The Yamato Baseball Club was a Japanese baseball team in the

Japanese Baseball League was a professional baseball league in Japan which operated from 1936 to 1949, before reorganizing in 1950 as Nippon Professional Baseball. The league's dominant team was Tokyo Kyojin (renamed the Yomiuri Giants in 1947), which won nine league c ...

(JBL). Based in

Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.468 ...

, the franchise was founded as the Korakuen Eagles before the 1937 season and was dissolved before the 1944 season.

Franchise history

Korakuen Eagles

In 1937, catcher

Harris McGalliard __NOTOC__ Andrew Harris McGalliard (September 25, 1906 – May 26, 1978), better known as Bucky Harris, was an American professional baseball player who played in the Japanese Baseball League from 1936 to 1938. While playing for the Korakuen Eagl ...

(better known as Bucky Harris), won the JBL Most Valuable Player Award with a batting average of .285 and 25 RBI (in 39 games).

Kurowashi

The team was owned by Ryutaro Takahashi of Dai-Nippon Beer from 1939 to 1941. For the 1940 and 1941 seasons, the team changed its name to Kurowashi (''Black Eagles'' in Japanese; in October 1940, responding to rising hostility toward the West due to

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, the league outlawed the use of English words in Japanese baseball)."Kurowashi,"
Baseball-Reference.com. Accessed Mar. 7, 2015.

Tadashi Kameda Tadashi (Kanji: 正, 禎, 忠, 荘, 匡史 Hiragana: ただし), Japanese masculine name, may refer to : *, the first aikido master to live and teach in the west *, Japanese manga story writer, novelist and screenwriter *, Japanese basketball coach ...

pitched two

no-hitter In baseball, a no-hitter is a game in which a team was not able to record a hit. Major League Baseball (MLB) officially defines a no-hitter as a completed game in which a team that batted in at least nine innings recorded no hits. A pitcher wh ...

s for Kurowashi, on March 18, 1940, against the Lion Baseball Club, and on April 14, 1941, against the

Osaka Tigers The Hanshin Tigers (Japanese: 阪神タイガース ''Hanshin Taigāsu'') are a Nippon Professional Baseball team playing in the Central League. The team is based in Nishinomiya, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan, and is owned by Hanshin Electric Railway ...

.Lammers, Dir
"Kameda tosses first of 2 JBL no-nos, 79 years ago today,"
NoNoHitters.com. Retrieved Aug. 22, 2020.

Yamato

Kenkichi Saeki, president of

Yamato Ironworks was originally the area around today's Sakurai City in Nara Prefecture of Japan, which became Yamato Province and by extension a name for the whole of Japan. Yamato is also the dynastic name of the ruling Imperial House of Japan. Japanese h ...

, purchased the team in 1942. As a result, the team changed its name to the Yamato Baseball Club.

Dissolution

During its nine seasons of existence (including split fall and spring campaigns in 1937–1938), the franchise only had two winning campaigns and never finished higher than third in the JBL standings. (They usually finished in the second division.) As a result, the team was dissolved before the 1944 season (along with another JBL team, the

Nishitetsu Baseball Club The Nishitetsu Baseball Club was a team in the Japanese Baseball League (JBL). Founded in 1936 as the Tokyo Senators, the team went through a number of name changes and mergers before being dissolved after the 1943 season. The team's undisputed ...

Team statistics

References

Defunct baseball teams in Japan Baseball teams established in 1937 Baseball teams disestablished in 1944 1937 establishments in Japan 1944 disestablishments in Japan Sports teams in Tokyo {{japan-baseball-team-stub