Category Archives: History

articles about Japanese baseball history

Baseball, History, Paid Content

100 years and counting

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Six years ago, Nippon Professional Baseball tooted its horn about the 80th anniversary of pro baseball in Japan, citing the December 1934 organization of the Greater Japan Tokyo Yakyu Club, the team that was to play visiting major leaguers and become the founding member of Japan’s first pro league.

All of that is true, except for the part about 2014 marking 80 years since the start of pro baseball in Japan. But when the Yomiuri Giants say there’s something to celebrate, NPB organizes a party.

And because Japan’s baseball media suck up so much to the Giants that they create a vacuum, one rarely hears anything to the contrary. Thus it was a great surprise recently when I saw a headline referring to this year as the 100th anniversary of pro ball in Japan, marking the 1920 founding of Japan’s first professional baseball team, the Japan Athletic Association, also known as the Shibaura Association.

Not surprisingly, the story came from outside the mainstream baseball media, on FNN Prime, the website of Fukuoka broadcaster TV Nishinihon. The station has been championing the campaign of Hawks chairman Sadaharu Oh to push for NPB to expand to 16 teams.

It’s said history is written by the winners but in this case, history was written by the survivors. The Shibaura club had no pro league to play in, although a second team was formed in 1921 in Seoul, the capital of Imperial Japan’s colonized Korean peninsula. On June 21, 1923, the Shibaura Association, while on tour on the continent, played the Tenkatsu Baseball Team in Seoul. The hosts won Japan’s first pro baseball game 6-5.

The Shibaura Association won the other two games played between the clubs, the last in Tokyo on Aug. 30. Two days later, the Seoul club lost its equipment in the Great Kanto Earthquake, when much of Tokyo was reduced to ashes. That was more or less the end of the Tenkatsu team, although a kind of Tenkatsu cover band toured the United States the following year.

The Shibaura Association’s ground survived the earthquake but was mobilized for relief efforts after the earthquake and was never returned to the team, which officially folded the following January.

The news was not lost on Ichizo Kobayashi, the owner of the Osaka-based Hankyu railroad, which services the area between Osaka and Kobe. In 1923 he had proposed a league sponsored by private railroads in the region in order to attract riders to the lines serving the clubs’ ballparks. Perhaps with an eye on realizing that dream, Kobayashi formed a new team out of the remnants of the Shibaura Club and located them in Takarazuka, Hyogo Prefecture, a hot spring town near Osaka.

A financial panic in 1927 forced the Osaka Mainichi Newspaper to fold its corporate team, costing the Takarazuka Association its principal rival, and the Association folded for good two years later when the Great Depression hit Japan.

Although members of the Shibaura and Takarazuka teams played leading roles in the organization of the first league five years later, the Giants have nearly succeeded in erasing those teams from history.

During my time at the Daily Yomiuri, I frequently had to argue long and hard to edit out the phrase “Japan’s first pro team” in stories referring to the Giants and change the reference to the “oldest existing pro team,” which the editors could live with. The editors kept wondering why I couldn’t just get with the program and settle for the word “oldest” which our revered Japanese paper treated like a fact.

Baseball, Commentary, History, Paid Content

Asian baseball on American TV

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My late pal Wayne Graczyk used to talk about the time he worked on the U.S. TV feed for the 1994 Japan Series alongside Ken Harrelson and Tom Paciorek when the major leagues were on strike, but otherwise Asian baseball on American TV has been a hit-and-miss affair.

On Thursday, Yonhap News reported that ESPN’s talks with the Korea Baseball Organization to air pro games from South Korea fell through. The report said the U.S. giant wanted the content for free, so that would seem like a non-starter.

South Korea suffered more severe early infections of COVID-19 than the United States. Despite Donald Trump’s boasts to the contrary, South Korea has done a vastly better job of controlling the coronavirus, and KBO is set to open its season, behind closed doors, on May 5.

Japan follows Trump’s lead

While Japan took some steps in February to stem the spread of infection by asking schools to close and event promoters not to attract crowds, the national government echoed Trump’s line that all was under control so that the Tokyo Olympics could go on as scheduled. Indeed, the biggest concern seems to have been suppressing the number of positive test results so as not to make people think Japan had a problem.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who seems to enjoy being in Trump’s orbit and who owes allegiance to the monied right-wing elites who fund his agenda, has said in essence, taking harsh measures to control the coronavirus is against the law and we lawmakers are helpless to change the law.

So it is that while Japan could have been in the same place as South Korea, with solid testing regimes and aggressive measures in place, it chose to test as few people as possible in order to keep published infection totals low. And while baseball might start here in June, it might not.

When it does, it will be very interesting if U.S. networks have any interest in broadcasting Japanese games. The Central League, where all teams hold exclusive broadcasting rights to their home games, is pretty much a no-go, but the Pacific League, whose clubs can market their rights jointly through Pacific League marketing, might have some attractive options available if baseball is being played here but not in the U.S.

Of course, there is always the chance that Japan, like ESPN, will boot its opportunity.

NPB and the fear of failure

In 2007, if I recall correctly, Bobby Valentine tried to introduce NPB to ESPN for the purpose of airing the Japan Series. The Series rights belong to NPB not to the individual clubs, although they have the right to select broadcasters for their home games in the postseason.

At the time, Valentine was the de facto general manager of the Lotte Marines, and team representative Ryuzo Setoyama — until he engineered Valentine’s ouster in a 2009 coup d’etat — sometimes cooperated with the skipper to pursue reforms. Setoyama broached the idea of having NPB sell the Japan Series broadcasting rights to ESPN, but according to Valentine, the other teams vetoed it.

“They said they were afraid that some kind of mistake might happen that would embarrass them,” Valentine told me at the time.

Of course, weird stuff has happened in the Series. Hall of Fame manager Toshiharu Ueda pulled his team off the field in 1978 to protest a home run he thought was foul. In 2004, accident-prone umpire Atsushi Kittaka’s poor execution of an out call at home plate caused Game 1 of the Japan Series to be delayed for 49 minutes.

And since Japanese baseball is about not losing by making mistakes, there may be some here who would consider vetoing a deal that could expose NPB to ridicule a victory.