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.
Toshiya Sugiuchi second round, throwing three shutout innings and being credited with a save. He was also used as a left-handed specialist in the tournament finals against South Korea. On April 5, in his first start of the regular season against the Orix Buffaloes, Sugiuchi struck out five over 7⅔ innings to bring his career strikeout total to 1003. He was the fourth-fastest pitcher in NPB history to amass 1000 career strikeouts (following Hideo Nomo, Kazuhisa Ishii and Yutaka Enatsu), doing so in 979⅓ innings. He became the 318th pitcher in Japanese professional baseball to amass 1000 career innings in a start