Eastern League (Japanese baseball) Eastern League (Japanese baseball) The is one of the two minor leagues ("ni-gun") of Japanese professional baseball. The league is owned and managed by the Central League of Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB). Teams in the Eastern League generally play an 80-game schedule every year. In 1954 the six teams of NPB's Central League agreed to form their own minor league — the Shin Nippon League (or "New Japan League") — as a complement to the already extant Kansai Farm League, which had begun play in 1952. The minor league affiliates of the Chunichi Dragons and Hanshin Tigers moved over from
Hidehiko Yoshida The fight was even closer than its first iteration, as Yoshida won the first round to the judges and kept himself mostly out of danger until the third round, but he lost again by decision. Yoshida recovered from the defeat submitting Tank Abbott at the next event with the judo technique known as kata-ha-jime. At the end of the same year, Yoshida faced fellow Japanese judoka Naoya Ogawa by an armbar in a highly anticipated MMA bout at PRIDE Shockwave 2005 with each fighter receiving a payment of US$2 million, which remains one of the most expensive fights in MMA