Enemy character Killing Machine threw out the first pitch at this Saturday’s Seibu Lions versus Chunichi Dragons game in Japan. Sorry, “threw.”
As you can see in the clip, a Killing Machine statue was surrounded by kuroko (黒衣), which are traditional stagehands in Japanese theatre. Dressed completely in black, they are supposed to be “invisible” to the audience, who obviously can see them, but due to longstanding conventions pretend they’re not there.
One kuroko holds up the baseball, puts it in the pitching machine so the Dragon Quest character can fire a strike through its signature crossbow, which has been changed to a pitching machine.
For the game, this incarnation of the character was dubbed “The Killer Pitching Machine. The pitch was clocked at 199 kph, but it certainly doesn’t look that fast!
Home team Seibu won the game, beating the Dragons 7 to 3.
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