Baseball Realignment 2004 — The Year the Fans Moved

Last time, we saw the ‘structure of dominance’ — a mechanism supported by one team and television broadcasting — grow thin over time. The strain in that structure finally surfaced in a form that shook the very survival of one team, in the year 2004.

What happened that year was not a scandal. Yet it was the event in which the management problems the baseball world had carried, and the distance between teams and their players and fans, became most vividly visible. For the first time in Japanese professional baseball history, players stopped the games and fans raised a great voice — we look back on that one year, including, as far as possible, the circumstances of each side.

One Team Disappears

In June 2004, a plan surfaced through news reports. The Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes of the Pacific League and the Orix BlueWave, also of the Pacific League, would merge. It is said that the heavy burden of team management carried by Kintetsu’s parent company lay behind this.

Team management had long been no easy thing, save for a few teams. For teams placed at a disadvantage in attendance and broadcasting in particular, yearly deficits weighed heavily. The side trying to push the merger forward had, on its own part, the pressing circumstance of being unable to sustain a team as a corporation — this is not a matter that can be settled by one-sided blame.

For people who had supported Kintetsu, this was unbearable. Their own team was about to vanish from the map for the grown-up reasons of management. Anger and bewilderment spread from the stands, and from outside the ballpark.

The Words ‘Mere Players’

There was an event that, in one stroke, set this problem ablaze as a confrontation between management and fans and players.

The body that bound the players together was an organization called the players’ association. Serving as its chairman was a player known as a catcher. Rather than opposing the merger itself, the players’ association first asked for a one-year freeze, and is said to have sought to hold a forum for discussion so that fans and players would not be left behind. Yet one influential figure on the management side, when asked to engage in dialogue with the players, was reported to have made remarks that belittled the players. These were the so-called ‘mere players’ remarks.

These remarks are said to have, in one stroke, broadened sympathy for the players’ association’s claims and strengthened the fans’ backlash. The problem went beyond the frame of baseball and came to draw the attention of society as a whole, as a problem of labor, as a relationship between corporation and worker.

The First Strike in History

The discussions stalled. The merger procedures advanced, and the freeze the players’ association sought would not be accepted. After negotiations continued down to the wire, the players’ association made a heavy decision.

In September 2004, the players carried out a strike, not playing games for two days over a weekend. It was the first such thing in the history of Japanese professional baseball. Players stopping the games of their own will — that was not solely because of backlash against the teams. It was also to show, through action, the claim that if a year were taken to prepare properly and recruit a newly entering team, the number of teams need not be reduced.

What is worth noting is the fans’ reaction to this strike. Rather than dissatisfaction at no longer being able to watch the games, voices supporting the players are said to have stood out more. Cheering messages for the players were displayed at the ballparks, and signature campaigns opposing the merger and the reduction of teams spread in various places. It was a rare situation in which players and fans, who might otherwise come into conflict, faced the same direction.

The Settlement the Fans Moved

The outcome contained both pain and progress.

The merger of Kintetsu and Orix was, in the end, not overturned. That a long-beloved team vanished was, for that team’s fans, an irretrievable loss. This fact can never be overwritten as a heartwarming tale.

On the other hand, the result that the players’ association and fans had sought — ‘do not reduce the number of teams’ — was realized. A slot for new entry was opened, and a team based on an IT company — Rakuten — would newly join, with the Tohoku region as its home base. In this way, the framework of twelve teams and two leagues was preserved.

Of course, not everything was resolved. The root problem of the difficulty of team management did not vanish, and the gap between the leagues did not disappear right away. Just how far the realignment was ‘reform’ is still a point on which assessments differ. Even so, the experience of fans engaging with the baseball world as parties to it left a definite change in Japanese baseball.

The year 2004 was a special year in which the deep loss of a team disappearing and the hope of fans moving the baseball world coexisted in the same year. It would be rare to find another period in which light and shadow stood side by side this closely.

The baseball world, having passed through this pain, begins to turn toward its communities and fans. But beyond that progress, another shadow that would shake the credibility of the baseball world once again would appear. It is that problem in which money and a world that must not come to the surface were joined together.