IN THE JAPANESE BALLPARK:

Behind the Scenes of Nippon Professional Baseball

 

American fans only get periodic glimpses of Japanese baseball from headline-making posting announcements to the World Baseball Classic every four years. What happens the other 143 nights of the NPB season, and what it actually feels like to be inside a Japanese ballpark, remains largely unknown to most American fans. Then there’s the business end, where an owner buys a team with the hopes of winning, and in the case of the Hokkaido franchise, catapulting ham sales from third place to first. 

 

In his new book, IN THE JAPANESE BALLPARK: Behind the Scenes of Nippon Professional Baseball, Robert K. Fitts, award-winning author and curatorial consultant for the National Baseball Hall of Fame tells us the story via twenty-six interviews with players, managers, cheerleaders, front office executives, marketing directors, a player agent, a data analyst, an umpire, a mascot, a beer vendor, and a league commissioner who receives 1/15th of his American counterpart’s salary.

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This oral history in the tradition of Lawrence Ritter’s The Glory of Their Times, 

IN THE JAPANESE BALLPARK addresses questions that don’t make the box scores: Why do Japanese teams deliberately lose money? Why is having an agent considered socially unacceptable for most players? Why can a salary be cut by 40 percent in a single year? We hear from a female owner who offered full ticket refunds to dissatisfied fans and the general manager who recounts what happened when he decided the Taiheiyo Club Lions should acquire a real lion as their mascot.

 

One of the book’s running themes is the tension between Japanese baseball’s roots in the samurai tradition—characterized by extreme training regimens and a culture of collective sacrifice—and the modern, internationally minded game that has produced a generation of players who move between NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball) and Major League Baseball.

 

IN THE JAPANESE BALLPARK also serves as a practical guide to the Japanese fan experience: the organized cheering sections with strict rules of decorum, the attractive female beer vendors carrying kegs on their backs, and a fan base where women account for 50 percent of team merchandise sales.

 

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Here are just a few people who provide their insights:

 

Ken Iwamoto of the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters gives a first-hand account of how his team convinced a seventeen-year-old Shohei Ohtani to stay in Japan rather than go directly to MLB. The deciding factor wasn’t money—it was the offer to develop him as a two-way player. “He was a treasure of Japanese baseball,” Iwamoto says.

 

Tomoko Namba, the DeNA mobile tech entrepreneur who became the first female owner in NPB history, explains how she rebuilt the struggling Yokohama BayStars into a championship team.

 

Saori Ogure, a Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters cheerleader, discusses how her “Fox Dance” became a national sensation.

 

Ichiro Kitano, strength trainer for the Chunichi Dragons, makes the case that Japanese baseball’s emphasis on running and stretching—far greater than in American professional baseball—may account for the notably lower rate of serious injuries in NPB, including significantly fewer Tommy John surgeries and oblique injuries.

 

Bobby Valentine, who managed the Chiba Lotte Marines to the 2005 championship, reflects on how the Japanese game has evolved over thirty years and shares his concern that MLB’s aggressive pursuit of NPB talent risks doing to Japanese baseball what it once did to the Negro Leagues.