Baseball

Baseball is considered the biggest spectator sport in Japan but if you find yourself at a Nippon Professional Baseball league game do not expect to merely sit and watch. In most of the Japanese professional sports there are “performance” sections where at the very least you will be expected to sport the correct team’s colors and are likely to be a participant in coordinated cheering led by cheer captains. Baseball in Japan started in the 1870s when students returning from the United States and visiting professors and other Americans introduced the game. In Kobe the local franchise is the Orix Buffaloes. Nippon Professional Baseball is composed of twelve teams playing in two leagues; the Buffaloes play in the Pacific League. Unlike American professional sports, Japanese teams play in the uniforms of corporate sponsors not their hometowns. The Buffaloes baseball lineage traces back to 1936 when they were one of the country’s first professional nines operated by the Hanshin Kyuko Railway Company. The Buffaloes competed in the Japanese Baseball League at the time and later became a charter member of the Nippon Professional Baseball circuit in 1950. The franchise came to Kobe in 1991 and became the Orix BlueWave. The 1990s…