Western League (Japanese baseball) League contains the minor league affiliates of five Japanese professional teams (minor league homefield shown in parentheses): Western 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 Pacific League of Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB). Teams in the Western League generally play an 80-game schedule every year. The league was created in 1952 as the Kansai Farm League, and was initially completely separate from the workings of the Nippon Professional Baseball. It featured the minor league teams of the six professional teams that had their homefields
Saori Yoshida regularly appears in their commercials. In December 2008, the wrestling singlet which Yoshida wore in the Olympic final bout earlier that year, was sold for 551,000 yen (ca. US$6,123) at an internet auction, and the money was donated to the Japanese Red Cross society. In 2013, when the International Olympic Committee named wrestling as a candidate for exclusion from the Games, she became an active part of the Japanese lobbying team that persuaded the IOC to retain wrestling at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. In May 2014 Yoshida made a cameo appearance in the Japanese television drama "Tokyo Metropolitan Guard Center",