NPB History | Osaka Stadium Site — The Home Plate Under the Shopping Centre

There is a pitcher's plate set into the floor on the second level of a shopping centre in Namba, and a home plate 18.44 metres away from it, both full size and both in the positions they occupied when this was Osaka Stadium. Osaka City's own Naniwa ward office describes the arrangement. It is the most precise thing left of a ballpark that stood here for forty-eight years. Nankai Electric Railway needed it badly. The Hawks won the pennant in 1948 and had no ground of their own in the city, borrowing Koshien and Nishinomiya from rivals to play at home. The railway bought the burnt-out site of the regional tobacco monopoly bureau from the government, set up Osaka Stadium Co. in 1949, and broke ground on 16 January 1950. The opening was a mess. The date was set for 12 September 1950, but a typhoon was closing on Osaka; only the ceremony went ahead and the intra-squad game meant to christen the field was postponed. The ward history published in 1957 records the opening as 16 September instead. Both dates are in the record and neither is wrong, depending on what you count as opening a ballpark. What went up was a tight, steep, modern thing on a small downtown lot — thirty-five thousand seats, infield decks pitched at a famously severe angle, and the first box seats in any Japanese ballpark. Floodlights arrived in 1951, before any other ground in Kansai had them, so it drew fixtures from both leagues and concerts and opera and school sports days besides. People called it the Osaka Castle of the Shōwa era. Beneath the stands was a five-storey block of tenants: a billiards hall, an indoor golf range, a cooking school, a beauty college, a technical college, a go centre, a beer hall. Kintetsu's Takechi Fumio threw the Pacific League's first perfect game here against Daiei in 1955. The seventh game of the 1979 Japan Series ended here with Enatsu Yutaka's twenty-one pitches, the most closely retold half-inning in Japanese baseball. By 1990 the ground had staged 3,049 games. The end was slow and strange. Nankai sold the Hawks to Daiei in 1988 and the last official game, against Kintetsu on 15 October that year, was a farewell. Visiting fixtures continued to 1990. Then a housing exhibition was built on the infield — show homes standing where the mound had been — and musicals were staged under temporary tents. In October 1998 a goodbye festival was held and the stands came down. Namba Parks opened on the site in 2003. Find the plates on level two, walk the sixty feet six inches between them, and go up to the Nankai Hawks memorial gallery, which NPB and the published history of the club both place on the ninth floor, though the ward's own page says the seventh. Coordinates 34.661679, 135.502084 — Namba Parks; ±60 m, OSM map-verified, pending on-site check. The plates are indoors on level two. Cover: the roof gardens of Namba Parks, photographed 28 May 2007 by 663highland, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons. This is the site today, not the ballpark.