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The story
A post by Kohei Morimoto, a former captain of Chiben Wakayama, explaining “why almost nobody quits the baseball team” went viral on X (formerly Twitter). On 5ch, users debated the team’s selective entry process—given that it fields only around 40 players a year while most Koshien regulars carry rosters of about 100—compared it to the old PL Gakuen powerhouse, and discussed how well its graduates have actually fared in professional baseball.
At the summer Koshien tournament, Chiben Wakayama (Wakayama) won a hard-fought battle against Kenei Takasaki (Gunma) to claim its fourth championship, tying for sixth-most all-time.
While many Koshien regulars carry rosters of around 100 players, Chiben Wakayama’s team hovers at roughly 40 each year. They put in some of the heaviest training loads in the country, yet almost all of the players stick it out for all three years.
Kohei Morimoto, who served as Chiben Wakayama’s team captain in 2004, laid out his own firsthand explanation in an X post titled “Why Almost Nobody Quits the Chiben Wakayama Baseball Team.”
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Isn't it an annual tradition there to make them run all the way home from Kenei-Omiya Station to Urawa-Misono and force every third-year to retire?
That's probably part of it, but maybe they're also screening for personality, like Aoyama Gakuin University's ekiden (relay marathon) team…
Can junior high kids even be judged on that…
Then again, they're already filtered through kindergarten entrance exams, so maybe it's possible.
That's exactly why Chiben Wakayama players can't hack it once they turn pro—or once they're out in the real world.
Yeah, their pro batting averages are pretty rough, come to think of it.
Do pros even do chores?
Does doing chores somehow improve your baseball skills? (lol)
PL's rate of turning players into successful pros is insane.
PL was also a small, elite squad, you know.
That said, while they're strong at Koshien, not that many of their players actually go on to succeed as pros.
Nishikawa of the Nippon-Ham Fighters—3-time stolen base champion, batted over .300 twice.
You say "small," but most teams still have around 80 players. Chiben only takes about 10 per grade, so in a good way, they're not even planning around anyone quitting.
They're not even good, but they're constantly heading off on away trips.
No one wants to come play them, so they have no choice but to travel themselves.
Maybe they're also raking in kickbacks from the bus company.
Just playing a bad video game for a little while is annoying enough—now imagine being locked into a "bad game" for two straight years, every single day. Of course the stress piles up.
And then in year three, it's not even that the environment finally becomes about playing real baseball—it's the joy of the seniors being gone so now they get to do the bullying.
20 players per grade is really the limit.
Maybe 25 if you're being generous.
Any bottom-tier baseball-factory private school carrying more than that shouldn't even bother showing up at Koshien.
don't you have to join the religion to go there?
Almost none of the students are actually followers of Bentenshu (the school's affiliated Buddhist sect), lol.
Kids go there for the academics, or because it's the kind of school doctors' kids attend.
Both Okamoto and Murakami are from Chiben Nara, not Chiben Wakayama.
They're packed into dorms with a ridiculous number of teammates, right?
Kind of gross when you think about it.
Having the coach do the grunt work instead seems backwards.
You occasionally see companies where the president personally takes the lead on weeding the yard or cleaning the toilets,
but those companies usually end up going nowhere and failing.
You can just tell Chiben Wakayama's players are built differently—thicker frames than any other school.
That physique is clearly the source of their fearsome power hitting.
They must place huge emphasis on diet and training to bulk up like that.
Pretty sure the one getting yelled at was the catcher, Azuma.
Same with comedians and their senpai-kohai (senior-junior) hierarchy—it's brutal too.
Respect is fine, but this goes way too far; it's just outdated at this point.
They just want to act important.
If they don't, they're afraid of being disrespected.
High-pride types who can't stand being looked down on.
Coordination? That (coordination drills) is probably necessary though.
Background and Key Points
Chiben Wakayama and Chiben Nara are sister schools under the same Bentenshu-affiliated Chiben Gakuen educational corporation, sharing a name but fielding separate baseball programs — a distinction that trips up even Japanese fans, as seen in the thread itself. Chiben Wakayama’s 2025 title (its fourth) puts it alongside Japan’s most storied Koshien programs, but the “40 vs. 100 roster” comparison needs context: Koshien tournament rosters are capped at 20 players regardless of school, so the real gap is in total squad size back at school, meaning far more players get real practice reps and playing time relative to their peers at bigger programs, rather than sitting out for years as bench depth.
The thread split less on facts than on interpretation of the same testimony: some read Morimoto’s account as evidence of tough, deliberate pre-enrollment screening akin to the old PL Gakuen dynasty, others argued a cohort of only ten per grade simply makes bullying-driven attrition unnecessary since there’s no numerical surplus to cull, and a third group pushed back on the whole premise by noting Chiben Wakayama’s actual track record of producing successful professionals is unremarkable compared to Koshien powerhouses.
What the thread never addresses is that PL Gakuen, repeatedly invoked as the gold standard for this kind of selective model, no longer fields a baseball team at all — it suspended recruiting in 2014 and formally dissolved the program in 2016 amid falling enrollment, so the comparison is to a defunct system, not a live rival. Readers unfamiliar with Japanese high school baseball may also assume “quitting” carries the same low stakes as in Western school sports; within Japan’s senpai-kohai dorm culture, leaving a team mid-tenure carries far heavier social cost.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geisports News+) thread “[High School Baseball] Chiben Wakayama Former Captain’s Post on “Why Almost Nobody Quits the Team” Sparks Reaction: “I Relate to This So Much”.”
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