Tōkyō Yakult Swallows
The Tōkyō Yakult Swallows ( Japanese 東京 ヤ ク ル ト ス ワ ロ ー ズ , Tōkyō Yakuruto Suwarōzu ) are a Japanese professional baseball team. You play in the Central League and have so far won the Nihon Series five times . The Swallows are based in Tokyo and play their home games in the Meiji Jingū Stadium .
The owner and namesake of the Swallows is the food, pharmaceutical and cosmetics company Yakult . The team's manager and coach ( kantoku ) has been the former Giants outfielder Shigeru Takada since 2008 .
history
The Swallows were founded in 1950 as Kokutetsu Swallows by the State Railways ( Kokutetsu ) . In the first few years they were among the weaker teams in the league, only in 1961 they achieved more wins than defeats with a win rate of 0.527. The best player of these years was the pitcher Masaichi Kaneda (nickname Kaneda-Tennō ), who won the Sawamura Award for best pitcher three times and was later inducted into the Hall of Fame . He left the Swallows at the end of the 1964 season.
In 1965 the team was sold to the Sankei Shimbun and was called Sankei Atoms from 1966 - the 1965 season was still played as Sankei Swallows : as sixth (last) in the Central League , the team was 45.5 games behind the first (44 wins, 91 losses , 5 draws). The team also played in the lower half of the table in the following years.
In 1970 Yakult bought the Atoms: With a win rate of 0.264 (33 S - 92 N - 5 U) they reached the lowest point in team history in their first season as Yakult Atoms . However, in the 1970s - from 1974 onwards as Yakult Swallows - a strong team was built around Hiromi Matsuoka (pitcher) and Tsutomu Wakamatsu (outfielder). Under manager Tatsurō Hirooka (1977-79) she won her first league title in 1978 and then won the Nihon Series against the Orix Buffaloes . That year she was named the Professional Team of the Year .
Although the dominance of record champions and local rivals Yomiuri Giants waned in the 1980s, the Swallows failed to match the success of 1978. You finished last four times and never came in the top three. Only with manager Katsuya Nomura (1990-98) did long-term successes emerge: The Swallows took first place four times and won the championship in the Nihon Series three times (1993, 1995 and 1997) . Outstanding players of these years were the first baseman Tom O'Malley and the pitchers Masato Yoshii and Atsuya Furuta .
The Swallows won their last championship in 2001 against the Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes . 2006 the place name Tōkyō was prefixed to the name. In the 2007 season, the Swallows were 84 defeats for the first time since 1986 last in the Central League .
Since their inception in 1950, the Swallows have achieved a win rate of 0.466 with 3,456 wins, 3,961 losses and 253 draws.
Stadion
The home stadium of the Swallows has been the Meiji Jingū Stadium since 1964 . The stadium was built in 1926, making it the second oldest professional baseball stadium in Japan that is still in use after the Koshien . It has been rebuilt several times, most recently in 2007/08, and currently offers space for around 36,000 spectators. Until 1963, the Swallows played in the Kōrakuen Stadium .
mascot
Tsubakurō ( つ ば 九郎 ) is the best-known mascot of the Japanese professional baseball team Tōkyō Yakult Swallows . The character Tsubakurō was presented on April 9, 1994. In 2008, Tsubakurō was the first mascot of a Japanese professional baseball team to have played 1,000 consecutive baseball games. On June 27, 2015, he achieved participation in 1,500 baseball games. Its appearance is based on that of a swallow ( tsubakuro ). Other similar-looking mascots are Tsubami ( つ ば み ), who differ in their skirt, and Entarō ( 燕太郎 ), who does not have a swallowtail.
Web links
- Official Website (Japanese)
- Historical tempo statistics at npb.or.jp (Japanese)
- Meiji Jingū Stadium website (Japanese)
- Team history Home in Yakult Swallows Fansite Plate (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Tsubakurou official blog (Japanese)
- ↑ Tsubakurou on the club website of Tōkyō Yakult Swallows ( Memento of the original from April 4, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
