NPB History | Nakamozu Stadium Site — Where the Hawks Were Grown

The sign on the front of the ballpark did not say 中百舌鳥. It said 中モズ, half of it in katakana, because nobody could read the characters. That is the right note to start on: this was never a showpiece. Nakamozu is where the Nankai Hawks were made, over half a century, mostly with nobody watching.

Nankai Railway planned it in the spring of 1936 as the fiftieth-anniversary project of the company, an athletic complex meant to be the finest in East Asia, out by Nakamozu station on the Koya line. Then the war with China started in 1937 and it took three more years. The ballpark was finished in the early summer of 1939, with an athletics ground, a sumo ring, a table-tennis hall and a gymnasium going up around it, and it opened over three days from 28 July with seven teams playing three games a day.

The Nankai club had been founded in February 1938 and had been using Sakai Ōhama; it moved here as soon as this was ready. But the stands were small beside Koshien and Nishinomiya, and getting out from central Osaka was awkward, so the first team barely played here: thirty-three official games in the ballpark's entire life, thirty-one of them before the leagues split. A handful of Western League fixtures in the 1950s. Otherwise it was the practice ground and the second-team home, with the Shūyō dormitory across the athletics field.

Which is the whole point. In the food shortage right after the war, the manager Tsuruoka Kazuto and his players planted sweet potatoes on the waste ground by the dormitory so that they could eat while they trained. What came out of that place over the following two decades was Okamoto Isami, Nomura Katsuya, Hirose Yoshinori, Minagawa Mutsuo — and a club that between 1950 and 1966 won nine pennants in seventeen seasons and finished second in the other eight.

The railway even built a station for it, a temporary halt called Nakamozu Undōjō-mae, in 1949. It was used so little that it closed in 1958. Shirasagi station opened on the same spot in 1964. When Nagai's athletics stadium opened that year the rest of the complex lost its purpose and was wound up in 1969, and the land went to housing estates, a primary school and a new railway line — everything except the ballpark.

Nankai's owner Kawakatsu Den died in April 1988; the club was sold to Daiei that autumn and left for Fukuoka, and professional baseball at Nakamozu ended with it. Local amateur teams used the ground until it was closed on 20 November 2001 for age, and flats were built on it.

There is a commemorative panel on the site, just west of Shirasagi station. Go and read it, then look at the block of flats behind it and consider that the Hawks' golden age was grown on that rectangle by men who had planted potatoes on it.

Coordinates 34.550172, 135.513395 — Shirasagi station on the Nankai Koya line; the ballpark site and its panel are immediately west. ±150 m, OSM-derived from the station rather than the panel itself, pending an on-site fix.

Cover: an aerial photograph of the Nakamozu sports complex in 1948, by the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan, CC BY 4.0 — the ballpark and athletics ground standing alone in fields. Second image: the same ground from the air in 1999, same source and licence. Both via Wikimedia Commons.