We Want to See a Major League Game in Japan

I'm afraid that the news is not very good for your plans.

For the past several seasons, the season has been scheduled to start the last weekend (or Friday) of March. In preparation for Opening Day, teams have generally had the week starting from the previous Monday off. Monday, March 24 is that Monday from which all the teams begin their final preparations without games. While the schedule for 2014 is not yet out, I have no reason to believe that the schedule would be any different.

What's more, unless Monday is a national holiday, Monday tends to act as the traditional day of rest for both leagues. There was one season when the Pacific League played Monday games and took Thursdays off. But it's been a very long time.

Costs, depending on the venue and seat, can cost between ¥1,000 for general admision (no reserved seats, and you may not get one) to ¥15,000 (field level seats) per person. Naturally, there's a wide range of prices in the middle.

Tickets can be purchased online, but you must be able to read Japanese. Furthermore, tickets go on sale 4 to 6 weeks before the actual game, so it's hard to prepare this far ahead of time.

Despite the bleak outlook, I hope this helps.

I would recommend JapanBallTickets for getting tickets in advance if you're not a Japanese speaker/reader (like me). I used them to get tickets for a couple open-sen (pre-season) games last March and it was pretty slick. The tickets showed up at my hotel a couple days before the first game. It's a little pricey ($60 service charge on top of the face value of the tickets) but given the issues I had trying to pantomime my way through buying a general admission ticket for an industrial league game at Jingu, I think it was well worth paying someone else to get the tickets for me.