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.
Dominican Republic national baseball team Republic’s win over the US set a new Marlins Park record for baseball game attendance with 37,446. Manny Machado of the Dominican Republic was named MVP for the first round Pool C bracket of the WBC, after batting .357. The Dominican Republic team participated in the 1992 Games, the first medal competition for the sport, and finished 6th. The team failed to qualify for another competition before baseball was eliminated from the Olympics after the 2008 Games. Dominican Republic national baseball team The Dominican Republic national baseball team is the national baseball team of the Dominican Republic. The team has