Selling the Hankyu Braves and leaving professional baseball (1988)

What it means to fold up a billboard

For Hankyu the club was, before it was a line in the accounts, the reason to carry people out along the line — and had been since Nishinomiya Stadium opened in 1937. That seven of the fifteen clubs belonged to railways when the two-league system began in 1950 shows how the private railways of that era treated a baseball team: as a species of capital investment. As postwar leisure options multiplied, its power to pull people to the line faded. Letting go meant setting down that premise as well.

Yet one can call this tidying-up correct only with hindsight. The company went on holding the Nishinomiya ground after selling the club, and it took another fourteen years before Hankyu Nishinomiya Stadium closed. Takarazuka Family Land would not close until 2003. Neither the order nor the pace of the disposals looks to have been foreseen in 1988. The character of management in this period shows less in whether the sale was right than in the fact that the line between what to keep and what to fold was being redrawn, again and again.