TOKYO, 18 September 2004 — Japanese professional baseball players geared up yesterday for the first-ever strike in 70 years of league history at the weekend as they failed to scupper plans to merge two financially troubled clubs.
While this baseball-crazy nation held its breath, the players’ union decided to go ahead with a series of strikes against 12 games scheduled for today and tomorrow as its last-ditch talks with management broke down.
The walk-out campaign, originally set to start a week earlier, had been frozen as the umbrella organization for Japan’s two professional leagues, Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), promised to review the merger plan.
But NPB concluded that the Kintetsu Buffaloes and the Orix BlueWave should be integrated ahead of next season as planned, reducing their Pacific League from six to five teams next season, despite widespread opposition from players and fans.
The Central League will retain six clubs although both divisions are loaded with money-losing teams. The crisis took a new turn on Thursday when two Internet-related businesses proposed setting up new clubs as the Japan Professional Baseball Players Association was seeking at least a year’s freeze on the merger.
“We requested that a new club be allowed to join next season. But it was ruled out as something impossible,” Atsuya Furuta, head of the players’ union, told a news conference.
“We will resume talks next week,” said the 39-year-old Yakult Swallows catcher, indicating players might strike again the following weekend.
NPB said the merger was a management matter resulting from “perennial structural deficit. Needless to say, professional baseball thrives on fans. To cancel matches is a direct and grave betrayal to fans,” it said in a statement.
The union opposes the merger because it would not only cost the jobs of at least 100 players and club employees but also possibly lead to a consolidation of the two leagues with more indebted clubs being weeded out. The one-league scheme has been advocated by Tsuneo Watanabe, the reputed “don” of Japanese professional baseball, who stepped down as chairman of the popular Yomiuri Giants Club last month over a scouting bribery scandal.
