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The story
Former Yomiuri Giants star Masumi Kuwata voiced his opposition to introducing a “seven-inning rule” for high school baseball on the TV program “Sunday Morning,” aired on the 23rd. On 5ch’s live discussion threads, opinions clashed — some called for moving games to domed stadiums to combat the extreme heat, others agreed with Koji Uehara’s concern that the change would mean top-of-the-order batters get disproportionately more at-bats, and still others predicted that powerhouse schools would oppose a seven-inning format simply because it would lead to more upsets.
“Switching to a Seven-Inning Format Would Sever Our History” — Kuwata Voices Opposition to the High School Baseball “Seven-Inning Rule” on “Sunday Morning”
Former Yomiuri Giants star Masumi Kuwata appeared live in the studio on TBS’s “Sunday Morning” (Sundays, 8:00 a.m.) on the 23rd.
The program reported that on the 22nd, in the final of the 108th National High School Baseball Championship, Chiben Wakayama defeated Kendai Takasaki 4-3 to win the title.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Read the original article here
What people said
Same with the countryside —
stubbornly clinging to local traditions and rules.
Before turning this into a completely different sport by changing the rules,
wouldn't it make more sense to just narrow it down to about 20 schools and cut the number of games?
Is it because Koshien Stadium is 'tradition' that they keep making kids play under the blazing sun even as it gets hotter every year?
Is forcing players to shave their heads 'tradition' too?
This is basically a cult.
The people saying 'just play it in a dome' are the ones who really don't get it.
The players definitely want to play at Koshien itself.
That's definitely just your own assumption.
Re: #23
Why not just hurry up and turn Koshien into a domed stadium already?
Because they're tax-sucking pigs.
Stuff like that is actually more dangerous during practice, so switching to seven innings wouldn't solve it anyway.
then just spread the tournament across multiple domed stadiums,
and only hold the semifinals and final at Koshien.
Part of it is that spectators actually want to watch the players suffer.
It's treated as a symbol of summer.
If the games were played in a comfortable environment, it would honestly feel like something's missing.
That's also why the spring Koshien tournament isn't as popular.
What's the reason for making it seven innings even in spring, when it isn't even that hot?
If this is about player health, cutting summer games from nine innings to seven isn't really a fundamental fix.
Even at seven innings, if it's still brutally hot, you'll still get heat stroke cases.
Apparently the real goal is to reduce the burden on volunteers, umpires, and teachers — for teachers it's about work-style reform.
It's also getting harder to sustain the tournament at its current scale, so a big part of this is using the heat-stroke issue as cover to make changes anyway.
The summer Interhigh tournament (a national high school athletic championship) uses 35-minute halves, yeah.
Koshien itself could just start from the quarterfinals.
What about the qualifying rounds, then?
Does this guy see it differently?
If that's the priority, then they need to do something about playing games at Koshien in the middle of the day at all.
they need to make the summer tournament sustainable going forward.
Same deal in mahjong: online mahjong data shows strong players have a harder time winning in East-only games (tonpuusen) than in full matches (hanchan).
Well yeah, tonpuusen is half the length.
Nope, not one.
The only people pushing the seven-inning idea are outsiders who don't understand baseball at all. They're squawking about it without knowing a thing. The players and everyone around them want nine innings, 100%.
Of course there aren't any — if it changed, their own stats would drop, their salary would drop. Nothing good comes of it for them.
Before that, you should also mention what Uehara said: 'I'm against it because with only seven innings, the bottom of the batting order might only get two at-bats.' Kuwata agreed with that and then went on to make the comment above. It's not just about tradition.
What baseball people don't get is dumb —
they don't realize the value of a hit would go up by 30% too.
They're so used to dragging every game out inning after inning while worrying about what the coach thinks and being controlled by him that they never even notice what that means.
Seven innings = baseball stripped down to its purest appeal, 'taipa' baseball (slang for 'time-performance,' i.e. time-efficient).
What disappears first won't be tradition — it'll be the coaches.
If people understood that, pretty much everyone would be in favor.
Background and Key Points
Koshien is shorthand for two things at once: the 100-year-old stadium near Osaka and the national tournament held there, currently the summer edition just concluded with Chiben Wakayama’s 4-3 win over Kendai Takasaki in the 108th championship. The tournament is single-elimination, drawn from prefectural qualifiers involving thousands of schools, and August games are played in early-afternoon heat that regularly exceeds 35°C. Kuwata and Uehara are not neutral commentators — both are former star pitchers (Kuwata at PL Gakuen and the Yomiuri Giants, Uehara in NPB and MLB) who built careers inside the exact system now under review, including customs like shaved heads and nine full innings as markers of seriousness.
The thread’s actual fault line isn’t “shorten games” versus “keep tradition” — almost everyone agrees the heat is dangerous. The split is over *which fix* addresses it: seven innings, moving games into a domed stadium, or trimming the field of participating schools. Posters were skeptical seven innings solves anything, since heat stroke risk doesn’t scale neatly with innings played.
What the thread barely touches is the administrative motive behind the proposal: Japan’s “work-style reform” push to cut hours for teachers, many of whom coach and umpire unpaid, and a tournament under strain from shrinking squad rosters as the youth population declines. One poster alludes to this, but most of the debate stays fixated on heat and tradition, missing that the seven-inning idea is as much about sustaining a shrinking system as protecting players.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Geinou/Sports News+) thread “[Baseball] Masumi Kuwata Voices Opposition to High School Baseball’s ‘Seven-Inning Rule’… “It Would Sever Our History” “The Perspective of What We’re Protecting Matters”.”
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