Card Of The Week May 31

I got intrigued by something I came across while researching Osamu Nomura for the post I did on the 2000 Olympic team last week - Nomura was the first pitcher in Japan to beat all 12 NPB teams.  I decided to do a little more research on this and I found this Japanese Wikipedia page that listed of all the pitchers who have done this feat.

NPB started out as a 15 team circuit in 1950 and it wasn't until 1958 when the Daiei Stars and Mainichi Orions merged that it was down to 12 teams.  There have been a total of 18 pitchers who have gotten victories against all 12 teams - or at least all 12 teams from when they played.  I give that caveat because of course the Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes stopped operating after 2004 (I know officially they "merged" with Orix but Kintetsu has no role in the ownership of the team anymore) and were replaced with the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles.  There are three pitcher that beat all 13 teams - both Kintetsu and Rakuten along with the other 11 teams: Kimiyasu Kuduh, Toshiya Sugiuchi and Hayato Terahara.

This feat was much more difficult before interleague play started in 2005.  For a player to pull this off before then he would have to play for a minimum of four teams - two in each league.  Since then a player just needs to play for two teams.  The numbers show this - 15 of the 18 pitchers on the list have done it since 2005.

As I said previously, Nomura was the first pitcher to do it.  He beat the Yokohama Taiyo Whales on May 15th, 1983 to beat his 12th team.  Four and a half months later on October 4th, Masaaki Koga of the Whales beat the Yomiuri Giants.  What's kind of odd is Koga only had 38 wins in his career - I think his victory over the Giants was the final one of his career.  It was over 18 years until the next player did - Kazuhiro Takeda of the Giants beat the Dragons on May 7th, 2002 to beat his 12th team.

I wanted to share cards of the three pitchers who did this pre-interleague, preferably showing cards of them with the team they were with when they got that final win.  I had a problem with Koga though because I only have two cards of him, both of which are from Lions OB sets.  On the plus side however the card I'm showing of Takeda is from the 2002 Calbee "Be Excited!" subset that commemorates him reaching this milestone:

2015 Epoch Tigers Nippon Champions 1985 #09

2010 Lions 60th Anniversary #67

2002 Calbee #EX-5