⚾ Graded 2022 Topps Bowman NPB Roki Sasaki #133 Chrome Rookie RC Baseball Card PSA 10 GEM MINT — The Highest Grade PSA Issues on the 2022 Topps Bowman NPB Chrome Rookie Card of the Iwate Prefecture Native Who Became the Most Dominant Pitcher in Nippon Professional Baseball, Who Threw a Perfect Game Against the Orix Buffaloes in April 2022 — the First Perfect Game in NPB in Nearly Three Decades — and Who Subsequently Signed With the Los Angeles Dodgers to Bring His Elite Arsenal to Major League Baseball

✨ The 2022 Topps Bowman NPB Roki Sasaki #133 Chrome, graded PSA 10 GEM MINT, is the certified premium document of one of the most anticipated international pitching prospects baseball has ever tracked — a right-hander from the coast of Iwate Prefecture who combined triple-digit velocity with the kind of secondary pitches that elite pitching coaches describe as generational, who pitched a perfect game in his home league while still technically a teenager in professional development terms, and who created a global collector audience before he ever threw his first major league pitch. Topps' NPB Chrome Bowman license produced the first major American hobby-standard chrome card product for Nippon Professional Baseball players, and the #133 Sasaki card within that 2022 release captures him at the precise point in his career when his NPB dominance was at its most spectacular. The PSA 10 GEM MINT grade confirms that this specific copy presents at the highest condition standard Professional Sports Authenticator assigns across all four evaluation dimensions.

⚾ Roki Sasaki was born November 3, 2001, in Ōfunato, Iwate Prefecture — a coastal community in the Sanriku region of northeastern Japan, in the Tohoku coast that faces the Pacific Ocean and that sits in one of the most geologically active marine zones in the world. Iwate Prefecture is a region where the natural landscape is both beautiful and, at its most extreme, terrifying — the Sanriku coast has a long documented history with the Pacific Ocean and its power, and the people who grow up in these communities carry that history as part of their identity. Sasaki grew up in this environment and developed through the Japanese high school baseball system — the Koshien tournament, the intense training culture of high school baseball in Japan — before the Chiba Lotte Marines selected him as the top overall pick in the 2019 NPB Draft.

⚾ The argument for Roki Sasaki as the most talented pitcher in Japan was made in dramatic fashion across his NPB career with the Marines, but the date that the baseball world outside Japan focused on most intensely was April 10, 2022. On that afternoon, Sasaki faced the Orix Buffaloes at ZOZOmarine Stadium in Chiba and retired all 27 batters he faced — a perfect game, the first in NPB since 1994, nearly three decades earlier. He struck out 19 batters. The performance was so complete, so dominant, so precise across its 27 outs, that the video of the game traveled immediately across baseball social media internationally, introducing Sasaki to audiences in North America and Europe who had been tracking him through scouting reports but who had not yet seen him perform at this level in real time. The velocity, the movement, the splitter that dropped off the table at the bottom of the strike zone — Sasaki's 2022 perfect game was baseball proof of what the evaluations were already saying: this was a front-line starting pitcher who would change any rotation he entered.

⚾ Sasaki's subsequent signing with the Los Angeles Dodgers brought him to a Major League Baseball roster in 2025, joining an organization whose accumulated pitching talent is unmatched in the modern game. The 2022 Topps Bowman NPB Chrome #133 PSA 10 GEM MINT is the hobby's premium-condition document of who Sasaki was in the NPB chapter — the Chiba Lotte Marines ace who threw a perfect game, who posted strikeout numbers and ERA figures that placed him at the top of Japanese professional baseball, and who had been the most watched international pitching prospect in the game before his MLB arrival. Condition: NOS.

⚾ Roki Sasaki. Ōfunato, Iwate Prefecture, Japan. Chiba Lotte Marines. Los Angeles Dodgers. April 10, 2022 Perfect Game. 2022 Topps Bowman NPB #133. Chrome Rookie RC. PSA 10 GEM MINT. Hall of Fame Sports Memorabilia. Condition: NOS.