NPB History | Shimonoseki Municipal Stadium Site — Half of the Central League's First Day

On 10 March 1950 the Central League played its first day, and it played it in two places. Four clubs opened at Heiwadai in Fukuoka. The other four opened here, at the western tip of Honshu, in a whaling port: Taiyō against Kokutetsu, and Chunichi against Hanshin, on a ground that had existed for a matter of months.

The ballpark was here because of whales. Taiyō Gyogyō — Maruha Nichiro now — had its head office in Shimonoseki, and in an era with no limits on commercial catches it was flush enough that the roughly ¥60 million needed to found a baseball club was not a difficult sum. Shōriki Matsutarō, the league's honorary commissioner, was pushing a two-league structure that took Japanese professional baseball from eight clubs to fifteen almost overnight, and Taiyō rode that wave: the Maruha club was founded in November 1949 and renamed the Taiyō Whales in March 1950.

They needed somewhere to play. A ballpark went up on the site of the old Ōbatake parade ground in Mukōyō-chō, at a cost of ¥25 million — and ¥20 million of that was raised from the citizens of Shimonoseki, who then ran it through an association of their own investors. The arrangement collapsed almost immediately and the city took the ground over, at which point it became Shimonoseki Municipal Stadium.

The Whales did not stay long — the club moved on, eventually to Kawasaki and then to Yokohama, where it plays today as the DeNA BayStars on the ground where professional baseball's first night game was held. But Shimonoseki is where the club began, and where half of the Central League's first day happened.

The San Francisco Giants played an all-Japan side here in 1960. The ballpark wore out and closed in 1985; it was demolished, and Shimonoseki Municipal Central Hospital — now Shimonoseki Municipal Citizens' Hospital — was built on the site. The Shimonoseki ballpark standing today, in a park in the northern suburbs, opened in 1988 and is an entirely different facility; do not confuse the two.

The club has not forgotten. It held championship parades through Shimonoseki in 1960 and 1998, and in March 2019, for the seventieth season since the leagues split, it came back and played on 10 March in replicas of the founding uniform, with WHALES across the left chest and the Maruha mark on the shoulder.

There is nothing to see on the site but a hospital. Go anyway if you are passing: the first day of a league that still runs was half held on this rectangle of ground, and paid for by the people who lived around it.

Coordinates 33.966319, 130.930392 — Shimonoseki Municipal Citizens' Hospital, in Shimonoseki Sports Park, on the ballpark site; ±80 m, OSM map-verified, pending on-site check.

Cover: Shimonoseki City Hospital, photographed 1 May 2015 by Bsx, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. It shows the building that occupies the site; nothing of the ballpark survives.