Most Popular Teams?

Five is hard to say. The top two are very easy, though: Giants and Tigers. This rivalry goes back to feudal Japan Kansai vs. Kanto disputes.

With baseball, though, the Giants were, for most of the history of television in Japan, the only team broadcast country-wide on a daily, then nightly, basis. The V-9 Giants shaped a generation.

The Tigers were the second major Japanese team, taking up residence in the Kansai area. Often upstaged by their Tokyo rivals, the Giants, Hanshin was the main runner-up for many years during the single league era and the start of the Central League. It's only been in the second half of the 1990's that they became the make inu (losing dogs) that they were until last season. But Hanshin fans, misplaced from Osaka or not, follow their Tigers faithfully win or lose. If this were a class struggle, it would be the white colar (Tokyo) vs. the blue colar (Osaka).

After that, it's kind of hard to say that any team is particularly more popular than any other. It all comes down to your definition of popular.

For example, going to a game in most stadiums, you get a good mix of home and away crowds, each taking up their respective sides of the stadiums - self segregating themselves by team. The first base side of all stadiums is the home team crowd, the third base side is always for the visiting crowd. All stadiums use this easy to follow algorithm, so you don't have to worry about sitting on the "wrong" side when you're in a different city on business and want to go to a game.

However, the home fans at Hiroshima Municipal Stadium go well into the visitor's side in the outfield. Is it because there are very few visitor team fans? Well, I would think that the Giants could draw a big fan base for the visitor's side, but they've still got but a single section wide for their oendan. No matter how few people they draw (they drew 6,000 last night against Yokohama at Hiroshima), the fan base is still overwhelmingly Carp fans. I've been to games at Yokohama Stadium against the Tigers, in years that the Tigers were in last, and the stands were pretty much 50/50. The Carp are the popular team in Hiroshima, unlike anywhere else. But their attendence is lower than all Pacific League teams this year, and lower than most PL teams in several previous seasons.

Daiei, on the other hand, has tremendous crowds coming out, and often. Even though they didn't win a pennant the past couple of seasons, they still had the best attendance in the Pacific League (I believe - need to verify), often surpassing several Central League teams. Even going back to when the Hawks were pretty weak, the Fukuoka fans came out and supported their team. How most people would definition popular would probably rank Daiei third, although I don't think that they'd necessarily be the third most popular team to all of Japan.

For recognition, Seibu would probably rank higher than Daiei throughout the country. The strong Lions' teams of the 1980s and '90s really put Seibu up there come October. And that's when most of the country would become aware of the Pacific League. (I like to think that things have changed a bit now.)

Before I started tracking attendence, I wouldn't have even considered putting Yokohama in this list, but they still draw over 20,000 on average, even over the past couple of dismal seasons. Looking at the standings and leaders page, you can see a pretty direct correlation between team performance and attendance (with the exception of the Giants). Yet, Yokohama ranks very much higher than the Carp who have a .500 winning percentage.

I suppose that a study to see how teams draw as visitors might help tell how teams do in non-local markets - thus giving us a better understanding of nation-wide popularity. If you're interested, I'll write up a script to generate that data for this year. If the above was the data you were looking for, then I hope it helped.

By the way, is this for a research paper of some kind? I sure wish someone would publish such a paper here for peer review before turning it in someday as I'm really interested in how all of these questions are being used.

I think the most popular team in Central League is the Giants, and in the Pacific League is Lions. Second most popular in Central League is the Tigers and in the Pacific League is the Buffalos.