The Yomiuri Giants clinched the Central League pennant this past week. Because there will be no Climax Series in the Central League they will be the league's representative in this year's Nippon Series and will "host" Games 1, 2, 6 and 7 (obviously if 6 and 7 are necessary). I say "host" because the Giants won't be playing their home games in the Tokyo Dome. The corporate league's "Intercity Baseball Tournament" normally gets played in July but this year it was moved to November because of the Olympics. Of course, the Olympics got postponed to next year due to the coronavirus but the tournament is still scheduled for November 22nd to December 3rd at the Tokyo Dome. Since the Nippon Series will be played at the same time (Game One is November 21st) the Giants will play somewhere else. That somewhere else is the Osaka Dome*.
*I know the ballpark has a corporate name but I see no reason to mention their name for free. I mean, they're not paying ME for the naming rights...
This will be the sixth time that the Nippon Series will be played at a location other than the home ballparks of the teams involved (the eighth if you include the 1950 Series which had its six games played in six different ballparks across Japan and the 1953 Series between the Giants and Hawks which had one game played at Koshien in addition to Osaka and Korakuen Stadiums) and the first time since 1980. The home games of the 1962 Toei Flyers and 1978 Yakult Swallows had to be moved from Jingu to Korakuen because of conflict with college games; the 1974 Lotte Orions home games were moved from Sendai to Korakuen because Miyagi Prefecture Stadium was deemed to small to host the Nippon Series and the Kintetsu Buffaloes home games in both the 1979 and 1980 Nippon Series were moved to Osaka Stadium because Fujidera Stadium didn't have lights yet. This is only the second time the Osaka Dome will host the Nippon Series - it had hosted Games One and Two in 2001 when Kintetsu lost to the Swallows in five games.
I've complained for a while that there haven't been any baseball cards featuring the NPB ballparks since BBM had a subset for them in their 1992 set. Only six of the eleven ballparks in that subset (the Fighters and Giants shared Tokyo Dome at the time) are still in use and a couple of them have had major renovations (Seibu Stadium had a roof put on it and Yokohama Stadium has had some major seating additions). Osaka Dome was not opened until 1997 so it was not in the subset. The closest there's been to cards showing the ballparks was the "Franchise Builder" insert set from last year's 2nd Version set from BBM. There's 12 cards in the set - one for each team - and each card shows a star from the team superimposed over a panoramic photo of the team's home park. Here's the card of Masataka Yoshida showing the Osaka Dome in the background (#FB04):
2 comments:
I agree with your editorial decision to refer to it as the Osaka Dome (which is what it used to be called).
I've often thought of doing the same with the team names themselves ("Tokyo Giants" instead of Yomiuri, etc).
The change that has annoyed me more than anything else in baseball in recent years was the renaming of the Baystars from "Yokohama Baystars" to the current "Yokohama (Corporate name) Baystars".
The team names don't infuriate me as much as the ballparks do since at least Yomiuri, Seibu, Lotte, Yakult, etc actually own the teams. I've liked the fact that a bunch of teams have added their location to their name in the past 20 years - Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, Tokyo Yakult Swallows, Saitama Seibu Lions. DeNA getting added to the Baystars name doesn't annoy me as much as Orix being the only Pacific League team to not use their location - especially after they absorbed a team that did (Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes).
But I really hate the fact that I'm expected to refer to a ballpark by a name that the team owner and not the municipality that built it is getting money for. It may be less of a thing in Japan since I think a lot of the ballparks are privately owned but it's a huge thing in the US. Plus it's so hard to keep track of the banking and telecommunication mergers that cause the names to change.
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