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.
Hideki Matsui the vote. Elected at the age of 43, he became the youngest player to be inducted to the Hall, breaking a record held by Hideo Nomo. Matsui did not miss a game in his first three seasons with the Yankees, putting together a streak of 518 games played. Before that, he played in 1,250 consecutive games with Yomiuri, for a total professional baseball streak of 1,768. Matsui holds the record for longest streak of consecutive games played to start a Major League Baseball career. On May 11, 2006, in his 519th game with the Yankees, Matsui fractured his left wrist