NPB History | Susaki Stadium Site — Where the Giants–Tigers Rivalry Began

At high tide the sea came into the outfield and the groundstaff bailed it out with buckets. Koto ward's own account of the ballpark says so, citing Kawakami Tetsuharu's memoir. The ground sat on land reclaimed only a few years earlier at the head of Tokyo Bay, and it was not really fit to play on, and the first champions of Japanese professional baseball were decided on it anyway. Susaki Stadium — also called Susaki Daitokyo Stadium — went up in about three months in 1936 because Tokyo had no ballpark the professionals were allowed to use. Meiji Jingu was closed to them by the university league. The Daitokyo club, formed that February to enter the professional competition, needed a home, so one was thrown together on the flats in what is now Shinsuna: timber stands, a corrugated perimeter, no lights. The 1936 autumn title was worked out on points across six tournaments from September onward, and the Giants and the Osaka Tigers finished level. A three-game decider opened here on 9 December. The Giants took the first, the Tigers levelled it, and the Giants won the third 4–2 to become the first champions in the history of the professional game. Eiji Sawamura pitched all three. Two years after facing Ruth and Gehrig as a schoolboy at Kusanagi, he threw three consecutive complete efforts against the Tigers in December on a field that drained badly, and he said afterwards that those three days were harder than the fighting he saw once he was conscripted. The Giants and the Tigers have been playing each other ever since, and Japanese baseball calls that fixture the traditional match. It starts here, on reclaimed ground beside a canal, in a ballpark that lasted about three years. Korakuen Stadium opened in 1937 and the professionals moved to it almost at once. Susaki's fixture list collapsed. It closed after three games in 1938 and was gone by the war; the site carries corporate office buildings now. In 2005 Koto ward put up a monument. It is a plain stone stele reading Susaki Kyūjō Ato — the site of Susaki Stadium — with an inscribed panel telling the story and a white relief of a bat and ball cut into the face of it, standing in a clipped hedge outside an office block. It is the only thing here that knows what this was. The address is Shinsuna 1-2-2, Koto ward, a walk from Toyocho station on the Tozai line. Note that the district actually called Susaki was some way west of the ballpark that took its name. Coordinates 35.66214, 139.82220 — Shinsuna 1-chome; ±150 m, derived from the ward's published address rather than a surveyed point. The monument is not in OpenStreetMap; the coordinate needs an on-site fix. Cover: the Susaki Stadium memorial in Koto ward, photographed 4 October 2019 by ja:User:江戸前鰻, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.