Marinerds, etc.

This is Part 2 in a series.

I mentioned this in the first part, but each pro team has exactly one farm team. In the sense of "minor leagues where the players are actually controlled by pro teams", there's basically only one level of minor league play, roughly defined as being "below the pro leagues". Most of the players are young guys who still haven't broken through, along with your usual assortment of veterans hanging on or players rehabbing or trying to work out issues.

With the exception of the Yokohama Baystars, whose farm team is the Shonan Sea Rex, and the Orix Buffaloes, whose farm team is the Surpass, all of the farm teams bear the same name as their corresponding pro team.

Since players are all really considered to be on the same 70-man organizational roster regardless of whether they're on the top team or the farm team, they keep the same uniform number when going between the majors and the minors. For 10 out of the 12 teams, this means guys wear the EXACT SAME UNIFORM no matter what their status is, although the Surpass and Sea Rex players do wear different uniforms than their corresponding top team, albeit with their same uniform number.

Unlike the pro leagues, which are semi-arbitrarily historically organized into the Central and Pacific Leagues, the minor leagues are organized geographically into the Eastern and Western Leagues:

Eastern League

Team                   City             Prefecture    Stadium (Year opened)
----                   ----             ----------    ---------------------
Yakult Swallows        Toda             Saitama       Yakult Toda Stadium (1977)
Yomiuri Giants         Kawasaki         Kanagawa      Yomiuri Giants Stadium (1985)
Shonan SeaRex          Yokosuka         Kanagawa      Yokosuka Stadium (1949)
Rakuten Golden Eagles  Higashimurayama  Yamagata      Yamagata Stadium (1980)
Seibu Lions            Tokorozawa       Saitama       Seibu #2 Stadium (1979)
Lotte Marines          Urawa            Saitama       Lotte Urawa Stadium (1989)
Nippon Ham Fighters    Kamagaya         Chiba         Kamagaya Fighters Stadium (1997)

Western League

Team                   City          Prefecture    Stadium
----                   ----          ----------    -------
Softbank Hawks         Fukuoka       Fukuoka       Gannosu (1991)        
Hanshin Tigers         Nishinomiya   Hyogo         Tigers Den Naruohama (1994)
Hiroshima Carp         Iwakuni       Yamaguchi     Yuu Stadium (1993)
Chunichi Dragons       Nagoya        Aichi         Nagoya Stadium (1948)  
Surpass                Kobe          Hyogo         Ajisai Stadium (2000)

You might notice that yes, one league has 7 teams and one has 5. Yes, that IS stupid. No, it wasn't always that way. From 1979 (when the Crown Lighter Lions moved from Fukuoka to become the Seibu Lions in Saitama and brought their farm team with them), the leagues actually had 6 teams each. Then in 2004 when the Orix Blue Wave and Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes merged to form Voltron -- er, the Orix Buffaloes -- their corresponding farm teams also had to become one. Fujiidera Stadium ceased to exist, along with the Kintetsu minor-league team that played there, and Surpass Kobe, which had been the Blue Wave's farm team, became the farm team for the new combined organization.

With the formation of the Rakuten Golden Eagles, and a farm team in the northeastern Tohoku area, naturally the geographic split now favored the eastern side of the country.

Geographical Difficulties

While it would theoretically make sense to even up the leagues somehow, geographically it simply doesn't really make any sense to move one of the Eastern teams into the Western League. All of the EL teams except for the Eagles' team are based in the Kanto region, which roughly means "the area near Tokyo", and only one farm team isn't within an hour train ride of its top team: the Fighters, who built their stadium and training complex in Kamagaya in 1996 back when the Fighters still shared the Tokyo Dome with the Giants.

Fighters fan digression for a second: The Fighters had a facility on the Tamagawa river in the western part of Tokyo, but it was apparently completely inadequate both in terms of clubhouse and fan amenities, plus when the Tokyu Toyoko trains went by it would actually pause the game action. So, the Fighters built a nice new place for their farm team in the middle of nowhere in Chiba with great facilities. Then they ended up moving the franchise to Hokkaido a couple of years later. However, moving the farm team to Hokkaido would have not only meant vastly increasing the travel budget for the Fighters' minor-leaguers but also for all OTHER teams in the Eastern League, who would have to fly to Hokkaido rather than bussing around Kanto -- so in the interest of keeping things cheaper and easier for everyone, the farm team stayed in Kamagaya.

As for the Western League, while the teams are not nearly as close by as all of the Kanto teams in the Eastern League, the furthest apart are the Osaka-area teams and the Hawks' team in Gannosu (which is in the northern boonies of Fukuoka).

The interesting thing is, due to the rosters being so nebulous sometimes, and the farm teams usually being located so close to the top teams, it is NOT entirely uncommon for a player to actually play in two games in one day, both a farm game and a top team game. On weekdays, almost all farm games take place at 1pm, and almost all top team games take place at about 6pm. And sometimes on the weekends, the Lotte Marines will actually have a "doubleheader" where their farm team plays a game at Chiba Marine Stadium starting half an hour after the major league team finishes an afternoon game. So you might see a player working out with the farm team early in the day, then playing in a top team game at night, or you might see a farm team player practicing with the top team on a day the farm team doesn't play.

Scheduling and Seasons

Thanks to having an odd number of teams, there ARE a lot of days where at least a few farm teams aren't playing, too. However, a day without a scheduled game is not usually a "day off": players will still have their daily practices and be out on the field working out nonetheless.

Since 2005, the 7-team Eastern League teams have played 96 games per season, while the 5-team Western League teams have played 88 games each. There is also a minor-league All-Star Game, played a day or two after the pro All-Star Game. This has gone on since 1963, although it used to be called the Junior All-Star Game and is now the "Fresh All-Star Game". At the end of the season, the top team in the Eastern League plays a farm championship game against the top team in the Western League.

The season runs for almost the same duration as the pro season: games are scheduled from the end of March until early September, and then makeup games take the season into mid-late September. The farm championship game happens at the start of October, right around when the pro season is winding up its final makeup games.

Exhibition games and Futures matches

The NPB farm teams also tend to play a LOT of exhibition games when they don't have official games. These can be against anyone from "amateur" industrial league teams such as JR, ENEOS, Honda, etc, to various "club" teams such as the NOMO Baseball Club and the Ibaraki Golden Golds, to teams from the independent regional semi-pro teams (Shikoku, Hokuriku, and certainly the new Kansai one, to be covered in a future post).

Another interesting diversion is what they call the "Futures" games -- these are played between one Eastern League farm team, and then a "futures" team which is made up of players from the rest of the Eastern League's teams. The only requirement is that players on the "Futures" team have never seen action at the top team level. A lot of them will be instructional (ikusei) players, who are already a super long shot to make the majors anyway.

The "Futures" teams have also been known to play against club teams -- a sort of famous incident was when Golden Golds female infielder Ayumi Kataoka got a hit off of Lotte's pitcher Kurotaki in one of those matches, singling to left.

(It's really interesting going to those games -- the players wear a Futures jersey and the rest of their uniform is from their home team, so you can spot the Searex guys with their bright teal outfits.)

Whither DH?

Whether or not a farm team game incorporates the DH basically depends on who the home team is. If the home team is a Central League farm team, they will not use the DH. If the home team is a Pacific League farm team, they will use the DH.

Miscellaneous

Farm team games are REALLY fun to go to. At some of the stadiums, games are even free -- there's simply no point in charging admission at a place like, say, Lotte Urawa Stadium, which has 3 benches on each side and a vending machine selling canned beverages, and that's about it. The Fighters stadium in Kamagaya charges admission (1000 yen for general admission, 500 yen if you're a Fighters fanclub member), but it's also a full grandstand with concessions and a mascot wandering around and mid-game activities and nice bleachers and bathrooms and everything. Your mileage may vary. Show up early and stake out a good seat.

Unlike the pro games, you can often very easily stalk players for photos and autographs and such -- in most cases, there is no clubhouse within the minor league field itself, and the players all have to exit the field to get back to their bus or to walk to the training facility nearby. The atmosphere is a lot more relaxed, though, and the young players are usually happy to sign stuff, or are at least very polite about it. Sometimes the veterans are happy to sign stuff too, if they're not in a sour mood about being stuck in the minors at the time :) Japanese fans, who are really diehard in terms of supporting their team, are also generally very respectful towards the players, so there is a relatively good relationship between the groups.

I'm a camera geek, and what I love best about the minor league games is being able to just sit right up in front by the field, so I can take a ton of photos. I usually end up there with a few other friends and we all chat about the players and snap photos. We often cheer or yell things to the players, and sometimes they even yell back. It's just a very intimate way to see a game.

Most minor-league parks do not have ouendan (the big organized cheering groups with the trumpets and flags and all), which may be a plus or minus depending on who you are.

The only caveat is, if you're a non-Asian foreigner, especially at some of these more out-of-the-way places, be prepared for a lot of staring and a lot of "gaijin" comments.

(Here are some of my minor league game posts, with plenty of photos and stories.)

So, those are the minor leagues. Next up will be, most likely, either the independent leagues, or the college leagues.

Please comment if you can add to this or correct it, as I'm considering it a work in progress.

I'm getting kind of frustrated when I read misguided blogs who say all kinds of crazy things like "Tazawa comes out of the independent leagues in Japan, the same place where they just drafted a 16-year-old girl".

So, I think I will basically braindump everything I can about all of the leagues in Japan, into a couple of posts. I admit that I'm on a bit of hiatus from baseblogging while I'm back in the US and here in Philly visiting my dad (who only watches football for the most part), and I apologize for that, but I'm really not into the offseason. This is the worst time of the year -- it's cold and there's no baseball. (I'm going to a hockey game tomorrow, but that's another story.)

Anyway. Let's start from the top:

Pro Yakyu -- Central and Pacific Leagues

If you want Japan's equivalent to the major leagues -- the National and American Leagues -- this is it.

There are 12 pro teams total in Japan, 6 in each league. The Pacific League uses the DH, the Central League does not.

There are no divisions within the leagues -- for playoffs (which started in 2005 in the PL and 2007 in the CL) -- they just take the top 3 teams in each league and have the 2nd and 3rd place teams face off, then the 1st place team plays the winner of that series. Playoffs are still in their infancy, and the format changes every year. Currently it's a best-2-of-3 for the first stage, then a best-4-of-7-but-the-first-place-team-gets-a-1-game-advantage for the second stage, with all games being played at the higher-ranked team's home field. Then the two playoff winners face each other in the Japan Series. It's a mess. But quite exciting.

One major difference between Japanese baseball and the MLB is that tie games are possible. If a game doesn't have a winner after 12 innings, it is over and counted as a tie. To determine rankings, teams calculate based on won-loss percentage without counting the ties.

Unlike in the US, the teams are almost uniformly owned by companies and bear the name of that company instead of a specific locale, although recently teams have been adding their city or prefecture or region's name to their moniker in a way to identify more with the specific region. As of right now, these are the leagues and teams:

Central League

Team                   City          Prefecture    Stadium (Year opened)
----                   ----          ----------    ---------------------
Yomiuri Giants         Tokyo         Tokyo         Tokyo Dome (1988)
Hanshin Tigers         Nishinomiya   Hyogo         Hanshin Koshien Stadium (1924)
Chunichi Dragons       Nagoya        Aichi         Nagoya Dome (1997)
Hiroshima Toyo Carp    Hiroshima     Hiroshima     Mazda Zoom-Zoom Stadium (2009)
Tokyo Yakult Swallows  Tokyo         Tokyo         Meiji Jingu Stadium (1926)
Yokohama Baystars      Yokohama      Kanagawa      Yokohama Stadium (1978)

Pacific League

Team                          City          Prefecture    Stadium
----                          ----          ----------    -------
Saitama Seibu Lions           Tokorozawa    Saitama       Seibu Dome (1979)
Orix Buffaloes                Osaka         Osaka         Kyocera Osaka Dome (1997)
                              Kobe          Hyogo         Skymark Stadium (1988)
Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters  Sapporo       Hokkaido      Sapporo Dome (2001)
Chiba Lotte Marines           Chiba         Chiba         Chiba Marine Stadium (1990)
Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles  Sendai        Miyagi        Kleenex Stadium Miyagi (1950)
Fukuoka Softbank Hawks        Fukuoka       Fukuoka       Fukuoka Yahoo! Dome (1993)

I include two stadiums for the Orix Buffaloes because they still play a signficant number of home games at Skymark Stadium. They were formed when the Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes and Orix Blue Wave were merged prior to the 2005 season. Orix played in Kobe and Kintetsu played in Osaka, so the combined team plays in both. Rakuten was created as a new team at the same time the other teams merged.

The Hanshin Tigers, despite being a symbol for Osaka and the Kansai Region and even having been called the "Osaka Tigers" at a distant point in the past, technically do not actually play in Osaka.

Geographical notes

Geographically, many teams are fairly close to Tokyo. Japan has four islands, and Tokyo is the capital city on the biggest island, Honshu. Ten of the teams are based on Honshu as well:

In Tokyo proper: Giants, Swallows
Within an hour of Tokyo by normal train: Baystars, Lions, Marines
About 2 hours from Tokyo by shinkansen: Eagles (north), Dragons (west)
About 3 hours from Tokyo by shinkansen: Tigers, Buffaloes (Osaka area, west)
About 4 hours from Tokyo by shinkansen: Carp

The Hawks are based on Kyushu, which you can get to in 6 hours by shinkansen or 2 hours by plane.

The Fighters are in Hokkaido, which you can get to in something like 26 hours by train, or 2 hours by plane. Needless to say, any road trip for the Fighters generally involves an airport. There's supposed to be a shinkansen to Sapporo eventually, which will take 4 hours from Tokyo, but it's probably not happening for the next, say, 10 years or so.

You will notice that the Pacific League teams are a lot more scattered around the country than the Central League teams.

Japan is a fairly small country, though, and as a result of this, visiting team fans often show up in pretty huge groups.

Every stadium has designated areas for home fans and visiting fans, although depending on the stadium and the particular team, the exact lines might blur. Yomiuri, Hanshin, and Lotte have the fans most notoriously willing to travel and very loudly support their team no matter where they're playing. If you go to a Giants game at the Tokyo Dome, you'll probably be surrounded by orange-towel-waving Giants fans everywhere in the stadium except in the designated visiting team cheering area -- except when they play against the Tigers, when the entire 3rd-base side is in yellow.

If you go to a Baystars game at Koshien, you'll probably be surrounded by yellow-wearing Tigers fans even if you have a "visitor's cheering area" ticket. (Seriously, this happened to me.)

Another stadium note: Pro baseball started in Japan in 1934 when Matsutaro Shoriki founded the Dai Nippon Pro Yakyu Club, subsequently called the Giants. A lot of the current teams started at the end of the 1940's. However, both Koshien and Jingu predate professional baseball by quite a bit. Koshien stadium was built to house the annual nationwide high school baseball tournament, and Meiji Jingu Stadium was built mostly for use by the Tokyo Big Six college league and other college ball clubs.

People often say that the Giants are "Japan's team". This may still be true in that there are plenty of people who are Giants fans because their parents were Giants fans, or because when they were kids the only team they could watch on TV was the Giants. And to be fair, if you only have terrestrial TV, the Giants are the only team that are on TV regularly -- channel 4 shows almost all Giants home games, though they start at 7pm and cut out at 8:54pm, despite the game starting at 6pm.

Despite this, though, there has been a rising "Anti-Giants" sentiment for quite a while, and almost every CL team's cheering group has a "defeat Yomiuri" cheer of one variety of another, some more vehement than others. Also, several parts of Japan which previously didn't have a local team to embrace -- notably the northern areas -- now have their own regional teams either in the form of the Fighters or Eagles in Hokkaido and Tohoku, or the independent BCL teams in the Hokuriku area on the north coast of Japan. (Which I'll get to in another post.) These factors have taken away from the Yomiuri grip on the nation, but the Giants still have a strong hold on the country nonetheless.

Team Structure

Unlike the MLB, where every team has a cascade of several minor league farm teams of varying levels of play and who play different length seasons, Japanese pro teams have one farm team. One. That's it.

Because "major-league" often means the MLB, there are a few ways people tend to refer to the split. Often you'll either hear "Top team" and "Farm team", or perhaps "Ichi-gun" and "ni-gun", which literally mean "first troop" and "second troop".

There are a couple of rosters on the team:

1) The 70-man roster, which is everyone currently registered to play baseball for the organization -- top team, farm team, injured players, everybody...

...except it does NOT actually include the ikusei players -- ikusei meaning "instructional" players, sometimes referred to as "taxi squad" players. They are drafted after the normal draft, sign slightly different contracts, are paid very little money relatively, and wear uniform numbers above 100. In order for them to actually play in an ichi-gun game, they have to sign a new contract and be put onto the actual 70-man roster, and onto...

2) The 28-man "registered" player list. When you hear about guys actually being sent up and down to the minors, this is the list they're getting put on or taken off of. The other caveat is that this is the list where the foreign player limit comes into play -- a team can have as many foreigners as they want under contract, sitting on the farm team, but currently, there can't be more than 4 foreigners on the top team's "registered" list, and there can only be 3 pitchers or 3 batters, not 4 of one kind.

(No, there is no "one Asian doesn't count towards the limit" rule. Koreans and Taiwanese are considered foreigners. The non-Japanese Asians on most rosters that don't count towards the limit are because they were drafted out of Japanese high schools or colleges and spent a certain amount of time there. Certain teams might or might not be taking advantage of this rule by signing Taiwanese kids and putting them in Japanese high schools, but that's another story.)

From the 28-man registered list, there is a 25-man list on any given day which is the list of players who can actually be used in that day's game.

If a player gets sent down to the farm ("de-registered"), they can't be called back up for at least 10 days. Of course, there is no lower limit on how long they can be called up to the top team for.

Service Time

Service time, in determining when a player becomes an FA, is determined by the amount of time a player spent on the top team roster, so if a guy gets called up literally to start one game and then sent down again, he gets a tiny fraction of time added to his service time. Unlike the MLB where there's this notion of "option years" and such, there is no such thing in the NPB.

If a player is registered for a full season, they get one year service time. If not, 145 days is what counts as a full season, and they add up the total registered time, and when that gets to 145 days, the player gets another full season credited to them. A player becomes a free agent domestically or overseas-eligible after a certain number of years, and that keeps changing. Currently it's 8 years for domestic moves, 9 years for overseas moves.

(If a player is injured and misses service time due to that, there are different provisions for them still getting a full service year, provided they are on the roster for a certain number of days outside of that, and I'm not sure how that works exactly.)

As a note: Foreign players who manage to get 8 years of service time in Japan count as Japanese free agents, and thus do not count against the foreigner limit on the roster. See: Tuffy Rhodes, Alex Ramirez.

So, players go up and down to farm teams. Which leads us into our second set of leagues in Japan, the Eastern and Western Leagues... and I'll continue this from there soon.

Please comment if you can add to this or correct it, as I'm considering it a work in progress.