Hmm, that doesn't really seem to capture what he did. I mean, yeah, it was a perfect game but it wasn't just a perfect game. He struck out 19 batters in the game which tied the NPB record set by Koji Noda in 1995. He struck out 13 in a row from the last batter in the first through the last batter in the fifth, shattering the previous NBP record of nine consecutive strikeouts held jointly by Takao Kajimoto and Masayuki Dobashi. He struck out the side in five innings (2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th & 8th) and struck out the final batter in every other inning. He threw a total of 105 pitches, 82 of them were strikes. It was his first complete game victory of his career. At the tender ago of 20 years and five months of age, he became the youngest pitcher to ever throw a perfect game. His catcher, Kou Matsukawa, was only 18 years old so the combined age of the battery was just 38 years.
And of course what we didn't know a year ago was that a week later in his next start he would throw another eight perfect innings before coming out of the game (a game the Marines ultimately lost on a Chusei Mannami home run, the only hit their pitching staff gave up). His 17 consecutive perfect innings was yet another record.
I thought a good way to commemorate the anniversary of this event would be to do a post showing all the baseball cards that depicted the perfect game last year. All four of the main baseball card producers - BBM, Calbee, Epoch and Topps - issued Sasaki cards with photos from the game. This is in addition to the "Roki Sasaki - Perfect Game" box set that BBM put out last summer.
Epoch did the first cards for the game, issuing three of their on-demand Epoch One cards for it - one for the perfect game (#108), one for the 13 consecutive strikeouts (#109) and one for the 19 total strikeouts (#110). Here's the front and back of each of these three cards:
Calbee ultimately did two cards for the perfect game. The first was Sasaki's "regular" player card from Series Two (#117):
The second one was from the "Exciting Scene" subset in Series Three (#ES-08) and is technically for the 17 consecutive perfect innings:
Sasaki's card in the Topps NPB set (#80) also uses an image from the perfect game:
BBM's annual Fusion set functions as a season review set and Sasaki's perfect game merited two cards in it - one for the perfect game (#16) and one for the 19 strikeouts (#18):
I'm a little amused that there's three different cards showing Sasaki sitting on the field holding a baseball in one hand and a bouquet of flowers in the other but all three of the photos are different.
In addition to these cards, there were a bunch of team issued cards of Sasaki, many of which are for the perfect game. I only have one of these cards but there's a number of them over at COMC. I don't know how many total cards there are though or how many are for the perfect game. Here's the one I have:
Finally I should mention that I left out a couple short printed BBM cards that use images from the game. I don't have either of these but I swiped the images of them from Jambalaya. There was an "ultra secret version" of Sasaki's 2nd Version card (#502):
And a "secret version" of card #18 from the Fusion set:
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