Sports Investing Information – American Baseball vs Japanese Baseball

1) Amount of games played in a season: In American baseball (MLB) there are 162 games played in a season compared to 144 games in the Japanese Central and Pacific leagues.

2) Corporations who have interests outside baseball own the teams. Historically speaking teams, teams have been identified with their owners, not where the team is actually based. However, in saying that in recent years, many owners have chosen to include a place-name in the name of their teams, 12 of the NPB teams are currently named with both corporate and place names. Manuha Corporation has taken this one step farther by completely dropping its name from its NPB team, the Yokohama Bay Stars.

3) The rules are essentially those of Major League Baseball.

4) In the Nippon league, TIE games are allowed and technical elements are  a little different: 1) A Japanese baseball is slightly smaller and wound more tightly than an American baseball and is harder. 2) The strike zone is narrower "inside" than away from the batter. 3) There are also 5 Nippon league teams that have "undersized" home fields (as compared to the 1958 MLB rule of 325/400/325 with slight allowances for the height of the fence). A team can have more than four foreign players, limiting the cost and competition for expensive players of other nationalities, similar to the rules in many European sports league's roster limits on non-European players.

5) The other very big difference between NPB and MLB is that there are "hard" limits to game lengths. During the regular season, the limit is twelve innings, while in the playoffs there is a fifteen- innings limit. The reason for this is to prevent spectators from missing the last train home. During the 2011 NPB season, due to concerns over power limits put into place because of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, once the first pitch has been thrown, once  three hours and thirty minutes have  passed after the first pitch, that innings will be the last innings of the game.

Teams with the best winning percentage go on to the bowling step ladder-format playoffs (3 vs 2, winner vs 1). Occasionally, a team with more total wins has lost to a team that had more  ties and fewer losses and, therefore, had a slightly better winning percentage.

Whereas, in the MLB, there is a very strong bias against allowing any ties at all. Since the introduction of stadium lighting, which allowed the games to be continued after dark, tie games have become basically non- existent. I f a situation arises in which the game cannot be continued on that day, for example due to inclement weather, and the game is tied at that point in time, the game is suspended to be resumed at a later point. It will then be played out until there is a clear winner.

The only recorded tie in recent MLB history was in the very highly controversial 2002 "All Star Game", a game which did not count towards the standings of any team at all, nor towards the statistics of any  of the players. However, teams with lesser winning percentage do frequently make the playoffs over more successful teams due to the structure of the divisions.

6)  The Japanese Pacific league uses the "designated hitter"  whereas in the Central league the designated hitter is not used. Whereas in the MLB the National League does not use the (DH).

Basically, the above are the main differences between baseball in the USA and baseball in "The Land of The Rising Sun".

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