Yomiuri Shimbun, Sapporo

By Shuko Tsuji

May 21, 2018 – Ever since the recent announcement that baseball is coming to the north, the city of Sapporo has been alive with excitement.  This was never more apparent than today, when  Hoso Kyokai Jr. was met by over 300,000 cheering fans at the old Sapporo Racecourse.  As the owner of the Kawaguchi Transmitters stepped on his golden shovel, plunging it deep into the earth here in the racetrack infield, the crowd erupted into an applause.  The Transmitters  are in the middle of a road trip, and were not able to attend the groundbreaking ceremony, but both GM Daniel Diemer and the LRS’s top prospect, Kensaku Gato were able to attend the ceremony. 

After speaking with several crowd members, it is easy to conclude that this will be a wonderful change for both the Transmitters and the entire Hokkaido Prefecture.  While Sapporo is known for its’ famous snow festival, there is little else in the area to keep people entertained, other than to drink beer, or so it seems.  “This is perfect” says Tetsuhiko Sugai, “now during summer nights we not only go drink, but we go to ballpark and drink!”.  Sugai, who traveled from nearby Ishikari with a bunch of his co-workers, says they are all already on the season ticket waiting list for the new stadium.  Another fan, Yakumo Ozawa, just likes the baseball unity it will bring to the prefecture.  “Most of the people up here are divided in what is their favorite baseball team, it causes a many bar-fights, arguing over which game to watch.  The fact that having a stadium in our backyard that we can all either drive or take public transit to will hopefully sway us all to like only one team.”  When pressed further, Ozawa did admit that like most of the baseball fans up here, he was more of an Akira fan, but he is already starting to follow the Transmitters more this season.   About half of the fans we spoke with were Neo-Tokyo fans, with the other half being split between Lupin and Kawaguchi.

The team has yet to unveil the new logo and uniforms for the Brewmasters, likely to try and capture more fan interest with the suspense.  While they did originally hint that the logo may look something similar to the Sapporo Beer star shaped logo, there is still no word on what the uniform will look like, but the fans do not care.  There was a rumor that an all brown uniform was proposed in a fan interest survey, but it did not return popular results.  When asked about the questionable uniform, one fan, whom we decided to leave unnamed said, “They could all be dressed up to look like crap on a stick and we would still come out to watch them play, it is just great to have a baseball team in Sapporo.”  No matter what color the organization decides on, it is easy to say that it will indeed be much better for baseball in Japan, when Sapporo gets their Brewmasters.