Three senior teams and one boys team from Kawasaki City belong to the “Kawasaki Baseball Council”
Protect the place where children can play baseball to the fullest. Common thoughts crossed the boundaries of the league. A team of seniors and boys in junior high school baseball, who usually work separately and have no interaction, belong to the same council in Kawasaki City, Kanagawa Prefecture. Parents of children who play in different leagues work together to improve the ground and open a baseball class together.
There is a valuable baseball field in the metropolitan area on the riverbed in Nakahara Ward, Kawasaki City. “Kawasaki City Tamagawa Marukobashi Baseball Field” owned by Kawasaki City and managed and operated by the Kawasaki Baseball Council. The semi-governmental and semi-private sector is an unusual initiative, but when talking about the situation of baseball in Kawasaki City, there is another characteristic that is rare nationwide. Seniors and boys are working together. Ryuhei Nakajima, Executive Secretary of the Kawasaki Rigid Baseball Council, said, “I don’t think there is a place where seniors and boys from different leagues in other areas such as the Tokyo metropolitan area and Kansai are holding hands and cooperating together as much as Kawasaki. It’s revolutionary for those who know it. “
Seniors and boys are the same junior high school baseball players, but there is a difference in their history. For seniors mainly in the Kanto region, the boys that originated in Osaka have spread from Kansai to Kanto. Since the leagues are separate, there is generally little interaction. If there are senior and boys teams in the same area, they may compete with each other, and there are many areas where the relationship is not good.
Originally, there was no interaction between Kawasaki City’s seniors and boys. However, there was a common sense of crisis about the worries that Kawasaki City had few places to practice and the situation where children who wanted to play baseball were flowing out to Tokyo and Yokohama. Therefore, in 2011, a team of working adults, three senior junior high school students, and two boys teams (currently one team) in Kawasaki City launched the Kawasaki Maruko Bridge Baseball Stadium, which manages and operates the Tamagawa Maruko Bridge Baseball Stadium. We decided to work together to develop local baseball.
