NPB History | Nissei Stadium Site — Two No-Hitters and Three Thousand Home Runs

Ninety metres and forty centimetres down each foul line. A hundred and seven to the gaps, with almost no bulge in the outfield. A mound that sat low, and an infield that tilted very slightly downhill from third base toward left. Nissei Stadium was five minutes' walk from Morinomiya station with Osaka Castle in view over the fence, and it was one of the worst places in Japan to be a pitcher. Nippon Life Insurance built it in June 1950 as a practice ground for the company's own corporate baseball team, which is why the formal name was Nippon Life Stadium and everyone called it Nissei. Professional baseball arrived three days after it was finished, on 1 July, Nankai against Mainichi. From the end of the 1954 season the owners kept it for amateur baseball, and it became a shrine for the Kansai university league and the Osaka high-school qualifiers. Kintetsu came in 1958, for the reason that runs through every Kintetsu story: Fujiidera, their home, had no floodlights. They had been renting Osaka Stadium for night games, but Nankai's own schedule came first there and the rent hurt, so Kintetsu paid the whole cost of putting lights into Nissei and made it their second home. They played here for close to forty years. In 1,540 professional games this ballpark gave up 3,094 home runs — almost exactly two a game, a rate beaten by hardly any ground in the country. The man who suffered most for it was Suzuki Keishi, Kintetsu's ace and fourth on NPB's all-time wins list with 317. What the ballpark taught him was to keep the ball down, and on 8 August 1968 he threw a no-hitter here against Toei, then another on 9 September 1971 against Nishitetsu. In 1,540 games he is the only man who ever threw one at Nissei. The ground was too small in the other sense as well. When Kintetsu reached the Japan Series in 1979 and 1980, they could not use it — capacity was around twenty thousand — and had to borrow Osaka Stadium from Nankai. Which is how the seventh game of the 1979 Series, and Enatsu's twenty-one pitches, came to be played at Namba rather than here. The last baseball played at Nissei was amateur, as the first had been: 8 November 1997, a national amateur championship final. It was taken down at the end of that year. Morinomiya Q's Mall BASE opened on the north half of the site in 2015, developed with the stated intention of carrying the ballpark's memory forward — the BASE in the name is not decoration. The pavements around the site are laid with slabs cast in the shape of a ballpark: home plate, the arcs of the infield, the foul lines running off under your feet as you walk up to the shops. Look down on the approach. That is the only diamond left in Morinomiya. Coordinates 34.680778, 135.530528 — Morinomiya Q's Mall BASE, on the ballpark site; ±70 m, OSM map-verified, pending on-site check. Cover: Nissei Stadium in July 1992, photographed by user MASA, CC BY-SA 3.0. Second image: the ballpark-shaped paving slabs on the approach to the site, photographed April 2005 by Mr.ちゅらさん / MASA, CC BY-SA 3.0. Both via Wikimedia Commons.