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.
Netherlands national baseball team team. While baseball only maintains a niche following throughout Europe, the Netherlands, along with Italy, are the two European countries where the sport's popularity is strongest; the team has finished in either first or second place in each of the 31 European Baseball Championships in which it has appeared. The team played in the 2017 World Baseball Classic and finished in 4th place. The Netherlands has competed in all four of the World Baseball Classic tournaments held. All sixteen teams that played in the 2006 edition were invited to compete in the second in 2009. The team was an automatic