Quote:
Originally Posted by nat
The early days of Japanese baseball were a very low offense affair. I've often wondered why. Now, I was watching this video of Starfin pitching. Check out the stadium that you can see starting at 0:08. It has HUGE amounts of foul territory in the infield. Just unbelievably enormous, the fans were sitting miles away from the action. It looks like the stadium wasn't originally designed for baseball.
Anyway, if that was anything close to normal then it would go at least some distance towards explaining the low run scoring environment. Having distant fences decreases home runs, but it increases doubles and triples, so it doesn't necessarily reduce scoring. But large amounts of foul territory does: all that leads to is more foul outs.
I tried to figure out which stadium this is. Google tells me that the caption at the top says "All Japan vs. Tools, 1949", but I'm pretty sure that should be "Seals" and that this is footage from the Seals' 1949 tour. Unfortunately they played games all over the place for that tour. There's probably records of which games Starfin pitched somewhere, but I'm not up for finding them at the moment.
Any other theories (or maybe someone actually knows) about why no one was scoring any runs in early Japanese baseball? |
That is actually Meiji Jingu Stadium which is actually still in existence and the home of the Yakult Swallows (though it is scheduled to be replaced in a few years unfortunately).
That was probably from Game 2 of the Seals 1949 tour, in which Starfin was the starting pitcher.
The stadium still has pretty big foul territory!