The Structure of Dominance — The Age of the Giants and Terrestrial Broadcasting

Up to now, we have looked at incidents that shook the credibility of the baseball world, and at the money problems surrounding player acquisitions. Here, let us lift our gaze from individual scandals. Why did Japanese professional baseball revolve, for so long, around one particular team? This is the chapter where we look at that structure itself.

In postwar Japan, two forces above all pushed professional baseball to become a national sport. One was a strong and glamorous team. The other was a new machine that delivered games to the living room: television. When these two joined together, Japanese baseball took on both fervor and, at the same time, a certain imbalance.

The Enthusiasm Television Carried

Television broadcasts of professional baseball began in Japan in 1953. In August of that year, NHK aired a Pacific League game live, and Nippon Television, which had just gone on the air, broadcast a Giants night game. This was an era when the television set was still expensive, and crowds gathered around street-corner televisions.

What carried great significance here was the connection between Nippon Television, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, and the Giants ball club. Nippon Television broadcast mainly Giants home games, and is said to have delivered most of them through its own production. A newspaper company owning a team, and an affiliated television station broadcasting that team’s games nationwide — this integrated mechanism was built up over the long postwar years.

Baseball, arriving in the living room every night, became part of family gatherings. Father and child cheered for the same team and rode the highs and lows of victory and defeat together. The names of star players came to be known even by people who did not watch baseball. This was, without doubt, a ‘light’ that Japanese baseball had gained. Television and the team, working in tandem, raised a sport to the level of a national culture.

This spread held a special meaning for people living in regional areas. Even without a team in one’s own town, turning on the television showed a favorite player in action almost every night. Boys imitated those figures swinging the bat, and on vacant lots after school imagined themselves wearing the same uniform number. Baseball was handed down across generations, and the act of cheering was passed from parent to child — the airwaves stretched across the country also supported that chain. It is only fair to note that one team’s popularity, as a result, broadened the base of the sport of baseball itself.

The Single Game Called a ‘National Event’

How vast was the scale that enthusiasm reached? There is one day that symbolizes it.

On October 8, 1994, the Giants and the Chunichi Dragons stood tied with exactly the same winning percentage in the final game of the season, in a head-to-head match where the winner would take the pennant. The average viewer rating in the Kanto region for this game, later called the ‘10.8 Showdown,’ is said to have recorded the highest figure in the history of professional baseball broadcasting. The peak instantaneous rating is said to have been even higher, and a manager of the time even called it ‘already a national event.’

That nearly half the households in the region were watching a single baseball game at the same time — it is a scene hard to imagine from today’s perspective. This was the moment when the popularity built by the team and television reached one of its summits.

But here is something worth pausing to consider. That this much popularity gathered around a single team means, conversely, that popularity and attention were ‘skewed.’ The stronger the light, the darker the shadow that forms outside it — and what we look at next is that shadow.

The Shadow Formed Outside the Light

The enormous broadcasting-rights revenue and attention that nationwide broadcasts generated flowed, for the most part, toward the team at the center of the broadcasts. Meanwhile, teams that rarely appeared on television were placed in a difficult position in both popularity and revenue. The Pacific League teams in particular passed through a long and hard era.

In the Showa-era Pacific League, it was said that filling half the seats was a good outcome, and there was a period when, it is told, teams changed parent companies one after another due to management difficulties. Though it was the same professional baseball, a gap that could not be ignored arose between the leagues in popularity and revenue. This is the so-called ‘Central-Pacific gap.’

This structure had another weakness. The prosperity of the entire baseball world depended heavily on the popularity of one particular team and on a single thick pillar: television broadcasting. While the pillar was thick, the whole was nourished. But if that pillar were to grow thin — the entire baseball world could waver all at once. Behind the abundance, that fragility was quietly accumulating.

When the Pillar Grows Thin

The signs appeared as the 2000s began. The number of terrestrial broadcasts of Giants games gradually fell, and the prime-time nationwide broadcasts that had once been taken for granted slowly disappeared. Ratings, too, could no longer hold their former heights.

There is not just one reason. Entertainment diversified, and how people spent their time changed. New ways of watching, such as the internet and pay broadcasting, spread. Various factors are said to have overlapped, and assessments of them differ. What is certain is the fact that a revenue structure centered on ‘one nationally broadcast team’ was no longer as rock-solid as before.

What many teams faced here was a fundamental question. With a mechanism supported by television and one team’s popularity, could all twelve teams remain viable? Movements to seek attendance rooted in local communities, and new paths to revenue, would begin in earnest in the baseball world after this. It was also an attempt to reexamine the very ‘structure of dominance’ that had continued for so long.

For a long time, Japanese baseball, supported by one strong team and television broadcasting, built its position as a national sport. That was certainly a light. But the same structure also produced shadows: the gap between the leagues, and dependence on a single pillar. Abundance and fragility were two sides of the same coin from the start.

And then a year arrives when that fragility surfaces all at once. A team disappears, players rise up, fans raise their voices — the story moves to that one year when Japanese baseball changed its form dramatically.