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.
Keishi Suzuki strikeouts in eight separate seasons. With 71 career shutouts, he ranks fifth all-time in Japanese professional baseball. Suzuki was also a fairly good hitter for a pitcher, with a lifetime .209 batting average and 13 home runs in the nine seasons he batted before the Pacific League implemented the designated hitter in 1975. After his playing career, he was the manager of the Kintetsu Buffaloes from 1993 to 1995, where he managed Hideo Nomo (although the two men did not get along). He was elected to the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 2002. With 200+ victories, he is also