NPB History | Narumi Stadium Site — The First Professional Game, Now a Driving School

Look at this block of Midori ward from above and you can still read it: a driving-test course laid out inside an unmistakable ballpark outline, with grandstands from 1927 standing around the edge of it like a wall. The Meitetsu Driving School has occupied the site since 1959 and has never bothered to erase the shape. There is a plaque out on the course, and where home plate stood there is a golden home plate, installed in 2007 for the ground's eightieth anniversary. This is where professional baseball in Japan began. Aichi Electric Railway — Meitetsu now — built Narumi Stadium in 1927 on about 100,000 tsubo of its own land, at a cost of ¥360,000, explicitly to answer Jingu in the east and Koshien in the west. There was an iron canopy behind the plate, and the infield deck was named the Ibuki Stand as a reply to Koshien's Alps. It held 22,500. The field was enormous: 106 metres down each line and 136 to centre, past international standard, later cut back. It became the home of middle-school baseball in the Tōkai region, and the American tours came through — Lou Gehrig in 1931, Babe Ruth in 1934. Then February 1936. The Japan Professional Baseball League, the body NPB descends from, held its founding meeting with seven clubs on 5 February. Four days later, on the 9th, the Nagoya Kinko-gun played the Tokyo Kyojin here. It was billed as a send-off for the Giants' second American tour and it did not count in any standings, but it was the first time two professional clubs in Japan played each other, and it is recognised as the first professional game. The Giants lost it badly. Kinko took two in the first, then put three more on Sawamura Eiji after he came in mid-inning. Three Giants pitchers between them put eighteen men on by walk or hit batsman. Kinko won 10–3. The Nagoya Shimbun, which sponsored Kinko, gave it most of a page the next morning under a headline about historic cheering rising at Narumi. Thirty-five official games followed in the single-league era. After the split, Meitetsu took a stake in the Dragons in 1951 and rebuilt the stands expecting to host them, but Chunichi Stadium was nearer the centre of Nagoya and Narumi was awkward to reach; only eighteen Central League games were ever played here, the last on 3 May 1953. What the ground kept was the club's second team and the dormitory beside it, and Sugishita Shigeru — who won 32 games in 1954 as Chunichi took their first pennant and the Japan title — has said the reason they won was that the players had been raised at Narumi. It closed after the Aichi autumn high-school tournament in 1958, thirty-two years old, and the driving school opened the following year. Go and look, but look from outside. This is a working business teaching people to drive, not a monument, and the Ibuki Stand is perfectly visible from the road. Coordinates 35.083543, 136.955906 — Meitetsu Driving School, on the ballpark footprint; ±80 m, OSM map-verified, pending on-site check. Cover: Narumi Stadium in 1937, photograph by the City of Nagoya, public domain. Second image: an aerial of the site in September 2020 by the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan, CC BY-SA 4.0, in which the diamond is still legible. Both via Wikimedia Commons.