Sunday, June 20, 2021

The Most Unusual Photo of a Professional Baseball Stadium Ever Taken

 

I Googled Osaka Stadium for no important reason just now.  Its the former home stadium of the Nankai Hawks until they moved to Fukuoka in 1988.  It was torn down in 1998 and the site is now the home of Namba Parks, a major shopping development (Dave visited on his trip a couple of years ago and did a great post about it). 

In my Google search the above photo popped up and really caught my eye.  That is literally a residential neighborhood built right in the outfield of a very large professional baseball stadium. You don't see that every day.

I thought it must be photo-shopped or something but on further looking into it I discovered that no, in fact that is a real photograph of Osaka Stadium.  In the ten years between the Hawks leaving Osaka in 1988 and it being torn down in 1998 they had to do something with the field.  One of those uses was as a showcase for model homes.  So the infield became a parking lot and the outfield became a neighborhood with about 20 homes in it, albeit one nobody ever lived in.

Its a shame they didn't keep it like that.  I think living in a house located in shallow left field of a really cool old baseball stadium would be hard to beat!  

8 comments:

  1. At first glance... I definitely thought this was photo-shopped too.

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  2. Me too, but its real.

    I think this would be fun to caption. There has to be a joke in there about a team being so bad that ownership decided to lease the outfield to developers who could construct homes safe in the knowledge that nobody can hit a ball far enough to pose a risk of breaking any windows. Or something like that.

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  3. "Honey, I'm going to eat lunch outside today."

    "Where?"

    "Section 218, row 7."

    "Okay, enjoy!"

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  4. Certainly more interesting than the shopping mall that's there now.

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    Replies
    1. The mall looked pretty nice from your photos, but yeah, houses in a stadium is hard to beat.

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  5. How cool would have been to actually be a neighborhood? Legit, no doubt. Imagine the neighborhood parties!

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    1. That would have been awesome! What I can't figure out is how they got all the construction vehicles and materials necessary to build them in there in the first place with the stadium still intact around it!

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