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.
Shutouts in baseball American and National League starting in 1967. Since the award was established, there have been 25 times (out of a total of 106 awards given since 1956) where the award was given to a pitcher who also led the league in shutouts. Since the establishment of the Rookie of the Year Award in 1947, three pitchers have led the league in shutouts in their rookie year and also captured the Rookie of the Year Award: Don Newcombe (1949), Fernando Valenzuela (1981), and Hideo Nomo (1995). Only 16 pitchers in the history of the American and National League have led the