The Senators did it on July 14, 1946, at Kanazawa City Public Ground, and no team has matched the total in the nearly 80 years since, Nippon Professional Baseball reported in its official historical records.
It happened because the first professional baseball games ever staged in Japan’s Hokuriku region were played on a makeshift diamond, inside a running track, with a single strand of wire separating the outfield from the grandstand. One year after the end of World War II, on July 13 and 14, 1946, four clubs — the Hanshin Tigers, Gold Star, the Senators and Kinki Great Ring — converged on Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, for a four-game “Professional Baseball Hokuriku Series,” NPB reported.
Baseball Adapts to Limited Stadium Space
Kanazawa had no dedicated baseball stadium in 1946. The games were held at the Kanazawa City Public Ground, a multi-purpose facility used for track and field, tennis and basketball. The venue had been built in 1925 as the Goseikon Kinen Kanazawa City Athletic Field to commemorate the wedding of the Crown Prince, later Emperor Hirohito, NPB records show.
The baseball diamond was laid inside the 400-meter track, and the only barrier between the outfield and the spectators behind it was a single wire strung around the perimeter. Umpires set a special ground rule for the venue: a ball hit directly over the wire was a home run, while a ground ball that slipped underneath it was a triple.
Under the baseball rules of the era, a fair ball that bounced into the stands or passed under a fence was normally a double. But the rules also allowed venues with unusually high fences or oversized grounds — Meiji Jingu Stadium and Koshien among them — to agree in advance on different assignments, NPB records note. The Kanazawa ground’s outfield was cramped by comparison: the foul lines measured roughly 80 meters from home plate to each wing, short even for the time.
On July 14, Hanshin hit four home runs against Kinki Great Ring, matching the existing single-game record, and the four-game series produced nine home runs in all.
The Record Game: Senators vs. Gold Star
The history came on the series’ second day, July 14, in the seventh meeting between the Senators and Gold Star. Senators outfielder Seiichi Suzuki opened the barrage with a center-field triple in the second inning. He added a second triple in the fourth, then a single and a home run for four hits in the game.
Because the day’s scorecard does not indicate whether each hit was an earned triple, the details remain unclear, but the total — six triples by one team in a single game — was a new professional baseball record, according to NPB.
The ground rule also denied Suzuki a place in the cycle-hit book. Had either of his triples been scored a double, his single, double, triple and home run would have been the first cycle in professional baseball history. The wire, in other words, cost him a first.
Eighty-Five Hits, Fifteen Triples
Across the two days and four games, the clubs collected 85 hits, 28 of them for extra bases — but the breakdown tells the story of the venue. There were four doubles, nine home runs and 15 triples. Triples dominated the series by a wide margin, NPB records show.
The wire also produced an injury. On July 13, in the eighth meeting between Hanshin and Gold Star, Tigers outfielder Atsushi Tomigashi chased a fly ball hit toward right field by Gold Star’s Kozo Naito, made the catch, then slammed his back into the wire and collapsed. Tomigashi finished the game but sat out from the next day, missing 16 contests before returning on Aug. 18 against the Giants at Korakuen, NPB records show.
A Lottery at the Ballpark
The series also marked a commercial first. Baseball lottery tickets — 野球籤 — went on sale across Japanese baseball on June 29, 1946, and were sold at the Hokuriku Series. Unlike a betting pool, the tickets did not ask buyers to predict winners or scores; winning numbers were drawn to award first through fourth prizes. Still, enough sold that the draw became a major attraction, the Ishikawa Shimbun, the series’ host newspaper, reported.
One Series, Then a Real Stadium
The Kanazawa City Public Ground hosted professional baseball only that once. In the autumn of 1947, the prefectural Kenrokuen Baseball Stadium was completed and capable of staging official games, and all subsequent professional baseball in the city moved there, NPB records show.
The old ground itself never left use. It continues today as the Kanazawa City Track and Field Stadium, a century-old facility that was the first in Japan to lay a cinder running track.
That is where the story rests: a track built for a prince’s wedding, a wire instead of a fence, and six triples in a row that still top Japan’s record books.
