High School Rubber Baseball Tournament

Well, a rubber baseball is just what the name suggests, a baseball made of rubber. It's referred to as nanshiki (軟式) where nan is the kanji for yawa(rakai) or "soft" and shiki means "type." While a nanshiki ball may be softer than a hard ball, it still hurts when you're nailed with it.

It was mentioned at the Little League World Series going on that the team from Tokyo was formerly from a nanshiki league. What the ESPN announcers didn't mention is that nanshiki is much more popular in elementary and middle school then hard balls. Looking at last November's Tokyo Area Newsletter [in Japanese], there appear to only be 8 leagues in the 4 major Kanto Area regions. There are more nanshiki leagues for elementary school aged kids in Yokohama alone then Little League leagues in all of the Kanto Plain.

As for the balls themselves, there are A, B, and C sizes, A being the largest and used by high school and industrial teams. C is the smallest and is used by elementary school kids.

The softball league that I'm in also uses a rubber ball, but the size of a usual North American softball. Rubber softball leagues abound for kids from elementary school and up as well. When my son decided to start baseball, the choices were (rubber) softball or nanshiki. (I'm not aware of any hard ball league such as Little League in my area.)

According to Stephen Jay Gould [1], stickball was often played in major U.S. cities in the 1940s and '50s using a "spaldeen" or "spalding" (from the A. G. Spalding company) which was a hollow rubber ball. These nanshiki balls are not like those hollow rubber balls used on the streets of Queens in the distant past, but rather are quite solid and have "seems" protruding in the rubber so feel like a regular hard ball.

Anyway, to conclude with your final question, the tournament you're referring to is a national tournament for high schools that use the nanshiki baseball rather than a hard ball. While the nanshiki balls tend to be preferred by youth leagues and adult amateur (for fun) leagues, hard balls seem to have the high school and elite industrial leagues.

I hope something here is what you were looking for in an answer.

[1] "Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball" by Stephen Jay Gould, 2003, W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., ISBN 0-393-05755-0.

Correction: There are significantly more Little League leagues in the Kanto Area than were mentioned in the newsletters referred to above. This organization chart shows that there are 23 leagues in Kanagawa, 37 in Tokyo, etc. So my previous statement that there are more nanshiki leagues in Yokohama than Little League league in all of the Kanto Plain may be wrong. But they still out number Little League by a great deal.

Thanks for the info.

Is safety an issue with rubber balls in Japan? I recall something about deaf high school baseball players having to use rubber balls instead of regular ones. Do you know anything about this? I know that the All Japan Deaf Baseball Tournament uses rubber balls.

Do some high schools have both regular ball clubs and rubber ball clubs? If so, are the rubber clubs seen as inferior?

There certainly isn't much media coverage of the high school rubber ball tournament.

To tell you the truth, I don't know if safety is the reason for the preference to the rubber ball or not. I kind of thought that it was economic, but I don't know how much hard balls cost to make a comparison.

As far as whether or not the nanshiki balls are viewed at as inferior, I would guess that they're seen as "for kids." But I don't yet know anyone at the high school level to give me a definitive opinion.

As my son goes through the system I hope to learn more about each level. We're still at the elementary school level, so it will still be a number of years before I can answer these questions with any authority. Answering "yes" to all of your above questions seems logical, but something logical to one culture isn't necessarily supported by the same assumptions in another, so I can't say for sure at this point in time.