NPB, Nippon Professional Baseball, is Japan's top professional baseball league, made up of 12 teams split evenly between the Central League and the Pacific League. It is widely regarded as the strongest baseball league outside MLB and crowns a single champion each year through the Japan Series.

NPB has 12 teams, six in the Central League and six in the Pacific League. The league has not expanded since 2005, when it last saw a franchise merger and a new team join the Pacific League.

NPB is overseen by a Commissioner, currently Sadayuki Sakakibara, who took office in December 2022. The Commissioner's Office works alongside the 12 team owners and the Japan Professional Baseball Players Association on league governance and labor matters.

Japanese professional baseball dates back to 1936, when the Japan Occupational Baseball League began play with seven teams. The league reorganized in 1950 into the two-league Central League and Pacific League structure that NPB still uses today.

The two leagues have operated under different rules for decades, most notably the designated hitter, which the Pacific League adopted in 1975 while the Central League kept pitchers batting. The Central League is scheduled to adopt the DH starting in 2027, unifying the rules across NPB for the first time since 1975.

No, NPB does not use a salary cap or a luxury tax system similar to MLB's Competitive Balance Tax. Team payrolls are set independently by each club's owning corporation, and spending gaps between big-market and small-market teams are generally wider than in MLB.

Most NPB franchises are owned outright by a major Japanese corporation, such as Yomiuri Shimbun for the Giants, SoftBank for the Hawks, and Rakuten for the Golden Eagles, and traditionally carry the parent company's name as part of the team name, a corporate ownership model quite different from MLB's more city-branded approach.

Baseball was introduced to Japan in the early 1870s, most famously through American educator Horace Wilson, and grew through school and university competition long before NPB's professional era began in 1936. That deep amateur and scholastic tradition, especially the national high school tournament known as Koshien, remains a major reason baseball is one of Japan's most popular sports today.

The Central League's six teams are the Yomiuri Giants, Hanshin Tigers, Chunichi Dragons, Tokyo Yakult Swallows, Yokohama DeNA BayStars, and Hiroshima Toyo Carp.

The Pacific League's six teams are the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks, Saitama Seibu Lions, Chiba Lotte Marines, Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, Orix Buffaloes, and Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters.

The rivalry between the Yomiuri Giants and Hanshin Tigers, known as the Kanto-Kansai or Tokyo-Osaka rivalry, is NPB's most storied matchup and one of the most intense rivalries in Japanese professional sports, comparable in cultural weight to a Yankees-Red Sox rivalry in MLB.

Since 2005, NPB has scheduled a dedicated interleague window, typically from late May through mid-June, in which every Central League team plays a set of games against every Pacific League team, adding up to 18 interleague games per team each season.

Yes. The most significant recent change came in 2004 and 2005, when the Osaka-based Kintetsu Buffaloes merged with the Orix BlueWave to form the Orix Buffaloes, and the newly created Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles took the vacated Pacific League spot, bringing NPB to its current 12-team, two-league structure.

Yes, each NPB team operates a farm team competing in either the Eastern League or Western League, Japan's equivalent of Minor League Baseball, where prospects develop and injured or demoted first-team players can get game action, a setup commonly referred to as ni-gun, or second-team, baseball.

Koshien most famously refers to the National High School Baseball Championship, a hugely popular amateur tournament held every summer at Hanshin Koshien Stadium, home of the Hanshin Tigers. It is organizationally separate from NPB, but it is widely seen as Japan's most important talent pipeline, having showcased future NPB and MLB stars including Shohei Ohtani, Daisuke Matsuzaka, and Yu Darvish.

NPB teams are concentrated in Japan's largest metro areas, especially Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, but the addition of the Rakuten Golden Eagles in Sendai in 2005 and the Nippon-Ham Fighters' move to Hokkaido in 2004 reflect a broader push to bring professional baseball to more regions of the country.

Each NPB team plays 143 regular-season games, noticeably fewer than MLB's 162, typically running from late March through early October ahead of the Climax Series and Japan Series.

NPB holds a two-game All-Star Series in mid-July, played at two different host ballparks rather than a single neutral site. The 2026 All-Star Series is scheduled for July 28 and 29.

Teams generally play in longer series, often three or six games at a time, with Monday traditionally serving as a leaguewide day off. An interleague window in late May through mid-June sees every team play a set of games against opponents from the other league.

The NPB Draft is typically held in late October, shortly after the end of the regular season, allowing newly drafted players to begin training with their new teams almost immediately.

Yes, Commissioner Sadayuki Sakakibara has said cutting average game time, historically around three hours, down toward two hours is a priority, so that evening games can finish in time for fans, including children, to get home by train.

The Pacific League has used the designated hitter since 1975, but the Central League has continued to have pitchers bat. The Central League is scheduled to adopt the DH starting in 2027, which will finally align the rules of both leagues for the first time in more than 50 years.

Yes. Regular-season games can go a maximum of 12 innings, and if the score is still level at that point, the game officially ends in a tie rather than continuing indefinitely. Ties are recorded as a distinct result in the standings, separate from wins and losses.

Each team may sign as many foreign players as it wants, but only four can be on the active roster for a given game, and no more than three of those four can be either pitchers or position players at the same time. Historically, NPB limited teams to just two or three foreign players total, a restriction known as gaijin waku, before the rules were loosened through the 1990s.

Yes, NPB uses a ball manufactured to different specifications than MLB's, generally considered slightly smaller with tighter, higher seams that can behave differently in flight, one of several equipment and playing-condition differences between the two leagues.

NPB began experimenting with time limits between pitches in official games before MLB introduced its own pitch clock in 2023, part of the same broader push to shorten games that Commissioner Sakakibara has continued to prioritize.

No, NPB professional games do not use a mercy rule and are played to their full length or innings limit regardless of the score. A run-rule is used in Japan's amateur and high school tournaments, including Koshien, but not in NPB itself.

The Climax Series is NPB's playoff format, introduced in 2007, in which the top three teams in the Central League and the top three in the Pacific League compete in two rounds, a First Stage and a Final Stage, to determine each league's representative in the Japan Series.

In the First Stage, the second- and third-place teams play a short series, and the winner advances to the Final Stage against the regular-season pennant winner, who starts with a one-game advantage as a reward for finishing first. The Final Stage winner becomes that league's Japan Series representative.

The Japan Series is NPB's championship series, played annually since 1950 between the Central League and Pacific League champions in a best-of-seven format, similar in structure to MLB's World Series.

The Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks won the 2025 Japan Series, defeating the Hanshin Tigers in five games for their 12th championship and first title since 2020.

Yes, though the threshold is higher than in the regular season. If a Japan Series game is still tied after 15 innings, it is called a tie and effectively replayed as part of the series.

In the first round, every team simultaneously names its top target; if only one team selects a given player, that team wins his rights outright, but if multiple teams select the same player, a lottery determines which team gets him. Later rounds proceed in a straightforward waiver-style order rather than by lottery.

Domestic players generally need around seven to eight years of first-team service time to qualify for domestic free agency within NPB, while a separate, earlier form of free agency lets players pursue opportunities overseas, most notably in MLB, after roughly nine years of NPB service.

The posting system is the formal process that lets an NPB player with enough service time move to MLB before reaching full free agency, subject to a release fee paid by the MLB club to the player's NPB team, calculated as a percentage of the player's guaranteed contract value.

Under the current agreement, the release fee is 20 percent of the first 25 million dollars of a player's guaranteed contract value, 17.5 percent of the next 25 million, and 15 percent of anything beyond 50 million dollars, with all 30 MLB clubs given a 45-day window to negotiate with the player once he is posted.

A player generally needs his club's consent to be posted unless he has accumulated nine years of NPB service time, at which point he can request the posting process himself. If no MLB deal is reached during the negotiating window, the player returns to his NPB team and cannot be posted again until the following offseason.

No, NPB salaries are generally far lower than MLB's. Even NPB's highest-paid stars typically earn a small fraction of what top MLB free agents command, which is part of why moving to MLB, often through the posting system, is so financially significant for star Japanese players.

Most NPB franchises are owned outright by a single Japanese corporation and carry that company's name as part of their branding, such as the Yomiuri Giants, Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks, and Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, reflecting a corporate ownership model rather than the more city-branded approach typical in MLB.

NPB has historically had less centralized revenue sharing than MLB, with teams relying heavily on their own ticket sales, local broadcasting arrangements, and merchandise, though the league and individual clubs have expanded shared national and international broadcasting deals in recent years.

NPB games are broadcast through a mix of national networks, regional over-the-air stations tied to each team's home market, and streaming platforms, with team-specific and league-wide broadcasting rights negotiated separately rather than through a single unified national deal like MLB's.

The Eiji Sawamura Award, created in 1947 and named for pitcher Eiji Sawamura, is given to NPB's outstanding starting pitcher of the year when a candidate meets the award committee's benchmarks, which include standards such as 15 wins, a 2.50 ERA, 10 complete games, and 200 innings pitched. It is not necessarily awarded every season if no pitcher meets the criteria.

NPB presents a Most Valuable Player award in each league, the Central League and the Pacific League, typically, though not always, going to a standout player from that league's pennant-winning team.

The Best Nine Award recognizes the top offensive performer at each of the nine positions in both the Central League and Pacific League every season, based on a media vote.

The Mitsui Golden Glove Award is NPB's equivalent of MLB's Gold Glove, honoring the best defensive player at each position in both leagues, chosen through a vote of journalists with several years of experience covering Japanese professional baseball.

NPB names one Rookie of the Year in the Central League and one in the Pacific League each season, an award that has been presented since the league's founding in 1950.

Sadaharu Oh hit 868 home runs for the Yomiuri Giants between 1959 and 1980, a total that remains the highest career home run mark of any major professional baseball league worldwide, more than 100 ahead of MLB's career leader, Barry Bonds.

Wladimir Balentien hit 60 home runs for the Tokyo Yakult Swallows in 2013, breaking a long-standing record of 55 shared by Sadaharu Oh, Tuffy Rhodes, and Alex Cabrera.

The Yomiuri Giants have won the Japan Series a record 22 times, including nine consecutive championships from 1965 through 1973 behind Sadaharu Oh, making them by far NPB's most decorated franchise.

NPB has seen 17 perfect games by international standards, most recently by Roki Sasaki of the Chiba Lotte Marines on April 10, 2022, the first in Japan's top league since 1994. Sasaki's outing also set an NPB record with 13 consecutive strikeouts and tied the NPB single-game record with 19 strikeouts overall.

Ichiro Suzuki, Hideki Matsui, Yu Darvish, Masahiro Tanaka, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Roki Sasaki, and Shohei Ohtani are among the most notable players to move from NPB to MLB, several of them through the posting system, going on to become MLB All-Stars and, in multiple cases, MVPs.

Not exactly. NPB plays a shorter 143-game regular season, uses a different baseball, and has evolved through different competitive eras than MLB, so while NPB records like Sadaharu Oh's 868 home runs are widely celebrated, they are generally treated as remarkable achievements within their own context rather than directly interchangeable with MLB records.

Japan's national team, known as Samurai Japan, is built heavily around NPB players and has won the World Baseball Classic three times, making Japan the most successful national program in the event's history.

Yes, several international streaming services carry NPB games for overseas audiences, and NPB has discussed staging official league games outside Japan for the first time as part of its push to grow the sport's global following.

NPB is generally considered the strongest professional baseball league outside MLB, and a steady stream of NPB stars have successfully transitioned to MLB, though talent evaluators generally still rate MLB as the higher overall level of competition.

NPB and MLB clubs do not face each other in official league competition, but MLB teams have historically toured Japan for exhibition games, and Japanese and North American players regularly compete against one another at events like the World Baseball Classic.

Oendan are organized fan cheering sections found at NPB games, using trumpets, drums, coordinated chants, and individual songs for nearly every player, creating a louder, more continuously choreographed atmosphere throughout the game than is typical at MLB ballparks.