Nippon Professional Baseball to start June 19

According to Katherine Acquavella of CBS Sports on Monday, Nippon Professional Baseball (the top professional baseball league in Japan) is set to begin play on June 19 in empty stadiums. At this time, the league is expected to only have a 120 game regular season schedule. That is down from 143 games that are normally played per season. The NPB has also announced that there will be no All-Star Game and no interleague games.

The fact that there are no interleague games makes a significant amount of sense. During this horrible era of coronavirus, the NPB is trying to cut down on unnecessary travel.

There are currently 12 teams in the NPB. The Chunichi Dragons, the Hanshin Tigers, the Hiroshima Toyo Carp, the Tokyo Yakult Swallows, the Yokohama DeNA BayStars, and Yomiuri Giants are part of the Central League. The Chiba Lotte Marines, the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks, the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, the Orix Buffaloes, the Saitama Seibu Lions, and the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles are part of the Pacific League.

The defending champions are the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks. In fact, the Hawks have won the last three Japanese baseball titles and five of the last six championships dating back to 2014. Last year the Hawks swept the Giants four games to none in the 2019 Japan Series. The Hawks were led by third baseman Yurisbel Gracial of Guantanamo, Cuba. Gracial batted .375 in the four-game sweep with three home runs and six runs batted in.

Meanwhile, the 2019 NPB’s most valuable player was Giants shortstop Hayato Sakamoto of Itami, Japan. Sakamoto batted .312 with 40 home runs and 94 runs batted in. There are currently 16, 623 cases of coronavirus in Japan and 846 deaths.