NPB Notes -- Intro

I've always been curious about/interested in Japanese professional baseball and, with the Japanese coming off an inaugural World Baseball Classic championship and my interest still intact below the surface of my mind, I figured now might be a good time to start what will hopefully be a regular feature on The Pipeline about major league baseball in Japan. I'm calling it NPB Notes for now but that's subject to change. I remember doing a project on Japan in fourth or fifth grade -- which even involved writing to the Japanese embassy in D.C. and getting a huge thick packet of stuff in return (greatly appreciated). I don't know how much of that info I remember -- I guess some but not nearly all -- but I didn't really go into baseball in that project, unfortunately.

When you're young and reading just about anything about baseball you can get your hands on, there aren't really a lot of references to the Japanese leagues. About all you ever read about is Sadaharu Oh and his feat of hitting more homers than Aaron or Ruth (an eye-popping 868 from 1959 to 1980) and maybe a mention of Masanori Murakami, who pitched 89 innings for the Giants in the mid-1960s. Then you had Warren Cromartie successfully making the trip overseas (at least the first noted success of my lifetime) to play in the 1980s followed by more American exports, known as "gaijin" in the '80s, '90s and today. MLB imported some Japanese players too starting in the mid-1990s with Hideo Nomo and Hideki Irabu and hitting it big with Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui. As many players going either way have failed as have succeeded. For every Ichiro and "Godzilla" Matsui there is a Tsuyoshi Shinjo or Masato Yoshii.

"Pro Yakyu" or Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) is what the Japanese call the major leagues there and the league structure there resembles MLB in several ways. Baseball was introduced there in 1872 and the teams that are now the Yomiuri Giants (kind of like the Yankees and Dallas Cowboys rolled into one) and Hanshin Tigers (somewhat like the Red Sox) were formed in 1934. Since 1958 the NPB has been 12 teams in two leagues of 6 -- the Central and Pacific leagues. That's one point where I think the Japanese may have a leg up on MLB -- they haven't overexpanded over the years. The Central is kind of the equivalent to the National League while the Pacific employs the DH and is therefore equated to the American League. The two winners have met in the Japan Series every year since 1950 with Yomiuri winning 20 titles. Interleague play began last season. There are fewer home runs in Japan and a different strike zone is used than we're used to as it is bigger close to the batter but smaller as you get farther away laterally. The NPB also uses a slightly smaller ball.

The Central consists of the Giants, Tigers, Yokohama Bay Stars (think the Cubs only with 2 recent titles -- in '60 and '98), Hiroshima Toyo Carp (sorta like the Reds), Chunichi Dragons (Dodgers without all the championships but still a winning tradition) and Yakult Swallows (kind of the "small market" team even though they're in Tokyo). The Pacific includes the Chiba Lotte Marines (the reigning champs under the guidance of Lasorda disciple Bobby Valentine -- closest in some ways to the Mariners), the Orix Buffaloes (hard to classify as a newer hybrid team), the Seibu Lions (another traditional power with 12 titles), the Fukuoka Softbank (formerly Daiei) Hawks (managed since '95 by Oh), the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters (a partner of the Arizona Diamondbacks) and the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles (closest Japan has ever had to an "expansion team"). The merger of the Orix BlueWave (Ichiro's former team) and the Kintetsu Buffaloes (the NPB team with the worst total historical record) after the 2004 season to form the Orix team left an open spot in the Pacific so that lead to the creation of the Golden Eagles, a team that features NPB's first American GM, Marty Kuehnert. Another point to note is that the team names are based on the owning companies and not the towns where they play.

The Pacific League begins play about a week before the Central starting in late March. One big difference between Japanese and American baseball is that they have ties in NPB. No game goes past 12 innings. I guess as Americans we've been trained that there must be a winner since a tie is, as Alabama football coach Bear Bryant once said, "like kissing your sister." That's not the case in Japan. They even have ties in the Japan Series. The teams play 140 regular season games and the PL has a different playoff system than the Central.

I'll probably do some kind of write-up on each team as part of the NPB Notes series along with keeping readers abreast of the CL and PL races in Japan. I may even adopt one team or maybe a team in both leagues to lend the Pipeline's fan support to.

Entering play Saturday (Japan is 14 hours ahead of the U.S. so at midnight it's 2 p.m. there), Chunichi and Yomiuri are tied atop the CL with Hanshin a game back with 6 or 7 games in the books. Seibu is a game and a half up on Softbank and Nippon Ham in the PL with 11 or 12 games played (depending on the team). Valentine's Marines are 4-8 and 4 1/2 games back. Once a find a regularly updated league leaders list, I'll detail some of those.

A couple of sites that were valuable in compiling this and are great sites in their own right are Bob Bavasi's JapanBall.com, Japan Baseball Daily, and the Wikipedia site for NPB. I encourage anyone interested to also check them out. The NPB Notes will be a fun diversion for me and, hopefully, an interesting topic for any readers.