New Sapporo Baseball Stadium

One of Japan’s professional baseball teams, the Nippon Ham Fighters, is thinking of building its own stadium in its home base of Sapporo, the largest city on the northern Japan island of Hokkaido.

Photo: facebook.com/npb.official

At present, the team uses Sapporo Dome as its home field, which is owned by the city of Sapporo and managed by a nonprofit organization. Every time they use the field, the Fighters have to pay 8 million yen a day ($72,000). In addition, if they attract more than 20,000 fans to a game, they have to pay 400 yen ($3.60) for every attendee over that number as a “service charge,” according to Kyodo News Service.

The team says it wants to “increase profitability” by building its own ballpark and “integrating management of the team and the stadium.” It adds that it is not interested in constructing a multipurpose stadium like the Sapporo Dome is. In other words, they don’t intend to compete with Sapporo Dome for high-end concerts and the like. Sapporo’s is one of five domed stadiums in Japan.

Daily Pulse