Twenty years ago today, on Thursday, Sept. 9, Nippon Professional Baseball was forced to take part in an official negotiation regarding the Nippon Professional Baseball Players Association’s demands to stop the merger of the Orix BlueWave and Kintetsu Buffaloes.

It was a historic point in the clash between baseball players, fans and the leaders of an established business used to being treated with deference by employees, customers and the media. It came about because of what one longtime former team executive, Yasuyuki Sakai, called “an unscrupulous effort at union busting that smacked of fascism.”

The 12 owners had refused to discuss the union’s demands after the Nikkei Shimbun broke the news of the merger on June 13. The momentum for a merger began after the owners in February, led by the Giants’ Tsuneo “Nabetsune” Watanabe, rejected Kintetsu’s plan to sell the Buffaloes’ naming rights.

Watanabe, said publicly that such a move was against the rules, but as with so many of his pronouncements, it was just something he made up. (1)

Watanabe, had long wanted to contract Japanese pro baseball from 12 teams, believing that too many teams diluted the product, and this was a chance to realize that. It would be difficult to operate a league without an even number of teams, as had occurred in 1951 and 1952 after one of the CL’s eight founding teams, Fukuoka’s Nishi Nihon Pirates, went out of business after one season and created a seven-team league.

In an early taste of NPB’s future political politics, the best Pirates players wound up playing for Yomiuri in the subsequent reshuffle, and after one year of struggling with a seven-team setup, the CL owners decided to contract after the 1952 season.

In that plan, 1952’s last-place team would be forced out via a merger. The Hiroshima Carp, currently battling for the CL pennant, finished sixth, 3-1/2 games ahead of the 1950 champion Shochiku Robins, who merged with the Taiyo Whales to become the Taiyo Shochiku Robins in 1953.

But in 2004, teams began jockeying for possible merger partners, in the hope of creating one strong team out of two weaker ones in a new 10-team or even eight-team single league. Word of this broke on July 7, when Seibu Lions owner Yoshiaki Tsutsumi revealed that to the public.