Tokyo Giants?

They're more commonly known as either the Yomiuri Giants or Kyojin. They're still around, and still in Tokyo.

Yomiuri is the name of the controlling company, a newspaper and media conglomerate. It was Yomiuri that sponsored the 1934 U.S. tour of Japan let by Babe Ruth. It was Yomiuri who sponsored the Dai Nippon Tokyo Yakyu Club to tour the U.S. in 1935 (renamed the Tokyo Giants at the suggestion of tour promoter Lefty O'Doul, after the popular National League team from New York). The name was translated to Japanese as the Tokyo Kyojin when they returned to Japan and joined several new professional team to start what eventually became the current Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) league. In 1947 the team name was changed to the Yomiuri Giants, to which it has been to this day.

That should be enough key words to Google around and run through Wikipedia for a while.

Thank you Commish, for your speedy reply.

I still feel foolish for not realizing that they are now known by their corporate name, not by the city they play in. Dumb.

Since you know Japanese baseball, and I am a Mariners fan, can you tell me what team Ichiro played for in Japan? (Yes, I could look that up myself, but you are an expert at Japanese baseball.)

Also, which team did Kenchi Johjima play for? Since these are are two or three of the Mariner's TOP player's, I would be interested in finding out about their success in Japanese baseball.

I do have a few mixed feelings about the Japanese league's limit on foreign players. If MLB did the same, perhaps Ichiro and Kenchi would never be given the chance to play in the United States.

Again, thank you for answering my (dumb) question so quickly, and any info you can give me about the Mariner's Japanese players (about their time in Japan) would be helpful.

Ah, the best way to learn about former players is to check out their own pages. I'm afraid that I'm one who prefers to teach people how to find answers rather than give them to them, so click on "Players" at the top of the page and go down the list to "Suzuki, Ichiro" and "Johjima, Kenji." While they played for the Orix BlueWave and Fukuoka Daiei Hawks respectively, neither team goes by the same name now. Again, Google and Wikipedia are your friends to learn more.

As for the foreign player limit, enter "foreign player limit" (without the quotes) in the search box at the bottom of this page and you'll find a wealth of information and discussion about it. And before condemning the practice of limiting foreign players based on the norms in the U.S., you might want to track down a study done in Taiwan where, with no foreign limits and teams filled primarily of foreign players, the fans let their feelings be known in the All Star vote, where zero foreigners were voted in while some Taiwanese who had never played in a single top level game were. Know your audience. (I'm not saying that I support one side or the other of the argument, but that it's a complex problem - and it really belongs on a separate thread.)

Nonetheless, there's a lot of information here. (The forums have been running since 2001, and I imported some of the material I'd written as far back as 1995.) Player pages and team pages are in a bit of disarray due to upgrading part of the site and it having an adverse effect on the rest.

Hope this helps you to better help yourself.

- Hope this helps you to better help yourself.

Yup.... Err, thanks.