1994 BBM Perfect Pitching Set

Today's perfect game by Roki Sasaki was the first in NPB since Hiromi Makihara's in 1994.  Makihara's feat inspired BBM to put out a set dedicated to all the perfect games in NPB history.  Called "Perfect Pitching", it was the first historic set BBM ever did.  It was also the first set that BBM did other than the annual "flagship", All Stars and Nippon Series sets.  I was surprised to discover that I'd never done a post about this set (although I've mentioned it at least once) so I thought I'd do one now.

It was an 18 card set (well, really 17 cards - more about that in a minute) that was sold in a folder rather than in a box.  You can see the front of the folder above while the back looked like this:

The folder has four panels.  When you open it up you get a two panel display showing Makihara's post game celebration.  Three cards for Makihara's perfect game were inserted into the panels.  Here's photos of the panels with and without the cards:

These panels open up again and the full four panel display has the box scores for all 15 perfect games in NPB history with a card commemorating the game inserted into the panel covering the box score.  Again here's photos of the panels with and without cards:

You might have noticed that the box score for perfect game #9 doesn't appear where you'd expect and there's a white piece of paper (that I just realized I inserted upside down for this photo) instead of a card covering the box score:

What this says is that BBM was unable to contact Tsutomu Tanaka, the pitcher who threw this perfect game on May 12th, 1966, and therefore could not produce a card of him.  I've always kind of wondered if the real reason was that Tanaka had been banned for life by NPB for his part in the Black Mist scandal and BBM's license with NPB didn't allow them to do a card of a banned player.

Here are the cards in the set for the other 14 perfect games.  They appear in the checklist in chronological order.  There's no #P9 due to the Tanaka card not being made:

#P1

#P2

#P3

#P4

#P5

#P6

#P7

#P8

#P10

#P11

#P12

#P13

#P14

#P15

Kind of surprising that with all the impressive stats with Sasaki's perfect game today, it turns out he's not the first "Sasaki" to throw a perfect game.  In fact, he's the third!

It's kind of interesting that the frequency of perfect games happening drops off significantly after the 1970's.  There were five perfect games in the 1950's, five in the 1960's and four in the 1970's.  Then there were none in the 1980's, one in the 1990's and then none in either the 2000's or 2010's.  There's a block of text in the lower right of the last panel of the box scores display that suggests that the reason for that is that there are now (in 1994) more stadiums with artificial turf and it's harder to throw a perfect game on artificial turf because ground balls move much faster.  While it's certainly true that there's only been three perfect games thrown since Korakuen Stadium was the first ballpark in Japan to install artificial turf in 1976, I'm not sure I buy that being the reason.  I don't have any alternate theory but it's possible there's no actual reason.

Here's the other three cards from the set - all associated with Makihara's feat:

#P16

#P17

#P18

I don't expect BBM or any of the other card companies to do anything like this to commemorate Sasaski's perfect game.  There will be an Epoch One card, probably issued this week, for the game and at the very least I'd expect to see it commemorated with a checklist card in Calbee's Series Two set and possibly the Marines team card in BBM's 2nd Version set.  I'd also expect to see a card for it in BBM's Fusion set at the end of the year, probably paired with a card of Makihara.