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.
2014 Baseball Hall of Fame balloting winner Jeff Kent, and 5-time All-Stars Luis Gonzalez. The field included 1995 NL Rookie of the Year Hideo Nomo, two MVPs (Kent and Thomas), three Cy Young Award winners (Glavine, Maddux and Éric Gagné). The field included four candidates with at least five Gold Glove Awards: Maddux (18 at pitcher, a record), Mussina (7 at pitcher), Kenny Rogers (5 at pitcher) and J. T. Snow (6 at first base). As in most recent elections, it was expected that the controversy over use of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) was likely to dominate the elections. "ESPN.com" columnist Jim Caple noted in the days