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Season to start April 10 at earliest

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Japan’s Central and Pacific leagues’ seasons will open no earlier than April 10, Nippon Professional Baseball’s 12 teams decided Thursday. Opening Day was originally scheduled for March 20.

After a meeting of the teams’ representatives, commissioner Atsushi Saito said a number of simulations had been conducted. At present, the leagues’ playoff formats, known as Climax Series will be maintained on a schedule that will allow the Japan Series to be completed before the end of November. NPB player contracts expire at the end of November.

As the leagues did in 2011, when the season was delayed following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami and the subsequent nuclear disaster, practice games will be played in the time frame prior to the start of the regular season.

NPB’s preseason games have been played as scheduled, but have been held behind closed doors.

Stadium issues will also need to be addressed for certain teams in the postseason, whose stadiums may have already been lent out for other purposes from the middle of November. Teams are required to reserve their home grounds for potential use in the Japan Series, but the dates set aside for this year’s series are likely no longer in play.

In 2000, the Daiei Hawks were penalized when they were unable to hold a Japan Series game on the scheduled day. A few years earlier, when the Hawks were a PL doormat, they had committed the facility for use by a convention of neural surgeons.

The leagues were scheduled to take a three-week break so that no baseball would be played during the Olympics. The CL’s Yakult Swallows, whose home park, Jingu Stadium, is a few hundred meters from the Olympic Stadium, is expected to be turned into an Olympic parking lot and equipment staging area. Yokohama Stadium, the home park of the CL’s DeNA BayStars, is set to host Olympic baseball and softball.

The Swallows were set to use Tokyo Dome as an alternate home stadium before and after the Olympics.

Although the president of the Tokyo Olympic organizing committee, former primer minister Yoshiro Mori, and Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike have declared any changes to the Olympic calendar “impossible,” there is a growing sense that the coronavirus pandemic will not allow for the games to go forward as originally planned.

Baseball, News, Paid Content

NPB puts Opening Day on hold

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Nippon Professional Baseball postponed the start of its 2020 regular season on Monday after an emergency meeting of the 12 teams’ representatives, commissioner Atsushi Saito said.

“How must we (pro baseball) act? We must protect the players, staff, families, but no one more so than the fans. We must protect the cultural legacy of pro baseball. That is why we made this decision,” Saito said.

Earlier, Saito said delaying the start the regular season was “unavoidable at the present stage” because of the risk that playing games in front of crowds will increase the rate of new coronavirus infections in Japan.

Opening Day was set for March 20, but it now appears that it will be put on hold until the middle of April. The last disruption this large came in 2011 after an earthquake and tsunami devastated areas of northeastern Japan and triggered a nuclear meltdown north of Tokyo. That season was delayed for two weeks.

NPB executives and their counterparts from Japan’s pro soccer establishment, the J-League, met with public health experts, who explained the risks.

“We can’t play games in the current situation, where for every one person in a large crowd, two to three more will likely become infected,” he said.

“If you have games you have to make a maximum effort. If you don’t have the ability to measure body temperatures, disinfect the stadium and equipment and so on, then you can’t be said to be doing your best.”

Since Feb. 29, all of NPB’s preseason games have been played behind closed doors.

Meanwhile, the government, while urging that people and institutions take the threat of infection seriously, has put its head in the sand about the upcoming 2020 Olympics, scheduled to open on July 24.

Former prime minister Yoshiro Mori, the head of the local organizing committee said, “It is impossible that the games will not go ahead as scheduled.”

When senior IOC member Dick Pound suggested that alternatives plans might somehow be necessary, Japanese lawmakers began hyperventilating, screaming for the heretic’s head.