Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters

Team history

Senators and Tokyo eras

In 1946, Saburo Yokozawa, manager of the Tokyo Senators in 1936–1937 (and later a prominent umpire), looked to revive the franchise and soon founded the new Senators. He assembled a team of ready and able players like Hiroshi Oshita, Shigeya Iijima and Giichiro Shiraki, but as a newly formed team the Senators faced strict fiscal management and resorted to using hand-me-down uniforms from the Hankyu Railway's pre-war team (who would eventually become the modern-day Orix Buffaloes). Former Japanese statesman Kinkazu Saionji, grandson of the influential Kinmochi Saionji, became the team's owner, and Noboru Oride, borrowing heavily from a Ginza cabaret proprietor, became the team's sponsor. Eventually, trapped by a lack of funds, Yokozawa was forced to resign as the team's manager.

For a time, the team was even mockingly nicknamed "Seito" (Bluestockings) after a Japanese feminist magazine of the same name. As the Yomiuri Giants' pet name was "Kyojin", baseball personality Soutaro Suzuki thought that other teams should also have pet names like the Giants, and names such as the Osaka Tigers' alias "Mouko" (fierce tiger), the Senators' "Seito" and the Pacific's "Taihei" (tranquility) began to be used by the press. However, the other teams rejected the use of these pet names, so they were not fully adopted.

On January 7, 1947, the team was sold to the Tokyu Corporation. The Tokyu baseball club was inaugurated into the league, and the team's name became the Tokyu Flyers. At that time Tokyu dominated the Japanese transportation sector, owning several other railway companies, although it was faced with troubles and the possibility of a breakup. Tokyu purchased the team to act as a banner of solidarity for the swelling company, and managing director Hiroshi Okawa assumed ownership of the club. The newly born Flyers, with Hiroshi Oshita becoming one of the most popular players in the league, began to attract many fans, but the team's administration still went into a deficit.

With the formation of the National Baseball League drawing nearer, in 1948 the not-yet-affiliated Daiei club, which had played a few exhibition games against the Otsuka Athletics, joined with Tokyu to create the Kyuei Flyers ("Kyuei" being a portmanteau of the two companies' names). However, Daiei decided to purchase a separate team, the Kinsei Stars, and after only one year the Flyers reverted to their former name.

Toei and Nittaku eras

On February 1, 1954, Tokyu entrusted the management of the Flyers to the Toei Company, of which Okawa had newly become president. Toei transferred control of the club to a subsidiary company, Toei Kogyo (industrial enterprise). The team's name was changed to the Toei Flyers, and its legal name consequently became the Toei Flyers Baseball Club. This name stuck for nineteen years.

In 1961, when Yomiuri Giants manager Shigeru Mizuhara resigned from his position, Okawa attempted to woo him to join his team, bringing him to a bar in Kyoto and calling famous movie producer Koji Shundo to meet with them. Shundo, an old drinking buddy of Mizuhara's, convinced the four-time Japan Series champion manager to join the Flyers, and he solidified a strong relationship with Okawa and Toei Studios.

Komazawa Stadium was to be torn down to make way for the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics, so in 1962 the Flyers moved their base of operations to Meiji Jingu Stadium in Shinjuku. (At that time, college baseball teams had priority at Meiji Jingu, so during weekends or other times when school games were being played the Flyers had to use Korakuen or another field for their games.) In the same year, two star aces, Masayuki Dobashi and Yukio Ozaki, blossomed under Mizuhara's coaching and the Flyers captured their first league championship. They would go on to defy odds in the Japan Series and defeat the Hanshin Tigers for their first Japan Series title. This championship would be their only one in the Toei era. The Kokutetsu Swallows jointly occupied Meiji Jingu with the Flyers the following season, and in 1964 the Flyers went back to their old home, Korakuen, also home of the Yomiuri Giants; both the Fighters and Giants would share a home for the next 39 years.

The Flyers assembled a group of powerful sluggers over the next few years—among them: Isao Harimoto, Katsuo Osugi, Inchon Bek, and Shoichi Busujima—but on top of a declining movie industry and the "Black Mist" match-fixing scandal that rocked the professional baseball world in 1970 (after which Flyers ace Toshiaki Moriyasu was banned from the game for life), in 1971 Flyers owner Okawa died suddenly. Shigeru Okada, who did not view Okawa favorably, took over Toei after his death. Together with Noboru Goto, company president of Tokyu and loyal friend of Okada (and one who also thought unfavorably of Okawa), Okada let go of the unprofitable team.

Nippon-Ham era

On November 19, 1973, meatpacking company Nippon Ham purchased the team, led by owner Yoshinori Okoso. Okoso had bought the team as he was willing to bring them back to prominence when essentially no one wanted them. He loved them to death, so much so that he never held any company meetings when the team was playing, and if where he was at, they were not on TV or radio, he would dispatch employees to go to that game and update him via payphone. The club's name was changed to the Nippon-Ham Fighters, its official name became the Nippon-Ham Baseball Corporation. Osamu Mihara became the team president and Futoshi Nakanishi, Mihara's son-in-law, as its manager. After 27 years, the "Flyers" nickname was abandoned. The "Fighters" nickname was born from a public appeal by the team's management. A female high school student from Okayama prefecture submitted the winning name, giving the reasoning that "(former Fighters player) Katsuo Osugi has guts, so he's a fighter." Osugi would be traded to the Yakult Swallows soon after the Fighters were rechristened. The same would be for Zainichi Korean Isao Harimoto, as Nakanishi hated Harimoto for challenging his authority, going nearly as far as trying to release him. This was also because Harimoto was upset that the FIghters sent away Osugi, and that he was the only reason he stuck around. In fact, when the then-Flyers attempted to trade Osugi to the Hanshin Tigers for Yutaka Enatsu (who the Fighters would ironically get later), Harimoto went to the front office and demanded they immediately cancel the trade. However, Okoso did not want to let him go, as Nippon-Ham had a major presence in South Korea, and it did wonders for sales having one of the greatest Koreans play for them, and having traded their other Korean player, Baek In-chun, to the Taiheyo Club Lions in 1974, Okoso was worried Nippon-Ham would completely lose their presence in South Korea. Mihara, however, persisted, and they nearly sent him to the Hanshin Tigers, before the Yomiuri Giants made a convincing last-minute deal to send him there instead.

Over the four seasons between 1974 and 1977, the Fighters dwelled at the bottom of the Pacific League, but after improving to finishing in third place for three straight years between 1978 and 1980, manager Keiji Osawa finally led the Fighters to their second Pacific League pennant in 1981. With saves leader Yutaka Enatsu and starter Shigekuni Mashiba (who went 15–0 over the season) forming the heart of the pitching staff, the Fighters shined with offensive sluggers Tony Solaita, Junichi Kashiwabara, and Tommy Cruz. The team that year also featured various important players of smaller stature, like Makoto Shimada and Nobuhiro Takashiro. They would go on to play the Yomiuri Giants in the Japan Series, where the Fighters lost in six games.

Hokkaido Nippon-Ham era

Prior to the 2002 season, the idea of moving the Fighters to Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaidō and Japan's fifth largest city, emerged. The Seibu Lions also had preliminary plans to move to the northern metropolis. Tokyo's Fighters fans voiced their opposition to the proposed relocation (though the franchise never drew as many fans as their co-habitual counterparts, the Giants, while playing in the capital), but it was eventually announced that the team would indeed call the Sapporo Dome its new home beginning in 2004. Aiming to build a grassroots relationship with its future fans, the team decided to change its name to the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters.

At first, with the unhappy Seibu Lions suddenly changing their approval vote, Giants owner Tsuneo Watanabe and Seibu owner Yoshiaki Tsutsumi voiced their concerns over the move. They believed that Nippon Ham's choice to move the team would spur a decentralization in Japanese professional baseball, and they threatened that a decrease in the number of teams in the Kantō and Kansai regions should merit a one-league system instead of two. As a matter of fact, the question of reorganizing baseball's league structure eventually became a bigger issue than the sale and renaming of the Kintetsu Buffaloes. The issue eventually settled down, though, and the Fighters' relocation was eventually approved by the league. The response from the people of Hokkaidō was weak, but NPB fans welcomed the move, noting that the Fighters could now be free from the Tokyo Dome's high rent and perpetual second-billing to the Giants. Out of respect for the Tokyo-based Fighters fans, the team decided to schedule a few "home" games per season at the Tokyo Dome.

After the move finally was complete in 2004, the Fighters signed former Tigers superstar Tsuyoshi Shinjo, who came back to NPB from MLB after playing with the New York Mets and nearly winning a World Series title with the San Francisco Giants, and a revitalized Fernando Seguignol. American manager Trey Hillman led the team to success in his second year on the job, and, at the end of the season, the Fighters were in a fierce race with the Chiba Lotte Marines for the final spot in the new P.L. playoff system. With a vital win over the Orix BlueWave on September 24, the newly moved Fighters earned a trip to the postseason, advancing to play Seibu in a three-game series. Though they put up a strong effort against Seibu ace Daisuke Matsuzaka, the Fighters lost the first game of the series 6–5. They took Game 2 by a score of 5–4. In the decisive third game, the Fighters fought back in the ninth inning after trailing for the whole game but ultimately fell to a Kazuhiro Wada walk-off home run, losing 6–5. The Fighters would have to wait for another chance for the P.L. pennant.

The Fox Dance

The Fox Dance is a tradition of the Fighters to do during the middle of innings, in which they encouraged fans, alongside cheerleaders, to dance similarly to the moves of a fox, set to the Ylvis song "The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?)", which began in May 2022. The origins of this tradition came from Fighters staff member and former Fighters Girl member Sari Ogure, who watched the music video 2 years prior. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic disallowing any cheering or singing at games, she wanted to make a choreographed dance that would be simple for anyone to memorize, especially children. She had planned to propose this dance, but waited until it was right for her to do so, which came at the hiring of Tsuyoshi Shinjo as manager, after then manager Hideki Kuriyama left the team to become the manager of Samurai Japan.

The dance was introduced in a game against the Saitama Seibu Lions, and while it was not a hit right out of the gate, the dance began to majorly gain traction after Pacific League TV (Pacific League's centralized streaming service) and the Fighters posted the dance on their YouTube channels. The dance, from then on out, became a major hit at Fighters games, and despite the team struggling in 2022, it became an entertaining part of games. It became so popular that on September 19, 2022, Ylvis went to Japan and performed the song live prior to a game against the Chiba Lotte Marines.

The dance's success led to the term "fox dance" to be ranked 3rd in the New Word/Buzzword Contest in 2022, a contest about new words/terms that were popular in Japan in a particular year, behind Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine (in honor of the attacks of Russia to Ukraine in 2022) and Murakami-sama (after Tokyo Yakult Swallows player Munetaka Murakami's 2022 season, where he broke Sadaharu Oh's single season home run record for Japanese born players), with the ceremony being attended by Ogure herself, Fighters Girl members, and mascot Frep the Fox, the main idea sake of the dance itself. Fighters Girl members, alongside Japanese idol group Hinatazaka46, performed the song during the Kohaku Uta Gassen annual concert on New Year's Eve on December 31, 2022.

Notable names that done the dance with Fighters Girl include actress and former Takarazuka Revue member Sei Matobu, Japanese idol group Nogizaka46 member Saya Kanagawa, and Fox Sports analyst and brother of MLB pitcher Justin Verlander, Ben Verlander, amongst other people, including opposing team's cheerleading squads.

Dschinghis Khan Dance

Another dance tradition the Fighters have was introduced in 2023, coinciding with their move to Es Con Field Hokkaido, also following the success of The Fox Dance, named the Dschinghis Khan dance. Similar to The Fox Dance, fans, alongside cheerleaders would dance, this time with a tambourine shaped like a pot from the era of Genghis Khan, which can also relate to the local cuisine of Hokkaido. The song that accompanies it is a Japanese cover by Fighters Girl of the song of the same name by the eponymous disco group from Germany. The dance was also upgraded on 29 April to coincide with the beginning of Golden Week in Japan, adding sheep ear headbands to the cheerleaders.

Players

Retired numbers

100 Yoshinori Ohkoso (Former chairman)

Honoured numbers

86 Keiji Ohsawa (Former manager)

11 Yu Darvish

11 Shohei Ohtani

Former Fighters in MLB

Active:

Yu Darvish (2012—present)

Shohei Ohtani (2018—present)

Chris Martin (2018–present)

Nick Martinez (2022–present)

Retired:

Masanori Murakami (1964–1965)

Tim McIntosh (1996)

Masao Kida (1999–2005)

Tsuyoshi Shinjo (2001–2003)

Takahito Nomura (2002)

Hideki Okajima (2007–2011, 2013)

Brandon Knight (2008)

Andy Green (2009)

Mitch Jones (2009)

Erick Almonte (2011)

Yoshinori Tateyama (2011–2012)

Buddy Carlyle (2011, 2014–15)

Luis Jiménez (2012)

Kensuke Tanaka (2013)

Anthony Bass (2017—2023)

Kohei Arihara (2021–2022)

Robbie Erlin (2022)

Naoyuki Uwasawa (2024)

Managers

Statistics current through the end of the 2025 season.

Mascots

Bear mascot (official name unknown): Only appeared on uniforms from 1949–1950.

Boy wearing a hat (official name unknown): Only appeared on printed materials from 1972–1973.

Hercules shooting a bow (official name unknown): Appeared in the logo until 1981.

Boy wearing a uniform (official name unknown): Appeared in the logo from 1982–1987.

Görotan (ギョロタン) (retired): a large red fuzzy creature with long feathered hair that served as mascot from 1980 to 1987. He is based on the sun. He often rode on a bicycle, but in later years he rode on a scooter. He was the first costumed mascot in the Pacific League. In 2014, he returned in the Legend Series along with Fighty, and they have appeared at every Legend Series since.

Fight-kun (ファイトくん) (retired): a winged warrior with a bat and a helmet who first appeared in 1988 as a replacement for Görotan. Appeared as a logo and as a costume.

Armored warrior (official name unknown): Appeared in the logo from 1993–2003.

Fighty (ファイティー) (retired): a bright pink pterodactyl whose head resembled a giant leg of ham and who sometimes rode a bicycle around the field. He appeared from 1993–2005. On August 17, 2005, Fighty was retired, despite the (unsuccessful) "Save Fighty" campaign, when the Fighters moved to Hokkaidō. In 2014, he returned in the Legend Series along with Görotan, and they have appeared at every Legend Series since.

B·B (Brisky the Bear) (ブリスキー・ザ・ベアー): a black bear with a black mohawk on his head. Although his full name is Brisky, he prefers to be called B·B. On Sundays, the mohawk is orange, and sometimes the mohawk is white. In 212 Story locations, his mohawk is pink. He first appeared in 2004, as the successor to Fighty. When B·B was first introduced, his appearance was criticized by some of the Fighters' supporters for being too Americanized. On the Fighters official website, B·B has his own photo gallery and column. The costume was updated in 2005 because the original costume was becoming damaged and it was difficult to perform in. On April 5, 2006, B·B injured his left foot during a match at the Tokyo Dome and was diagnosed with a serious injury of 3 months. He appeared with a crutch the next day, and returned on July 4, 2006. B·B was also the mascot of Nippon Ham from 2004–2017. He has his own section on the website called B·B Diary. In 2019, he launched a blog, which was called B·B The Home. As of 2022, he has barely appeared in any more games, and is primarily now going around different communities in Hokkaido.

Minor League team

The Fighters farm team plays in the Eastern League. The team was founded in 1948.The farm is in Chiba Prefecture, not Hokkaido.