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.
Eiji Sawamura Award only Central League pitchers were eligible to win the award from (the first year the NPB employed the current two-league format) to . The first pitcher to be bestowed the honors from the Pacific League was Hideo Nomo for the Kintetsu Buffaloes in . No pitcher was found to be sufficiently deserving of the award in , , , and . The award has been presented to two pitchers in the same season twice (, ). While it is sometimes assumed that the award was introduced following the creation of the Cy Young Award in Major League Baseball, the Cy