Only 21, Roki Sasaki Has Already Done the Unprecedented

The world is going to get a better look at Japanese righthander Roki Sasaki this week with the beginning of the 2023 World Baseball Classic, and most likely they are going to be amazed. 

He’s incredibly talented, and as a 21-year-old, his best days are hopefully still ahead of him.

But if Sasaki’s career ended today (and let’s hope he has well over a decade of impressive pitching to come), I would argue he’s already pulled off one of the greatest feats in baseball history.

You may be aware that Sasaki threw a perfect game last year. Even in the rarefied air of perfect games it was especially dominant. Sasaki struck out 19 of the 27 batters he faced. Only two balls left the infield and Sasaki dominated with just two pitches (his fastball and splitter). It was one of the best pitched games you’ll ever see.

Hitters were helpless. What do you do when a pitcher can dot the zone with a 100 mph fastball, and then as you gear up to hit that heater, you find he’s thrown a 90 mph splitter that falls off the table?

Sasaki threw his low-90s splitter 35 times in that game. Only six were balls. Of his splitter’s 29 strikes, 21 were swings and misses.

It was a completely dominating perfect game, one of the best pitched games you’ll ever see. That’s what perfect games are, a day when a pitcher is at the upper limit of their ability. No-hitters can be the sign of a pitcher’s dominance, but perfect games require something more, as one walk, one hit batter or even one error can destroy them. Nolan Ryan threw seven no-hitters, but he never threw a perfect game. 

But what is not getting enough notice is what Sasaki did the next time out. A week later, Sasaki faced Hokkaido. This time, Sasaki faced 24 batters. He retired all 24 and struck out 14. With the game tied 0-0 after eight innings, Chiba Lotte manager Tadahito Iguchi went to the bullpen.

Chiba Lotte ended up losing the game in the 10th, but Sasaki left unblemished. Only the team’s care for the arm of the best 20-year-old pitcher in the world kept him from going back out to try to complete back-to-back perfect games.

Sasaki had also retired the last batter he faced in his previous start on April 3 on a strikeout. He did give up a single on the first pitch of his game on April 17, proving he is human.

But over a stretch of 52 batters, Sasaki picked up 52 outs. That’s six batters better than the longest perfect streak by any pitcher in Major League Baseball history.

Yusmeiro Petit’s MLB-record 46-batter streak came over a series of brief relief appearances. Sasaki followed up a perfect game with eight innings of perfection for 51 batters faced and 51 batters retired in back-to-back starts.

I’m sure you realize how remarkable that is without me needing to explain it. But I’m guessing you’re probably not fully aware how rare it is.

The history of perfect games is an imperfect one when you dig deeper into the upper levels of baseball. We know with absolute certainty how many perfect games have been thrown in the major leagues (27, although two of them came before the merger of the American and National leagues in 1903). Similarly, we know there have been 17 perfect games in the Nippon Professional Baseball League. Across other national professional leagues, we can be reasonably certain of the count. Italy has had four perfect games. Honkbal in the Netherlands has had four as well. Taiwan’s CPBL has had just one. Korea’s KBO is still waiting for its first. In the history of Cuba’s Serie Nacional there’s been one.

But even when you get to the minor leagues in the U.S., some statistical humility is required. The term perfect game wasn’t even invented until after some perfect games had been thrown.

We can find records for 80 perfect games in the affiliated minor leagues as well as the Mexican League. 

When you go further, and try to include all the perfect games in college baseball, those records become even sketchier. The NCAA has records of 19 nine-inning perfect games in Division I and 10 in Division II since 1957 (the first year for which the NCAA has records). The NCAA does not keep records of Division III perfect games.

The NAIA has records for 24 perfect games. Well, it actually has records for 26, but I’ll explain the discrepancy in a minute.

So scanning as far as we can find, we can come up with records for 180 perfect games at the upper levels of baseball since 1903.

In no way am I comfortable in saying that those are all the perfect games that have ever occurred in men’s professional baseball around the world, or at the major college level. In fact, I feel comfortable saying there’s a perfect game out there somewhere that I’m missing, and we’ll probably find it, or a couple, that will be sent to me after we publish this story.

But doing the best due diligence I can, that comes to 180 perfect games. And do you know how many pitchers have thrown two of those 180 perfect games?

Zero.

I’m not saying that no one has ever thrown two perfect games in the majors (no one has). I’m not saying that no one has ever thrown two perfect games in college baseball (no one has).

I’m saying that with the best records we can find, we can’t find an example of anyone who has ever thrown two perfect games in their career between all the many, many upper levels of the game.

No one has thrown a perfect game in college baseball and then gone on to throw one in the minors. No one ever spun a perfect game in the minors and then went on to do it in the majors. No collegian then headed to Italy and threw a perfect game in Serie A1. No one threw a perfect game in an NAIA game and then followed it up with one in the Northwest League.

I can’t find anyone who has thrown two nine-inning perfect games, period. 

That does require a little bit of explaining. The NAIA actually lists Southeastern Oklahoma’s Denney Crabaugh as having thrown two perfect games.

Crabaugh is now a very successful head coach at Oklahoma City. He’s won an NAIA national title and has won over 1,500 games. But his coaching bio lists him as having thrown two no-hitters, not perfect games. A quick check with Crabaugh confirmed that. He explained that both were no-hitters but not perfect games, and neither went nine innings.

So that wiped out the one example I could find of the only man with two career perfect games.

But we’re not done. Because while I could not find any examples of a man doing it across more than a century of baseball, I did find one example of a woman doing it in the brief 12-year history of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.

Jean Faut is arguably the best pitcher in the history of the AAGPBL. She passed away on Feb. 28 at the age of 98. In addition to posting a career 1.23 ERA, she threw two of the league’s five perfect games. She threw one in 1951 and then added another in 1953. That means, as best I can determine, she is the only pitcher to throw two career perfect games at the upper levels of the sport.

She may get company one day. Sasaki is only 21. 

ALL-TIME PERFECT GAMES

Here is, as best we can determine, every nine-inning or longer perfect game that has been thrown in the professional leagues in the U.S., Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Cuba, Mexico, Italy and the Netherlands, as well as perfect games from four-year college baseball leagues in the U.S. and the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. The sources are MLB, NPB, the CPBL, the Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball, the NCAA, the NAIA and SABR, as well as Serie A1 and Honkbal’s official sites.

 

League	Year	Player	Team
MLB	1904	Cy Young	Boston
MiLB	1906	Irv Wilhelm	Birmingham
MiLB	1906	Tom Fisher	Shreveport
MiLB	1907	Charles Evans	Hartford
MiLB	1907	Fred Brown	Sacramento
MiLB	1907	Gene Packard	Independence
MiLB	1908	Ivan Loos	Danville
MLB	1908	Addie Joss	Cleveland
MiLB	1909	Chet Carmichael	Buffalo
MiLB	1909	Chief Williams	Newton
MiLB	1909	Urban Faber	Dubuque
MiLB	1910	Cy Dalhgren	Superior
MiLB	1910	Jack Northrop	Reading
MiLB	1916	Tom Rogers	Nashville
MiLB	1917	Ben Tincup	Little Rock
MiLB	1920	Jim Park	Drumwright
MiLB	1921	Clarence Brown	Ludington
MiLB	1922	Thomas Gheen	Winston-Salem
MLB	1922	Charlie Robertson	Chicago (AL)
MiLB	1923	Eddie Steinman	Mt. Pleasant
MiLB	1923	Randolph Young	Bloomington
MiLB	1924	Walter Jacoway	Daranelles
MiLB	1925	Herman Schwartz	Bloomington
MiLB	1926	Raymond Starr	Danville
MiLB	1935	Eddie Cole	Galveston
MiLB	1935	Hugo Klaerner	Longview
MiLB	1937	Ed Tantillo	Dover
MiLB	1941	Charley Welchel	Biog Spring
MiLB	1943	Chet Covington	Scranton
AAGPBL	1944	Anabelle Lee	Minneapolis
AAGPBL	1945	Carolyn Morris	Rockford
MiLB	1947	Carl DeRose	Kansas City
MiLB	1947	Mel Nee	Miami
AAGPBL	1947	Doris Sams	Muskegon
MiLB	1948	Buddy Lake	Sanford
MiLB	1948	Dick Strahs	Hot Springs
MiLB	1949	Bob Heffernan	Pensacola
MiLB	1950	Harry Clark	Dothan
MiLB	1950	Higgins Duncan	Douglas
MiLB	1950	James Pomykala	Greenville
MiLB	1950	Marlin Stuart	Toledo
NPB	1950	Hideo Fujimoto	Yomiuri
MiLB	1951	Ken Kimball	Idaho Falls
AAGPBL	1951	Jean Faut	South Bend
ITA	1952	Carlo Tagliaboschi	Nettuno
MiLB	1952	Dick Marlowe	Buffalo
Mexico	1953	Ramiro Cuevas	Nuevo Laredo
MiLB	1953	Bill Butler	Lewiston
AAGPBL	1953	Jean Faut	South Bend
NPB	1955	Fumio Takechi	Kintetsu
MiLB	1956	John Herbert	Erie
MLB	1956	Don Larsen	New York (AL)
NPB	1956	Koretomo Miyaji	Kokutetsu
NPB	1957	Masakazu Kaneda	Kokutetsu
NPB	1958	Sadao Nishimura	Nishitetsu
MiLB	1959	Ron Bloodworth	Lincoln
NCAA D-I	1959	Dick Reitz	Maryland
NPB	1960	Gentaro Shimada	Taiyo
MiLB	1961	Dennis Ribant	Quad Cities
NPB	1961	Yoshimi Moritaki	Kokutetsu
NCAA D-I	1963	Don Woeltjen	Georgia
MLB	1964	Jim Bunning	Philadelphia (NL)
MLB	1965	Sandy Koufax	Los Angeles (NL)
NCAA D-I	1965	Bob Schauenberg	Iowa
NCAA D-I	1965	Jerry Anderson	Murray St.
NPB	1966	Tsutomu Tanaka	Nishitetsu
NPB	1966	Yoshiro Sasaki	Taiyo
MiLB	1967	Wenty Ford	West Palm Beach
NCAA D-II	1967	Larry Gonsalves	Fresno St. (Calif.)
MiLB	1968	Edward Phillips	Winston-Salem
MiLB	1968	Larry Bohannon	Orlando
MLB	1968	Catfish Hunter	Oakland
NPB	1968	Yoshiro Tokoba	Hiroshima
Mexico	1969	Abel Armas	C. Mante
Mexico	1969	Gonzalo Meza	San Luis Rio Colorado
MiLB	1970	Chuck Swanson	Montgomery
NCAA D-II	1970	Dennis Kessel	Carthage (Wisc.)
NPB	1970	Koichiro Sasaki	Kintetsu
NPB	1971	Yoshimasa Takahashi	Ei Azuma
MiLB	1973	Steve Hardin	Wilson
NCAA D-I	1973	Eddie Bane	Arizona State
NCAA D-II	1973	Chuck Burns	Northern Iowa
NPB	1973	Shoroku Yagisawa	Lotte
MiLB	1974	Greg Diehl	Oneonta
MiLB	1975	Marc Bombard	Tampa
NAIA	1975	Robert Vargas	Texas Lutheran
NCAA D-II	1977	Rosario Viens	Sacred Heart (Conn.)
Mexico	1978	Horacio Pina	Aguascalientes
NPB	1978	Yutaro Imai	Hankyu
NAIA	1980	Noel Delgado	Lubbock Christian (Texas)
Mexico	1981	Victor Garcia	Nuevo Laredo
MLB	1981	Len Barker	Cleveland
NAIA	1982	Mark Simons	Armstrong State (Ga.)
MiLB	1983	Randy Ramirez	Bakersfield
NAIA	1983	Billy Elliot	Dallas Baptist (Texas)
MLB	1984	Mike Witt	California
NAIA	1985	Randy Beilmeier	Wisconsin-Oshkosh
NCAA D-I	1987	Kevin Sheary	Miami (Fla.)
NCAA D-I	1987	Mark Bowlan	Memphis
MLB	1988	Tom Browning	Cincinnati
DML	1989	Craig McGinnis	Haarlem
MiLB	1989	Rafael Valdez	Riverside
NAIA	1989	Kevin Fowler	Montevallo (Ala.)
ITA	1990	Richard Olsen	Grosseto
MLB	1991	Dennis Martinez	Montreal
Mexico	1992	Don Heinkel	Campeche
NAIA	1992	Jamey Morton	Lubbock Christian (Texas)
NCAA D-II	1992	Dave Sparks	Troy (Ala.)
NAIA	1993	Jeff Luttrell	Cumberland (Tenn.)
MiLB	1994	Jason Robbins	Billings
MLB	1994	Kenny Rogers	Texas
NAIA	1994	Jason Allread	Campbellsville (Ky.)
NAIA	1994	Tim Arden	LeTourneau (Texas)
NPB	1994	Hiromi Makihara	Yomiui
NAIA	1995	Mark Unger	Illinois Tech
MiLB	1996	Rick Helling	Oklahoma City
NAIA	1996	Lee Harper	Birmingham-Southern (Ala.)
NCAA D-I	1996	Chris McConnell*	St. Francis (N.Y.)
DML	1997	Eelco Jansen	Kinheim
MLB	1998	David Wells	New York (AL)
CUB	1999	Maels Rodriguez	Sancti Spiritus
ITA	1999	Tom Urbani	San Marino
MiLB	1999	Eric Ireland	Kissimmie
MiLB	1999	Marcos Castillo	Inland Empire
MLB	1999	David Cone	New York (AL)
NAIA	1999	Andy Heimbach	Mount Vernon Nazarene (Ohio)
NAIA	1999	Luke Martin	Embry-Riddle (Fla.)
MiLB	2000	Scott Dunn	Clinton
MiLB	2000	Tomo Ohka	Pawtucket
MiLB	2001	John Halama	Tacoma
MiLB	2001	Kip Bouknight/Pat Lynch	Tri-City
MiLB	2001	Nick Regilio	Charlotte
NCAA D-II	2001	John Connally-Barnett	Florida Southern
NCAA D-I	2002	Eric Brandon	Auburn
MiLB	2003	Bronson Arroyo	Pawtucket
MiLB	2003	John Wasdin	Nashville
NAIA	2003	Mitch Crafton	Lee (Tenn.)
Mexico	2004	Oscar Rivera	Yucatan
MiLB	2004	A.J. Murray/Steve Karsay/Scott Feldman	Frisco
MiLB	2004	Chris Coughlin	Burlington
MiLB	2004	Keith Ramsey	Kinston
MLB	2004	Randy Johnson	Arizona
NAIA	2005	Mike Mlotkowski	Oklahoma City
MiLB	2007	Manny Parra	Nashville
NPB	2007	Daisuke Yamai/Hitoki Iwase	Chunichi
NAIA	2008	Levi Curry	Mount Vernon Nazarene (Ohio)
MiLB	2009	Jeanmar Gomez	Akron
MLB	2009	Mark Buehrle	Chicago (AL)
NAIA	2009	Sean Teague	Southern Poly (Ga.)
MLB	2010	Dallas Braden	Oakland
MLB	2010	Roy Halladay	Philadelphia (NL)
MiLB	2011	Justin Germano	Columbus
NCAA D-I	2011	Will Roberts	Virginia
MiLB	2012	Chris Corrigan	Palm Beach
MLB	2012	Felix Hernandez	Seattle
MLB	2012	Matt Cain	San Francisco
MLB	2012	Philip Humber	Chicago (AL)
NAIA	2013	Drew Greiwe	Central Methodist (Mo.)
NAIA	2013	Elliott Engle	Doane (Neb.)
ITA	2014	Angel Marquez	Grosseto
NAIA	2014	Chris Pike	Oklahoma City
NCAA D-I	2014	Javi Salas	Miami (Fla.)
MiLB	2015	Gabriel Castellanos/Brett Lilek/Steven Farworth	Batavia
NAIA	2015	David Mullins	Missouri Baptist
NAIA	2015	Jason Karkenny	The Master’s (Calif.)
NCAA D-I	2015	Drew Rasmussen	Oregon State
NCAA D-I	2016	Jesse Scholtens	Wright State
NCAA D-I	2016	Shane McCarthy	Seton Hall
MiLB	2017	Connor Grey	Kane County
MiLB	2017	Domenic Mazza	Augusta
MiLB	2017	Tyler Mahle	Pensacola
NAIA	2017	Damon Proctor	University of Northwestern Ohio
NCAA D-I	2017	Cory Abbott	Loyola Marymount
CPBL	2018	Ryan Verdugo	Uni-Lions
NCAA D-I	2018	Joe DeMers	Washington
NCAA D-II	2018	Dan Wirchansky	Pace (N.Y.)
NCAA D-II	2018	Mitchell Powers	Southern New Hampshire
DML	2019	Misja Harcksen	Neptunus
NCAA D-I	2019	Jake Kuchmaner	East Carolina
NCAA D-II	2019	Will Bausinger	Missouri Southern St.
NCAA D-I	2020	Bryce Jarvis	Duke
DML	2021	Tom de Blok	Amsterdam
NCAA D-II	2021	Cade Crader	MSU Denver
NCAA D-I	2022	Ryan Ramsey	Maryland
NPB	2022	Roki Sasaki	Chiba Lotte