It’s been another month since the start of professional baseball in 2022. There have already been many events, and baseball fans are completely immersed in the daily life of professional baseball.
So, the professional baseball team, Interleague Play 12 has hometowns scattered all over the country from Hokkaido to Kyushu. I feel that it is biased toward the metropolitan area, but Rakuten games will be held in Sendai from the end of March, when it is still cold, and Softbank is also in Kyushu and Fukuoka. There are professional baseball teams in Osaka, such as Nagoya, Sapporo, Hiroshima, and so on, and they are enthusiastic about the people in that town.
Where was the first ballpark in the history of “professional baseball”?
Now, here is the problem. Which stadium in which town did the baseball teams belonging to the Japanese Baseball League, which is familiar with today’s professional baseball, play for the first time?
Historical and traditional stadiums such as Korakuen, Koshien, and Jingu come to mind, but they are all different. The correct answer is Narumiya Baseball Field in Narumi-cho, Aichi-gun, Aichi Prefecture (currently Midori-ku, Nagoya City). It was February 9, 1936.
In detail, it seems that the match between Japanese professional baseball teams was held in Seoul in 1923, but since both teams at that time disappeared soon, the match at Narumiya Baseball Field in 1936 was virtually lost. It can be said that it is the first match between professional teams. From that time on, the history of professional baseball began to be carved.
What was the match like?
It was the Tokyo Giants and the Nagoya Kinko Army that fought. The Giants were preparing for an American expedition and were positioned like a send-off match. The Giants are lined with legendary and legendary players. Eiji Sawamura, later famous general Shigeru Mizuhara, good pitcher Starffin, and Haruyasu Nakajima, who won the Triple Crown for the first time in Japan, are on the list. On the other hand, the Kinko army is a little small, but you can see the name of Wataru Nōnin, who was the director of Chunichi and Lotte after the war and led Lotte to the championship in 1970.
The Kinko Army was a team formed in Aichi Prefecture as a hometown with the Nagoya Shimbun (later Chunichi Shimbun) as the parent company, and was based in Narumi Stadium, which is close to Narumi Station on the Nagoya Railroad. So I thought it was the roots of the Chunichi Dragons, but at the same time, the Nagoya Army was formed with Shin-Aichi Shimbun (the Chunichi Shimbun of this place) as the parent company, and this is the origin of the Dragons. During the war, the Kinko Army merged with the Tsubasa Army (Tokyo Senator’s) to become the Ocean Army, and changed to the Nishitetsu Army, whose parent company was Nishi-Nippon Railroad, and was dissolved in 1943.
