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.
World Series Baseball '95 Also, players are selected to the All-Star Game purely based on statistics from the first half of the regular season. Unlocking a code allows a fictional team in exhibition mode. In Japan, this game is sponsored by Hideo Nomo and is called "Nomo's World Series Baseball" in English and "Nomo Hideo no World Series Baseball" in Japanese. The players are asked how many innings they want to play and if they need a designated hitter prior to starting the game among other options like an optional digitized voice (for all the umpire's decisions) and the way that the game is