City officials in Niigata have, at least three times in the past five years, expressed their desire to land a Nippon Professional Baseball franchise to play in a beautiful new ballpark opened in 2009.
The first was in 2005 when NPB awarded an expansion team, the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, to the city of Sendai. Last year, when their new stadium opened, Niigata personnel again called for a Central or Pacific League team to move in and, once more earlier this year, the "We want a team" cry was heard.
Niigata faces the Sea of Japan on the northwest coast of the main Japanese island of Honshu. The city lists a population of 812,705. Sendai, by comparison, has 1,031,704 inhabitants.