Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters
The Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters are a Japanese professional baseball team based in Kitahiroshima, Hokkaidō, in the Sapporo metropolitan area. They compete in the Pacific League of Nippon Professional Baseball, playing the majority of their home games at ES CON Field Hokkaido. The Fighters also host a select number of regional home games in cities across Hokkaidō, including Hakodate, Asahikawa, Kushiro, and Obihiro. The team's name comes from its parent organization, Nippon Ham, a major Japanese food-processing company.
Founded in 1946, the Fighters called Tokyo home for 58 years, as co-tenants of the Tokyo Dome and Korakuen Stadium with the Central League's Yomiuri Giants near the end of their tenure in the capital city. The franchise has won three Japan Series titles, in 1962, 2006, and, most recently, 2016.
Team history
Senators and Tokyo eras
In 1946, Saburo Yokozawa, manager of the Tokyo Senators in 1936–1937, looked to revive the franchise and soon founded the new Senators. He assembled a team of ready and able players like Hiroshi Oshita, Shigeya Iijima and Giichiro Shiraki, but as a newly formed team the Senators faced strict fiscal management and resorted to using hand-me-down uniforms from the Hankyu Railway's pre-war team. Former Japanese statesman Kinkazu Saionji, grandson of the influential Kinmochi Saionji, became the team's owner, and Noboru Oride, borrowing heavily from a Ginza cabaret proprietor, became the team's sponsor. Eventually, trapped by a lack of funds, Yokozawa was forced to resign as the team's manager.For a time, the team was even mockingly nicknamed "Seito" after a Japanese feminist magazine of the same name. As the Yomiuri Giants' pet name was "Kyojin", baseball personality Soutaro Suzuki thought that other teams should also have pet names like the Giants, and names such as the Osaka Tigers' alias "Mouko", the Senators' "Seito" and the Pacific's "Taihei" began to be used by the press. However, the other teams rejected the use of these pet names, so they were not fully adopted.
On January 7, 1947, the team was sold to the Tokyu Corporation. The Tokyu baseball club was inaugurated into the league, and the team's name became the Tokyu Flyers. At that time Tokyu dominated the Japanese transportation sector, owning several other railway companies, although it was faced with troubles and the possibility of a breakup. Tokyu purchased the team to act as a banner of solidarity for the swelling company, and managing director Hiroshi Okawa assumed ownership of the club. The newly born Flyers, with Hiroshi Oshita becoming one of the most popular players in the league, began to attract many fans, but the team's administration still went into a deficit.
With the formation of the National Baseball League drawing nearer, in 1948 the not-yet-affiliated Daiei club, which had played a few exhibition games against the Otsuka Athletics, joined with Tokyu to create the Kyuei Flyers. However, Daiei decided to purchase a separate team, the Kinsei Stars, and after only one year the Flyers reverted to their former name.
During the off-season of 1949, the Flyers joined the Pacific League after the former league split. In September 1953, the team completed a new ballpark—Komazawa Stadium—along one of Tokyu's train lines in Setagaya, Tokyo, moving from Bunkyo ward's Korakuen Stadium. The Flyers' wild play on the field eventually earned them the nickname, "Komazawa's hooligans".
Toei and Nittaku eras
On February 1, 1954, Tokyu entrusted the management of the Flyers to the Toei Company, of which Okawa had newly become president. Toei transferred control of the club to a subsidiary company, Toei Kogyo. The team's name was changed to the Toei Flyers, and its legal name consequently became the Toei Flyers Baseball Club. This name stuck for nineteen years.In 1961, when Yomiuri Giants manager Shigeru Mizuhara resigned from his position, Okawa attempted to woo him to join his team, bringing him to a bar in Kyoto and calling famous movie producer Koji Shundo to meet with them. Shundo, an old drinking buddy of Mizuhara's, convinced the four-time Japan Series champion manager to join the Flyers, and he solidified a strong relationship with Okawa and Toei Studios.
Komazawa Stadium was to be torn down to make way for the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics, so in 1962 the Flyers moved their base of operations to Meiji Jingu Stadium in Shinjuku. In the same year, two star aces, Masayuki Dobashi and Yukio Ozaki, blossomed under Mizuhara's coaching and the Flyers captured their first league championship. They would go on to defy odds in the Japan Series and defeat the Hanshin Tigers for their first Japan Series title. This championship would be their only one in the Toei era. The Kokutetsu Swallows jointly occupied Meiji Jingu with the Flyers the following season, and in 1964 the Flyers went back to their old home, Korakuen, also home of the Yomiuri Giants; both the Fighters and Giants would share a home for the next 39 years.
The Flyers assembled a group of powerful sluggers over the next few years—among them: Isao Harimoto, Katsuo Osugi, Inchon Bek, and Shoichi Busujima—but on top of a declining movie industry and the "Black Mist" match-fixing scandal that rocked the professional baseball world in 1970, in 1971 Flyers owner Okawa died suddenly. Shigeru Okada, who did not view Okawa favorably, took over Toei after his death. Together with Noboru Goto, company president of Tokyu and loyal friend of Okada, Okada let go of the unprofitable team.
The team was sold to Akitaka Nishimura of the Nittaku Home real estate enterprise, a common acquaintance of Okada and Goto, on February 7, 1973. The team's name became the Nittaku Home Flyers. Nishimura, in an attempt to inject life back into the unpopular Pacific League, developed seven different uniforms for his team and experimented in every aspect of the team's operation, but the effort failed to produce results. Believing that the Pacific League's chances of survival were grim, Nishimura was on the verge of partnering with the Lotte Orions, who were eyeing a league reunification. When the deal fell through, Nishimura, tired of the baseball establishment, resigned from his leadership position and abandoned the Flyers.
Nippon-Ham era
On November 19, 1973, meatpacking company Nippon Ham purchased the team, led by owner Yoshinori Okoso. Okoso had bought the team as he was willing to bring them back to prominence when essentially no one wanted them. He loved them to death, so much so that he never held any company meetings when the team was playing, and if where he was at, they were not on TV or radio, he would dispatch employees to go to that game and update him via payphone. The club's name was changed to the Nippon-Ham Fighters, its official name became the Nippon-Ham Baseball Corporation. Osamu Mihara became the team president and Futoshi Nakanishi, Mihara's son-in-law, as its manager. After 27 years, the "Flyers" nickname was abandoned. The "Fighters" nickname was born from a public appeal by the team's management. A female high school student from Okayama prefecture submitted the winning name, giving the reasoning that " Katsuo Osugi has guts, so he's a fighter." Osugi would be traded to the Yakult Swallows soon after the Fighters were rechristened. The same would be for Zainichi Korean Isao Harimoto, as Nakanishi hated Harimoto for challenging his authority, going nearly as far as trying to release him. This was also because Harimoto was upset that the FIghters sent away Osugi, and that he was the only reason he stuck around. In fact, when the then-Flyers attempted to trade Osugi to the Hanshin Tigers for Yutaka Enatsu, Harimoto went to the front office and demanded they immediately cancel the trade. However, Okoso did not want to let him go, as Nippon-Ham had a major presence in South Korea, and it did wonders for sales having one of the greatest Koreans play for them, and having traded their other Korean player, Baek In-chun, to the Taiheyo Club Lions in 1974, Okoso was worried Nippon-Ham would completely lose their presence in South Korea. Mihara, however, persisted, and they nearly sent him to the Hanshin Tigers, before the Yomiuri Giants made a convincing last-minute deal to send him there instead.Over the four seasons between 1974 and 1977, the Fighters dwelled at the bottom of the Pacific League, but after improving to finishing in third place for three straight years between 1978 and 1980, manager Keiji Osawa finally led the Fighters to their second Pacific League pennant in 1981. With saves leader Yutaka Enatsu and starter Shigekuni Mashiba forming the heart of the pitching staff, the Fighters shined with offensive sluggers Tony Solaita, Junichi Kashiwabara, and Tommy Cruz. The team that year also featured various important players of smaller stature, like Makoto Shimada and Nobuhiro Takashiro. They would go on to play the Yomiuri Giants in the Japan Series, where the Fighters lost in six games.
At the time, the franchise shared Korakuen Stadium with the Giants, so scheduling games throughout the season for both teams posed a problem. League schedulers tried to avoid putting the Fighters and the Giants at Korakuen on the same day, but when they both had home games scheduled, league officials made the implicit decision that the Giants would play during the day and the Fighters during the night. One novel aspect of the Fighters was that they attracted armies of grade-school boys to sit in the outfield stands on weekend games under a "Young Boys’ Fan Club" promotion, starting the first organized fan club in Japanese professional baseball.
During the 1980s the Fighters hosted many of the Pacific League's leading pitchers, including Isamu Kida, Mikio Kudō, Hiroshi Tsuno and Yasumitsu Shibata. Yukihiro Nishizaki particularly stood out, recording 15 wins and an ERA under three in each of his first two years, racking up seven double-digit win seasons over the course of his eleven-year stay with the Fighters and gaining a considerable following from female fans due to his easy-going demeanor. In 1986 shortstop Yukio Tanaka joined the club; he remained with the team for 22 seasons, becoming known as "Mr. Fighters".
From 1988 until the move to Hokkaidō, the Fighters played their home games in Tokyo Dome, the stadium that replaced their longtime home Korakuen. After the Dome was finished, the pitching dominance of Yukihiro Nishizaki and Yasumitsu Shibata began to emerge. Keiji Osawa came out of retirement to manage the team for a third time in 1993, only to see his team sink to the bottom of the standings; he gained notoriety for kneeling to the fans at the end of that season, begging for their forgiveness. With the Fighters experiencing more managerial troubles in 1996, then-manager Toshiharu Ueda suddenly took a personal leave during a pennant race with the Orix BlueWave, eventually causing the Fighters to fade over the last month of the season. However, new life was born in Tokyo Dome in 1998. Hitters such as Nigel Wilson, Jerry Brooks, Yukio Tanaka, Atsushi Kataoka, Katsuhiro Nishiura and a young Michihiro Ogasawara formed what became known as the Big Bang lineup and subsequently shattered various batting records. They ran away with first place for the first half of the season, but a pitching collapse in the second half caused a fall of historical proportions. The Fighters would ultimately finish in second place to the Seibu Lions.