton, Ernesto Mejia, Alan Busenitz, Raidel Martinez and Livan Moinelo - along with someone I was surprised wasn't in 1st Version - T-Okada (although I had not previously noticed this).  There are 32 players in 1st Version who do not appear in this set.  The bulk of these (28 of them) are Westerners, especially ones who are in their first season in Japan like Tyler Austin, Gerardo Parra, Alcides Escobar, Jerry Sands, Matt Moore and Cory Spangenberg or who switched teams over the winter like Frank Herrman and Stefen Romero.  That's not to say there are no foreign players in the first year in Japan in the set - it does have Justin Bour and Adam Jones in it. 

Like BBM's 1st Version set the set also includes all 12 managers plus all the non-ikusei 2019 draft picks for each team.

I really like the design of this set.  I prefer borderless fronts on my baseball cards and for the first time Epoch has done a borderless design for this set (after two years of white borders).  My main gripe with the set is that Epoch still really hasn't broken away much from the "batters batting, pitchers pitching, catchers catching" monotony of photographic poses - at least not as much as BBM did in the 1st Version set this year.  Still there's a handful of at least slightly more interesting photos.  Here's a bunch of example cards:

#413

#075

#060

#222

#383

#017

#129

#289

#285

#355

Here's what the card backs look like.  These have been pretty much the same in every NPB set so far - they have a cropped version of the photo from the front on the card and the player's stats for his last three years (at most) in NPB with no stats for any other leagues (MLB, KBO or CPBL).  Here's an example back:

#208 (Masataka Yoshida)

I mentioned that there were 12 "Legendary Player" cards that featured OB players.  Eleven of those twelve players are actually retired - Shijiro Hiyama, Masumi Kuwata, Nobuhiko Matsunaka, Shinya Miyamoto, Eishin Soyogi, Hitoshi Tamura, Yoshitomo Tani, Kazuyoshi Tatsunami, Kiyoshi Toyoda, Teppei (Tsuchiya) and Shunsuke Watanabe - but the other one is still active in MLB - Shohei Ohtani:

#437

I'm pretty much convinced the only reason the "Legendary Player" cards are in the set is so that Epoch can include autographed cards of them in packs.

As always you can see all the cards (along with the parallels and inserts) over at Jambalaya.

Card Of The Week July 12

Last Friday was the first day that fans were allowed into the ballparks in Japan.  The teams are limiting the crowds to no more than 5000 people with plans to go to half capacity on August 1st (assuming the increase in cases in Tokyo and other places doesn't continue).  One of the games on Friday was called on account of rain (Swallows at Giants in Kobe) and another was called after five innings because of the weather (Baystars at Tigers at Koshien Stadium) but all of the remaining games were decided in the final inning.  The Lions pushed across the winning run in the top of the ninth in Chiba but the other three games sent all the fans home happy as they all ended on dramatic sayonara home runs.

In Osaka, the Fighters had a 3-1 lead on the Buffaloes with two outs and two on in the bottom of the ninth when Aderlin Rodriguez did this:



About 10 minutes later and 300 miles to the west, Yuki Yanagita led off the bottom of the 10th with this prodigious blast:



Over in Nagoya (and I'm not sure where it falls in the timeline of the evening) the Dragons had a bottom of the ninth rally to tie their game with the Carp at 1 before Dayan Viciedo made it a 2-1 final with with a solo home run in the bottom of the 10th:



According to John E. Gibson and the Japan Baseball Weekly podcast, this is the third time in history that there were three walk off home runs in one day in Japan.  The most recent time was last September 4th and the other time (according NPB Reddit) was September 10, 1967.

I thought I'd share cards of the three players this week.  I just got the new Epoch NPB and Calbee Series Two sets the other day and I'll be doing posts on them in the next few days so I thought I'd show cards of Yanagita and Viciedo from the sets as kind of preview.  Rodriguez isn't in either set so I'm just going to show his BBM 1st Version card - it's the only card I have of him so far.

2020 BBM 1st Version #151

2020 Epoch NPB #063

2020 Calbee "AVG Leader" #AL-11

More Summer Releases

I wanted to do a quick post about some recent set announcements along with a quick discussion about what hasn't been announced yet.

- 2020 marks the 30th year that BBM has been publishing baseball cards so it's not a surprise that they're issuing a 30th Anniversary set to celebrate (especially since they did a 20th Anniversary set in 2010 and a 25th Anniversary set in 2015).  This is a pack based set that will have a 252 card base set that includes 108 cards for OB players (I assume 9 cards per team), 108 cards for active players (again I assume 9 cards per team), 24 "Records & Highlights" cards and 12 "Famous History" cards.  The 24 "Records & Highlights" cards apparently uses the same design as the similarly named subsets in the 20th and 25th Anniversary sets although I don't know if they only cover the past five seasons (the 25th Anniversary set's subset cards only covered 2010 to 2015) or if they will cover events over the entire 30 years since 1991.  There are six insert sets associated with the set.  BBM reached back into history for the designs for two of the sets - the 12 card "Dream Team" set uses the design of the 1998 "Dream Team" insert set and the 12 card "All Star" set uses the design of the 2002 Touch The Game "All Star" insert set.  The other insert sets are "Cross Blossom" (24 cards), "Esperanza" (30 cards), "Phantom" (18 cards) and "3D Cross Blossom" (24 cards).  I'm pretty sure that at least the "Phantom" and "Esperanza" cards are serially numbered.  There are also a variety of memorabilia and autograph cards available, including "buy back" autographed cards.  The set will be released in late August.

- I'm not sure but I think BBM is releasing their own OB/active higher end team set to compete with Epoch's "Stars & Legends" sets.  They're putting out a box set called "Swallows Legacy" that contains 37 cards - a 36 card base set plus one autographed card.  The 36 cards are split evenly between OB and active players.  The autographed card could be either an OB or active player (and could also be an active player who is not in the base set).  The set will be out in early August.  I would not be surprised to see BBM issue more team sets like this.

- For the third year Epoch is releasing a Pacific League Rookies box set.  The box contains a 37 card base set featuring all the 2019 non-ikusei draft picks by the Pacific League teams plus two parallel cards (looks like each base card has three different parallel versions) and an autographed card.  The set will be released on August 8th.

- Epoch is collaborating with the OB Club on another ultra high end set.  This one is called "Career Achievement" and six card boxes retail for 16,500 yen (~$153).  Two of those six cards are autographed cards though.  The base set contains 43 cards and there are I think three numbered parallel versions of each card.  There's five different varieties of autographed cards, all of which I think are serially numbered as well.  The set will be in stores on August 29th.

I wanted to cover some other news in this post as well.  The NPB regular season is almost three weeks old at this point and Epoch is back to publishing Epoch One cards again.  These are the Japanese version of Topps Now cards - the cards are available to order on-line and the print run for the cards are determined by the number of orders received.  The two big differences between the Epoch One and Topps Now cards are the price (Epoch One cards are 500 yen or a little less than half of the $9.99 the Topps Now cards cost) and the time period the cards are available (Epoch One cards are available for three days while Topps Now cards are only available for one day).  As has been the case for the two previous years that Epoch has been doing the Epoch One cards, Epoch is only doing these cards for a subset of the NPB teams.  They added the Baystars this year but dropped the Carp so there are still only cards for nine teams.  In addition to DeNA there are cards available for the Marines, Dragons, Hawks, Tigers, Fighters, Lions, Swallows and Giants.

After four years, BBM and Nippon-Ham have stopped doing the "Home Run Sausage" cards.  I don't know if this was related to COVID-19 or just they decided that four years was enough.  It's probably a coincidence but it is interesting to note that the "Home Run Sausage" cards were issued in the same four years that the Fighters did early spring training in Arizona.

Speaking of COVID-19, I think we're finally seeing some impact of the virus on card releases.  Normally by now BBM has not only announced the details for the 2nd Version set (which is normally published in early to mid August) but they've also announced both of the "Dancing Heroine" cheerleader sets (and in fact usually published "Hana", the first earlier of the two).  I'm hoping that BBM is simply pushing 2nd Version to later in the year - maybe September - rather than cancelling it altogether but I don't know what they're planning.  I'm curious what they'll do about the "Ceremonial First Pitch" cards in it although maybe with the limited number of fans who will be admitted to games starting this weekend they'll be able to do first pitch ceremonies again.

Card Of The Week July 5

Yushi Aida spent four seasons pitching for the Yomiuri Giants from 2006 to 2009.  He worked out of the bullpen but never recorded a save.  Until, that is, last week when Aida, who is now the pitching coach of the Giants san-gun team, saved the life of a man who fell off an escalator at the Bakuro-yokoyama subway station.  The man was unconscious and Aida performed CPR on him until paramedics arrived.  The man regained consciousness and was taken to the hospital.

Aida was inspired to get certified in CPR after seeing his coach and former teammate Takuya Kimura collapse on the field due to a subarachnoid hemorrhage 10 years ago.  Kimura passed away a few days later.

Here's a card of Aida from his playing days (2008 BBM Giants #G030):

2009 World Baseball Classic Roundup - Relics

The posts I've done in the past for the 2009 World Baseball Classic cards available for the Japanese and Korean teams didn't include much detail on the memorabilia cards for the teams that Topps produced that year.  I thought I'd do a quick post to correct that oversight.

Topps included memorabilia cards for the WBC in a number of products in 2009 but only six of them included cards for the Japanese and/or Korean teams - Topps 2, "Bowman Sterling", "Allen & Ginters", "Ticket To Stardom", "Triple Threads" and "Updates & Highlights".  There were only six members of the Japanese team who had memorabilia cards - Shinnosuke Abe, Norichika Aoki, Yu Darvish, Kosuke Fukudome, Ichiro Suzuki and Masahiro Tanaka - while there were seven Korean players with relic cards - Choo Shin-soo, Kim Kwang-hyun, Kim Tae-kyun, Lee Dae-ho, Lee Jae-woo, Lee Jin-young and Ryu Hyun-jin.  Lee Jae-woo and Ryu Hyun-jin do not have any non-memorabilia WBC cards in any of Topps' sets that year although the remaining eleven Japanese and Korean players do.

The Topps 2 set had a handful of WBC relic cards.  The only member of either the Japanese or Korean teams to be included was Lee Jin-young:

#BCR-LJY

The bulk of the WBC relic cards were issued with the "Bowman Sterling" set.  49 players from 15 of the 16 World Baseball Classic teams (everyone but Team USA) had a relic card randomly inserted into packs of the product.  The "base" relic cards were not serially numbered but each one had five numbered parallel versions - "refractor" (numbered to 199), "blue refactor" (to 125), "gold refactor" (to 50), "black refactor" (to 25) and "red refractor" (1-of-1).  There were Bowman Sterling relic cards of five of the six Japanese players (everyone but Masahiro Tanaka) and all seven of the Korean players.  I have cards of eight of the twelve players from the two teams:

#BCR-SA (Blue Refractor)

#BCR-NA

#BCR-YD

#BCR-KF

#BCR-TK

#BCR-DL (Blue Refractor)

#BCR-JL

#BCR-HRR

"Bowman Sterling" also had WBC Patch cards available via a redemption card.  There were 25 total patch cards available which included five Japanese players (Ichiro, Abe, Aoki, Darvish and Tanaka) and two Korean players (Kim Tae-kyun and Lee Dae-ho).  Oddly enough both TradingCardDB.com and COMC list these patch cards as a 2008 issue despite the fact that the back of the cards available on COMC clearly show the cards are from 2009.  Topps did issue some WBC cards in late 2008 - they had a 25 card "WBC Preview" insert set in that year's "Updates And Highlights" set that featured players from the 2006 Classic but these obviously aren't a similar preview issue as Ichiro was the only one of those seven players who played in the 2006 Classic.  As far as I can tell, the patch cards were serially numbered to 65.  I do not have any of these cards.

The 2009 "Allen & Ginters" set had an insert set called "N43 Relics" that included some WBC players.  Each card was serially numbered to 25.  Lee Jin-young, Aoki and Darvish were the only Korean or Japanese players included in this insert set.  I don't have any of these cards.

Topps' "Ticket To Stardom" set had a unique insert set in which each card featured both a piece of game used memorabilia plus a piece of a ticket stub.  It was a 72 card set but only 12 of the cards were WBC related.  Four of these were Japanese players (Abe, Aoki, Darvish and Tanaka) and another four were Korean (Choo, Kim Kwang-hyun, Kim Tae-kyun and Lee Jin-young).  I believe that each card featured part of a ticket stub from the WBC final game between Japan and Korea but I don't know that for sure.  Each card was serially numbered to 90 and there were two parallel versions as well - Gold (numbered to 10) and Red (1-of-1).  I only have the Tanaka card:

#TSP-66

There were a number of serially numbered relic cards for the Japanese and Korean teams included with the "Triple Threads" set, none of which I have any examples of.  There were two relic cards that featured three players - one with Ichiro, Darvish and Aoki and one with Choo, Lee Dae-ho and Lee Jin-young - and a relic card featuring Darvish and Yulieski Gourriel of Cuba (which is somewhat ironic considering the controversy between the two of the them in the 2017 World Series).  Each card is serially numbered to 36 and had five parallel versions - Sepia (numbered to 27), Emerald (to 18), Gold (to 9), Sapphire (to 3) and Platinum (1-of-1).  In addition, four Japanese players (Ichiro, Aoki, Abe and Fukudome) and three Korean players (Choo, Lee Dae-ho and Lee Jin-young) had their own patch cards.  Each had a "Triple Patch" card that was numbered to 9 with a 1-of-1 "Platinum" parallel was well as a "1-of-1" "Dual Patch Logo" card.

Finally Topps' "Updates & Highlights" set included six cards featuring relics from either two or three players from the Japanese and Korean teams.  There are three "WBC Stitches Dual" cards that feature Aoki and Abe; Lee Dae-ho and Lee Jin-young; and Kim Kwang-hyun and Lee Jae-woo respectively.  There are also three "WBC Stitches Triple" cards - one with Fukudome, Tanaka and Aoki; one with Ichiro, Darvish and Abe; and one Choo, Lee Dae-ho and Lee Jin-young.  Each of these cards was serially numbered to 25 and I have none of them.

And before you ask, the Konami WBC Heroes set issued in Japan did not include any memorabilia cards.

Issei Baseball

I wanted to do a quick post about Rob Fitts' latest book which was published a few months back.  It's called "Issei Baseball" and it's the story of some of the first Japanese immigrants to play baseball in the United States.

The book follows a handful of immigrants and their experiences traveling to America and settling first in San Francisco and then Los Angeles.  They played on local teams but eventually joined the first ever professional Japanese baseball team - Guy Green's Japanese Base Ball Team - on a barnstorming tour of the Midwest in 1906.  The players later played on other teams including the Denver Mikado, the Los Angeles Nanka and the Japanese Base Ball Association (JBBA).  The book follows the entire lives of the players, including their experiences with the relocation camps during World War II.

In addition to these teams, the book also includes descriptions of tours of America by Waseda University in 1905 and 1911 and Keio University in 1911.   These tours as well as the teams the immigrants played on were most American's first exposure to Japanese baseball players.

I found "Issei Baseball" to be a very good book.  Other than vaguely being aware that a couple Japanese universities had toured the US in the early 20th Century I didn't know anything about this topic and I was a bit concerned when I picked up the book whether I'd be all that interested in it.  But the book actually is quite interesting, especially the stories about the barnstorming teams.

You can buy the book through Rob's web site as well as bookstores both on-line and brick and mortar.  I will point out that you can also buy Rob's "An Illustrated Introduction To Japanese Baseball Cards" as an actual book (rather than a pdf) from Rob's web site as well.

When I ordered the book through his website Rob was kind enough to send me several promotional baseball cards featuring some of the players who the book follows.  Four of these were large (5 1/2 inches by 8 1/2 inches) "cabinet" style cards:

There were also three standard sized cards of Kitsuse, Saisho and Uyeda.  The backs of these were pretty much the same as the cabinet cards so I'm just going to show the fronts: