Nippon Professional Baseball merged with the Orix BlueWave and were replaced by the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles. Until 1993, baseball was the only team sport played professionally in Japan. In that year, the J.League professional soccer league was founded. The new soccer league placed teams in prefectural capitals around the country—rather than clustering them in and around Tokyo—and the teams were named after their locations rather than after corporate sponsors. The wave of players moving to Major League Baseball, which began with Hideo Nomo "retiring" from the Kintetsu Buffaloes, then signing with the Los Angeles Dodgers, has also added to the financial problems.
Hisashi Iwakuma the Mariners. He was an MLB All-Star in 2013, as well as the third-place finisher for the 2013 American League Cy Young Award. On August 12, 2015, Iwakuma became the second Japanese player ever to pitch a no-hitter in Major League Baseball (joining Hideo Nomo, who threw two), throwing a three-walk, seven-strikeout 3–0 win over the Baltimore Orioles at Safeco Field. It was also his first career complete game, and the Mariners' fifth no-hitter in team history. Iwakuma was born in Higashiyamato, Tokyo, and began playing baseball in the first grade before attending Horikoshi High School in Nakano. Iwakuma was