The railroad companies' baseball stadiums and changes of the baseball world in the prewar period

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to consider the importance of the baseball stadiums, which railroad companies built and managed, in prewar Japanese baseball.
It was a national trend that railroad companies built the baseball stadiums around the railway as part of passenger attraction or residential section development. In the prewar period when the public baseball stadiums still hardly existed, railroad companies' baseball stadiums, where stand equipment was also ready, were pioneers in Japanese baseball. Moreover, baseball conventions were excellent items for railroad companies to raise passenger traffic receipts.
They contributed to the birth of the Japanese Professional Baseball League. It is worth mentioning that the railroad companies' baseball stadiums existed in Kansai and Nagoya although there was no baseball stadium for professional baseball in Tokyo at the time of the establishment of Japanese Professional Baseball. It is also significant that half of the professional baseball games was held in the railway companies' baseball stadiums in the prewar period.