Last week Samurai Japan played a couple friendly matches against "Team Europe", a collection of players from several European countries, including the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Italy, Spain and Germany. On Wednesday, Japan shutout the Europeans 5-0 but the big deal was Thursday's game where six Japanese pitchers combined to throw a perfect game against their Continental opponents.
This iteration of Samurai Japan included four collegiate players and three of them made their presence known in this game. Yumeto Kanemaru from Kansai University started and threw two innings, striking out four batters. He was relieved by Yuto Nakamura of the Aichi Institute of Technology, who pitched one inning and had one strikeout.
The professionals took over on the mound in the fourth inning with Shinya Matsuyama of the Dragons and Shota Watanabe of the Eagles both going an inning and striking out one and two batters respectively. Seibu's Chihiro Sumida came on in the sixth and threw an immaculate inning, striking out the side on nine pitches. The European's best chance for a hit came off of Sumida in the next inning when Delano Selassa led off the seventh with a shot to center field that Misho Nishikawa of Aoyama Gakuin University made an amazing diving catch to preserve the perfect game. Sumida struck out the next batter and got the final one to ground out to end his stint on the mound with four strikeouts. Atsuki Taneichi from the Marines was next on the mound and he retired the Europeans in order in the eighth without a strikeout, the only inning of the game in which no Japanese pitcher recorded a strikeout. He made up for it in the ninth, though, when he struck out the side to end the game. The six pitchers combined to strikeout 15 batters in the 2-0 victory.
I'm very curious to see if Topps does any Topps Now cards for these games like they did for the friendlies against Australia in November of 2022. It would be great to get cards of the collegiate players before they go pro. In the meantime, here's cards of the four NPB pitchers:
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| 2023 Epoch NPB Luxury Collection #70 |
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| 2023 BBM 1st Version #105 |
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| 2023 Topps Now Asian Professional Championship Samurai Japan Team Set #SJ-3 |
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| 2019 Calbee #173 |
2 comments:
I was watching that perfect game through the 7th when our local network cut away at 9PM to show its regularly scheduled TV drama. I didn't learn they had completed it until the next day.
Team Europe isn't necessarily the toughest opponent but it was still a cool accomplishment.
Ah, the infamous terrestrial broadcast cut off! I've heard about it but since I'm streaming everything I watch, I haven't really experienced it (except the couple times when the pirated signal has been terrestrial).
I missed the games entirely. We were on the West Coast Wednesday and I didn't want to get up that early (2 AM?) to watch the game. We got home to the East Coast later that night and I didn't get up Thursday morning until after the game was over.
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