Last Tuesday, Yuto Kimura of the Marines took a perfect game into the sixth inning against the Lions. He did end up with a perfect game or even a no-hitter but he did throw a complete game shutout. He tied a record for "fastest to a complete game shutout" in team history, joining Choji Murata, Yukinaga Maeda and Yuki Karakawa as pitchers to do it in their second year. (H/T NPB Reddit)
Since I didn't get any 2025 cards, all the cards I have of Kimura are from last year, his "rookie" season (at least in terms of his baseball cards - in terms of eligibility for the "Rookie Of The Year" award, this is his rookie season). I thought this would be an good opportunity to showcase the differences in his 2024 flagship cards. He only appeared in the Topps, Epoch and BBM sets as Calbee didn't have many rookies in their set.
He was included in the Topps set because he was the third round pick in the 2023 draft - Topps only included the top three draft picks for each team. One of my complaints about Topps' NPB sets is that they use photos from the team's introductory press conferences or fan festivals or posed photos in front of fake backgrounds for their rookie cards - here's an example of the former:
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| 2024 Topps NPB #51 |
What made it worse last year was that Epoch took a similar approach for most of the rookie cards in their NPB set. So we get a very similar looking card for Kimura:
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| 2024 Epoch NPB #222 |
It was only BBM that had a flagship card of Kimura on the field (or bullpen). Weirdly, the BBM set was the first of these three sets to be released. You'd think if they could have a photo of him from spring training, the other two companies could have too.
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| 2024 BBM 1st Version #214 |
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