There's some recent releases by Panini that have included cards of Japanese players and I wanted to do a quick post about them.

There's yet another Tomoyuki Sugano Panini card.  The Crusade set includes a card of him along with something like seven different parallels.  There's also a autographed card for him as well.  I picked up the base set card off of Ebay last week - here's the front and back of it.

2024 Panini Crusade #174

Pretty sure this is the same photo that Panini used on a couple of his cards from last year.

Panini has released a box set version of their USA Baseball Stars & Stripes set.  Each box contains a 94 card base set, four autographed Team USA cards, a Chinese Taipei National Team game-worn jersey card and a Japanese Collegiate All Stars game-worn jersey card.  The Japanese Collegiate All Stars game-worn jersey cards appear to be exactly the same as the autographed memorabilia cards that were released back in July except that they (1) don't have autographs and (2) are not serially numbered.  This is a much cheaper option for getting all the team members than the autographed cards.  I picked up two of them last week off of Ebay:

To be honest, these look a little odd with the empty space on the right where the sticker autographs went.

 2024 BBM 2nd Version Set Summary

#406

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#429 (Tomoyuki Sugano)

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I'm describing the theme for the team cards as "Early Season Highlights" but that's kind of a broad term.  Many of the cards show post game celebrations but several are obviously pre-game (the Marines card shows Roki Sasaki coming out of the dugout during the pre-game introductions while I think the Eagles card shows the team lined up on the field for Opening Night).  I'm not entirely sure what's happening on the Tigers card but I like the photo:

#589

For the roughly billionth year in a row, BBM has done a cross set subset and this year's iteration is called "Cross Earth".  Half of it was in the 1st Version set and the other half is in this one.  As I said when I wrote about it in my post on the 1st Version set, the "Cross Earth" cards aren't unattractive but I'm more than ready for BBM to move onto the their next gimmick.

#CE71

#FP31

#FP23

#FP29

2024 is the twentieth season that the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles have been around and BBM is commemorating the occasion in a somewhat unique way.  Instead of issuing a stand-alone "Twentieth Anniversary" set (like they did for the team's tenth anniversary ten years ago), BBM basically appended a "Twentieth Anniversary" mini-set onto their annual Eagles team set this year.  

BBM's annual "comprehensive" team sets* have had base sets of 81 cards for ten years now with this being the first exception**.  This set has 117 cards with the first 81 cards being basically the standard team set and the remaining 36 cards being the "Twentieth Anniversary" mini-set.

*A "comprehensive" team set contains cards for all the players on the team's 70 man roster at the time the set went to press.

**I guess more accurately I'd say that this is the first team set that was intended to depart from the 81 card size since 2014.  There've been a couple sets that have only 80 cards because of a player leaving a team after the checklist being set but before the cards were published - BBM has pulled the card from the set but not replaced it in the checklist.

Let's dive into the standard team set portion first.  The bulk of those 81 cards are the 66 cards for manager Toshiaki Imae and all the players on the team's 70 man roster (which is apparently five players short of being full).  Normally this is the point in the post when I would talk about who's in the set and who's missing but that seems kind of silly here - the set contains everyone on the Eagles' roster and there's nobody missing.

The photos for BBM's "comprehensive" team sets are usually a mixed bag and this set is no different.  There are a lots of "batters batting, pitchers pitching" poses.  I'm generally a little more forgiving with these sets than I am of the flagship sets though and there's a handful of decent photos in this set.  There's also a couple cards that use a horizontal format which I'm very partial to.  Here's some examples - I really like the Takahisa Hayakawa photo:

#E009

#E041

#E044

#E050

#E007

The remaining 15 cards of the standard team set portion are split up into five subsets that really don't serve any purpose other than to pad the set out to 81 cards.  There's a single card to celebrate the Eagles winning interleague this year; a two card "Brightest Hope" subset featuring rookies Tatsuki Koja and Daisuke Nakashima; a five card "Break The Limit" subset featuring pitchers Takayuki Kishi, Takahiro Norimoto, Kosei Shoji, Hayakawa and Seiryu Uchi; a five card "Unstoppable" subset featuring batters Hiroto Kobukata, Hideto Asamura, Itsuki Murabayashi, Ryosuke Tatsumi, and Yuya Ogoh; and a two card "Record Makers" subset featuring Masahiro Tanaka and Hiroaki Shimauchi.  Here's examples of all of these cards:

#E067

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#E081

Moving on to the "Twentieth Anniversary" mini-set, half of it is cards of OB players from the Eagles along with three of the team's former managers.  The players are Ginji (Akaminai), Koji Aoyama, Kazuya Fujita, Hiroyuki Fukuyama, Ryo Hijirisawa, Koichi Isobe, Hisashi Iwakuma, Shinichiro Koyama, Daisuke Kusano, Yuki Matsui, Motohiro Shima, Yosuke Takasu, Teppei (Tsuchiya), Naoto Watanabe and Takeshi Yamasaki.  The three managers are Yasushi Tao (the team's first manager), Katsuya Nomura (who led them to their first post-season appearance in 2009) and Senichi Hoshino (who led them to their only Nippon Series Championship in 2013).  I think Matsui is the only OB player who's still active somewhere else.

18 players (well, 15, really) is a small number to try to represent twenty years of history so there's any number of additional players who could have been included - Kazuo Fukumori, Kazuo Matsui, Jose Fernandez and Andruw Jones all come to mind.  But given the constraints of the set, BBM probably did as well as they could.

The card design for the OB cards is pretty much the same as the player cards in the standard team set portion of the set.  Again, there's a couple decent photos but most of them are pretty run-of-the-mill.  Here's a couple examples:

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#E095

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The mini-set also contains nine cards for the Eagles career leaders in various categories.  This is a little misleading as there are nine different players represented but some of the players aren't the leader in the category they're on the card with.  For example, Asamura is on the RBI card but he's actually fourth on the list - Yamasaki's number one on the list but he's on the home run card.  Hiroaki Shimauchi is number two on the RBI list but he's on the hits card.  Of course, he's second on that list too but number one is Ginji who's on the batting average card.  You get the idea.  Here's Yamasaki's card as an example:

#E102

The next six cards in the mini-set are reprints of the BBM 1st Version rookie cards of some significant Eagles players - Ginji (2006), Motohiro Shima (2007), Masahiro Tanaka (2007), Takero Okajima (2012), Takahiro Norimoto (2013) and Yuki Matsui (2014).  Here's Matsui's card:

#114

The final three cards in the set are highlights from the past 20 years.  That's right, according to BBM, the Eagles have only had three highlights since 2005.  Those highlights are them winning their first ever game (but let's not talk about their second game), Tanaka going 24-0 in 2013 and the Eagles winning the Nippon Series a month later.  I mean, the Eagles have not been a great team but they have made the playoffs five times in 19 previous seasons - maybe add one of those to the list?  Here's the card for Tanaka - he's got five total cards in the set:

#E116

I'm not sure what to say about this set.  For me, I don't mind the merging of the historic set with the annual team set as I would have bought both of them if they were separate but I could see someone who only wanted a team set or a historic set but not both being kind of irritated.  The team set portion is fine - it's pretty much what you'd expect from a BBM team set.  The historic part is...OK.  I think they could have cut back or dropped the team leaders subset and added more OB players and/or highlights but other than that, it's passable.  I'm guessing that this means BBM isn't going to be doing an "Eagles History 2005-2024" set like the similarly named sets they've done for the Carp, Giants, Dragons, Marines, Tigers, Buffaloes, Swallows, Hawks and Lions since 2020.

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

Calbee initially announced that this year's Series Two set would be released at the end of June but it actually wasn't until late July that the cards started showing up in stores.  It was just one more in a line of odd things that I feel has plagued Calbee's releases over the past two years with last year's Series Two getting delayed until August, Series Three being cancelled altogether and the oddball Hawks set apparently also being delayed by a few months.  Not to mention the distribution issues that prevented people from being able to find the chip bags for last year's Series One in stores for a while.  Then there's all the errors with Series One this year - "Kaiju" Itoh, the sparkle-less Star and Legend cards and the misprint on the chip bags themselves. 

But enough about that, let's talk about the cards.  The set contains 60 "regular" player cards, 12 "Player's Association President" cards and six checklist cards for a total of 78 cards.  This makes it one of the smallest Calbee sets in recent memory - the only smaller one I can think of was last year's Series Two set since it only had four checklist cards.

The 60 "regular" player cards are numbered 61-120 in continuation of the numbering from the Series One set.  The cards continue the same design that Series One used, with the player names in Japanese one them (the Calbee standard for even-numbered years since 2016).  

In my post about Series One, I had mentioned that it didn't have "regular" player cards for a number of NPB's biggest stars such as Kazuma Okamoto, Shugo Maki, Yuki Yanagita, Kensuke Kondoh, Roki Sasaki and Munetaka Murakami.  Series Two makes up for this a little with cards for Murakami and Sasaki but the other four are still missing.  With Series Two likely being the final Calbee baseball set for 2024, it means that there will be no "regular" Calbee cards for Okamoto, Maki, Yanagita and Kondoh this year (and this will make it the second year in row that Kondoh doesn't have a "regular" Calbee card).

Besides the afore-mentioned Sasaki and Murakami, the big names in the set are probably Chusei Mannami, Takeya Nakamura, Koji Chikamoto, Tomoya Mori, Teruaki Satoh and Hayato Sakamoto.  Unlike Series One, Series Two contains players who changed teams over the winter like Yuito Mori, Hiroski Kaino, Ryoma Nishikawa and Hotoka Yamakawa and a couple rookies - Ryuki Watarari and Shunsuke Sasaki.  There's also a fair number of Western players including Gregory Polanco, Adam Walker, Ariel Martinez, Sheldon Neuse and Cy Sneed.

I usually beat up on Calbee a lot for their photo selection being pretty dull and this set gives me no reason to stop.  For the most part, it's the usual collection of dull "pitchers pitching, batters batting" poses without even a single "catchers catching" shot.  On the plus side, there is one horizontal oriented card to break up the monotony a little and Watarai's photo is pretty good.  And I will repeat my comment from Series One that despite the dull photos, the cards themselves look good.  Here's some example cards:

#099 Roki Sasaki

#084 Munetaka Murakami

#061 Shota Morishita

#103 Adam Walker

#071 Ryuki Watarai

#118 Kenya Suzuki

If it wasn't clear, I'm somewhat puzzled by the decisions that Calbee made on player selection for this set.  I'm also puzzled by the theme of the one subset.  It's getting translated as something like "Player's Association President" in the set's checklist although the text on the card itself translates as "Player Chairman".  I think these are each team's representative to the Player's Association.  While I am a firm supporter of organized labor, I think it's kind of an odd theme for a subset.  The subset includes cards for players like Ukyo Shuto, Yutaro Sugimoto and Shota Tonosaki.  The cards themselves have kind of an ugly design with big triangles taking up the upper left and lower right corners of the card.  The photos are all pretty dull, continuing the "pitchers pitching, batters batting" theme.  Here's the card for Dragons rep Yuya Yanagi as an example:

#PL-06

The backs of the cards have each team's ichi-gun Opening Day roster which seems somewhat unrelated to the fronts of the cards so it's another oddity about the set:

#PL-06

The six checklist cards also continue the numbering established in Series One.  They're numbered C-07 to C-12.  The cards all feature events from the first week or so of the season - the first victories for new managers Shinnosuke Abe and Toshiaki Imae; Norichika Aoki getting his 2,706 NPB-MLB hit, moving him into fifth place all time; Hideaki Wakui getting his 2000th strikeout; Natsuki Takeuchi getting his first win and Chusei Mannami hitting the 100th home run at the Fighters new stadium.  Usually the checklist cards have some of the better photos in Calbee's sets but I feel like they picked the dullest shots for this set.  Four of the cards (Abe, Wakui, Imae and Takeuchi) just show the player (or manager) basking in the post-game recognition of their honor and the Aoki card shows him just holding up his hands at first base (although admittedly that might be a better photo than that of almost all the "regular" player cards).  I think the only checklist card with a photo I like is the Mannami one:

#C-12

You can take a look at all of the cards over at Jambalaya and decided for yourself if I'm being too picky about the set.  As I said, I'm somewhat puzzled by it as well as kind of disappointed again.