Card Of The Week April 17

Today is Sunday which means it's once again "Roki Sasaki acts like he's playing NPB with a cheat code" day.  Today of course was Sasaki's first start since he threw a perfect game against the Buffaloes and he picked up where he left off last week, going eight perfect innings against the Fighters while striking out 14.  The Marines, however, had failed to score off of Fighters' starter Naoyuki Uwasawa and Nippon-Ham's bullpen and Lotte manager Tadahito Iguchi decided to pull Sasaki after he'd thrown 102 pitches.  Naoya Masuda kept the no-hitter intact through the ninth inning (I think he let a batter get on base via a wild pitch on a third strike but I'm not positive - according to the box score he pitched one inning and had three strikeouts while giving up no walks or hits but he somehow faced four batters) but the Marines again failed to score in the bottom of the ninth.  In the top of the tenth, the Fighters finally broke through with their first of the game when Chusei Mannami came up against Yuji Nishino and did this:

Naoki Miyanishi held the Marines off in the bottom of the tenth and the Fighters won the game 1-0 after only getting the single hit by Mannami.

Sasaki has now retired 52 consecutive batters.  His stats for the season are 56 strikeouts, two walks, seven hits and four runs in 31 innings.

Since I've featured Sasaki both of the last two weeks, I thought I'd feature Mannami today.  Here's a card of his from last year's BBM Fighters set (#F64):

2010 Giants Winning Game Cards

When I did my post about the 2009 BBM Giants Expression set yesterday, I mentioned that Dan had also sent me the complete 2010 Giants Winning Game Card set.  As it sounds, this was a set that contains a card for every victory that the Yomiuri Giants had in the 2010 season.  I know that the Giants did sets like this every year between 2009 and 2014 and it wouldn't surprise me if they did it both before and after that range of years as well.  There used to be a website that you could go on to buy the cards - I think your options were only buying a complete set or a month at time but I'm not sure.  I'm also not sure how much the cards cost.  I do know that at least the Fighters and Lions have also done these kind of sets but I don't know if anyone is still doing them.

The front of each card features an "Impressive Player" from the game in question as well as the date, score and location of the game.  They are unnumbered other than the win number.  The backs have the line score of the game, a "Game Digest" with a brief summary of the game and a "Viewpoint" that I think talks about what the player featured on the card did.  Here's the front and back of the card for the Giants second victory of the season as an example:

The photos on the cards are really outstanding.  There's a great variety of shots and there's a handful of cards that use a horizontal format.  There's a couple of cards that feature alternate uniforms that the team wore that year as well.  Here's a bunch of examples:

By the way, all three of the guys on the front of Chih-Lung Huang's card are Huang.  The sliding player in the foreground of the card of Chono for July 19th is not Chono, it's Yoshinobu Takahashi - Chono's the player behind him.  And Shugo Fujii is a pitcher but is shown batting on the card for October 2nd.

2010 was an unusually close pennant race in the Central League (actually in both leagues) with the Dragons, Tigers and Giants finishing within a game of each other.  The Dragons and Giants both finished the season with 79 wins and the Tigers finished with 78.  Because of ties, however, victories don't determine the standings in Japanese baseball, winning percentage does.  Since the Dragons and Tigers both had three ties each but the Giants only had one, those two teams finished in front of the Giants with the Dragons (.560 winning percentage) in first, the Tigers (.563 winning percentage) in second and the Giants (.562 winning percentage) in third.  The Giants swept the Tigers in the First Stage of the Climax Series two game to none before losing in the Final Stage four games to one to the Dragons.  

So obviously there's 79 cards in this set to account for the Giants' 79 wins.  But there's another 11 "special" or bonus cards in the set to get the total size of the set up to 90.  Unlike the regular cards, these cards all have a "kira" finish to them.  Three of these cards are dedicated to the three wins the Giants got in the post-season - two against the Tigers and one against the Dragons.  Here's the one for their sole Final Stage victory:

Two of the remaining eight cards highlight performances by the Giants in the two All Star games that year - Shinnosuke Abe being MVP of the first game and Tetsuya Matsumoto becoming the first former ikusei player to get a hit in an All Star game in the second.  The last six cards are for highlights of the season - manager Tatsunori Hara's 500th career win; Ryota Wakiya setting a CL record by scoring in 15 consecutive games; Yuya Kubo leading the CL in pitching appearances; Hisayoshi Chono winning the Rookie Of The Year award. Alex Ramirez leading the league in home runs and RBIs and Hayato Sakamoto playing in every inning in the 2010 season.  Here's the Sakamoto card:

Obviously many of the Giants players had multiple cards in this set.  Ramirez has the most with 11 followed by Chono with 10, Sakamoto with 9 and Michihiro Ogasawara with 8.  There are 27 different players who have at least one card in the set (well, 26 players and manager Hara).  Probably the biggest two names on the roster who don't appear in this set are Lee Seung-yeop and Takahiro Suzuki.  (Dan actually had been told by the seller that Lee was in the set which is why he bought it.)

If it's not obvious, I really like this set.  I'd probably like it even more if (1) it was for a season that I followed the team closely and/or (2) it was for a team I liked more.  But still it's a lot of fun.

2009 BBM Giants Expression Set

Dan of Korean Cardboard sent me two Giants related sets last week - the 2009 BBM Giants Expression set and the 2010 Giants "Winning Game Card" set.  I'll talk about the 2010 set soon but I wanted to do a quick post on the Expression set.  This was sold as box set with a 33 card base set - it's not clear to me if there was any sort of "special" insert card like an autograph or memorabilia card that came with it.

The big deal with this set was that it contained cards that showed close up photos of the players faces - so you can see their "expressions".  There's essentially 16 player cards in the set which includes Shinnosuke Abe, Hayato Sakamoto, Alex Ramirez, Seth Griesinger, Marc Kroon, Lee Seung-yuop, Yoshiyuki Kamei, Michihiro Ogasawara, Yoshinobu Takahashi and Tetsuya Yamaguchi.  The photos on the cards are very different from the usual BBM photos.  Here's some examples:

#07

#12

#10

#05

The rest of the set is broken up into four subsets.  There's a two card "Playback 2008" subset for how the Giants finished in 2008 - there's one card for them winning the Central League pennant and another for them beating the Dragons in the Climax Series (but no card for them losing to the Lions in the Nippon Series).  Here's the Climax Series card:

#18

There's a three card subset called "2009 Newcomer" which, as it sounds, includes three players new to the Giants in 2009 - Edgardo Alfonzo, Michael Nakamura and rookie Taishi Ohta.  Here's Alfonzo's card:

#20

Next up is a six card "Rising Stars" subset featuring Kamei, Daisuke Ochi, Sakamoto, Takahiro Suzuki, Shun Tohno and Yaamguchi.  I think the inclusion of Suzuki as a "Rising Star" is kind of odd considering that at the time he was 31 years old.  Here's Sakamoto's card:

#25

The last subset is another six card one for players who changed their uniform number coming into the 2009 season - Tomoya Inzen, Kamei, Ken Katoh, Ochi, Sakamoto and Tohno.  Here's Kamei's card:

#32

As you can tell, a number of player appear multiple times in the set.  Kamei, Ochi and Sakamoto have three cards each while Suzuki, Tohno and Yamaguchi have two cards each.

It's a nice little set and I'm grateful to Dan for sending it to me.  You can see all the cards over at Jambalaya.

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.

Card Of The Week April 10

Roki Sasaki threw a perfect game today against the Orix Buffaloes.  There's so many amazing things about this game that its hard to figure out what to say next.  It was the 16th perfect game in NPB history and the first since Hiromi Makihara of the Giants threw one against the Carp on May 18th, 1994 (although Daisuke Yamai and Hitoki Iwase of the Dragons combined to throw one in Game 5 of the 2007 Nippon Series - NPB does not recognize combined no-hitters as "official" ones).  Sasaki struck out 19 batters in the game, tying 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 20 years and five months of age, he's the youngest pitcher to ever throw a perfect game.  His catcher, Kou Matsukawa, is only 18 years old so the combined age of the battery was just 38 years.  Sasaki's stats for the season now are 42 strikeouts, seven hits, two walks and four earned runs in 23 innings.

There's already a page for the game on Japanese Wikipedia but if you'd rather see the highlights rather than read about it, here's a video that the Marines put out showing all 27 outs:

Since I just did Sasaki for last week's Card Of The Week, I thought I'd share cards commemorating the feats he matched today.  Here are cards for Makihara's perfect game in 1994 and Noda's 19 strikeout game in 1995:

2002 BBM Giants #G112

1996 BBM #543

But I can't resist showing another Sasaki card:

2020 Calbee #094

Maybe I should resist - I only have 20-ish cards of him and if he keeps up these kind of performances, I'll run out of Card Of The Week material by the end of the season!