The Story of the Hanshin Tigers

The Pride of Kansai: The Birth of the Osaka Tigers

The Hanshin Tigers were founded in 1935 as the 'Osaka Tigers.' Alongside the Yomiuri Giants, they are one of the few clubs that have existed since the earliest days of Japanese professional baseball, and from the very start carried an identity as 'the team of Kansai (the Osaka-Kobe region),' in contrast to Tokyo-based Yomiuri. This Tokyo-versus-Kansai framing carried on for decades into what became Japanese baseball's biggest rivalry, the Hanshin–Yomiuri games, seen as a contest of regional pride that goes well beyond a simple matchup between two teams.

Koshien: Home of a Team That Lives at a Shrine

Hanshin's home ground is Koshien Stadium, built in 1924 in Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture. Famous for its ivy-covered outer walls, the stadium also hosts the National High School Baseball Championship every summer (known as 'Summer Koshien'), making it hallowed ground recognized by every baseball fan in Japan. With unusually deep power alleys, a shallow center field, and the only all-dirt infield left in NPB, home runs are rare here — instead the park is known as a pitcher's park famous for unpredictable bad-hop grounders. The catch is that the national high school tournament falls right in the middle of the pro season, in August. Hanshin has to vacate the stadium during the tournament and the season-opening series, so since 1997 the team has borrowed rival Orix's home ground, Kyocera Dome Osaka, to play its 'home' games during that stretch. Even so, the travel takes a physical toll comparable to a road trip, and Hanshin fans still see this stretch of the season as a rite of passage that can make or break the year.

1985: The Back-Screen Trio and the First Japan Series Title

The most-told moment in Hanshin history is 1985. That April, in a game against Yomiuri, three-hole hitter Akinobu Mayumi, cleanup hitter Randy Bass, and five-hole hitter Akinobu Okada (now the team's manager) hit three consecutive home runs into the center-field back screen — the legendary 'Back-Screen Trio' still ranks among the most iconic moments in Japanese baseball history. Riding that momentum, Hanshin won the league pennant and then beat the Nishitetsu Lions (now the Seibu Lions) to capture the club's first Japan Series title. Import slugger Randy Bass came within a hair of the Triple Crown that year and led the championship run, cementing his legendary status.

The Colonel Sanders of Dotonbori — and the Curse

In the celebratory chaos right after the title, excited fans began diving one by one into the Dotonbori River in Osaka, shouting the names of their favorite players as they jumped. Unable to find anyone who resembled import slugger Randy Bass, fans grabbed a Colonel Sanders statue from a nearby KFC and threw it into the river instead. Hanshin then went a full 18 years without another league pennant, and even longer without another Japan Series title, giving rise to the urban legend of the 'Curse of the Colonel.' The statue itself wasn't actually recovered from the river until 2009 — and made headlines when it turned up missing its glasses and part of its left hand.

2023: The Curse Breaks After 38 Years

Hanshin won the league pennant in 2003 and 2005 but couldn't reach the top of the Japan Series either time. In 2023, the team made another run at the title with manager Akinobu Okada — the very same player from the Back-Screen Trio — back at the helm. Okada became known for a distinctive way of talking all season, avoiding the word 'championship' and instead calling it 'are' (それ, 'that thing') to ward off jinxing it — a quirk that became such a cultural meme it was nominated for Japan's Buzzword of the Year. Hanshin finally beat the Orix Buffaloes to win the Japan Series, lifting the trophy for the first time in 38 years since 1985. Dotonbori once again filled with diving fans.

'33-4' — the Number Baseball Fans Never Let Hanshin Live Down

In 2003 and 2005, Hanshin won the league pennant twice but fell just short of the Japan Series title both times. In the 2005 series against the Chiba Lotte Marines especially, Hanshin was swept in four straight games (0 wins, 4 losses), with a combined score across those four games of 4 to 33. That '33-4' became a running joke among Japanese baseball fans. If a pitcher's ERA happens to be 3.34, or a batter's average happens to be .334, or even if a game just happens to end in 3 hours and 34 minutes, fans will jokingly needle Hanshin fans with lines that translate roughly to 'What's it to you! Hanshin's got nothing to do with it!' Even after finally winning it all in 2023, the meme is still very much alive.

The Loudest, Most Passionate Cheering in Japan

One symbol of Hanshin fandom is the club's fight song, 'Rokko Oroshi' (六甲おろし), written in 1936. It's the oldest team anthem in Japanese professional baseball, and the sight of players and fans singing it together after a home win is one of the defining images of Hanshin baseball. The outfield cheering squads (oendan) are famous for being bigger and more organized than any other club's, and just as notorious for the brutally frank jeers (yaji) that rain down when results go south. On days Hanshin plays rival Yomiuri, even the traveling section at Tokyo Dome is known for chanting things that translate to 'drop dead, Yomiuri' at full volume — loud enough that it has occasionally bled straight into live broadcast audio and caused on-air incidents. A fanbase that runs just as hot in good times as bad — that's the real reason the Hanshin Tigers have more stories to tell than any club in Japan.

Notorious for 'False Alarms': Rumored Signings of Korean Players

Hanshin is notoriously famous for leaking rumors to the press about signing Korean players. Names like Lee Jong-beom, Lee Seung-yeop, Kim Dong-joo, Kim Tae-kyun, Lee Bum-ho, Lim Chang-yong, Lee Dae-ho, Kim Kwang-hyun, Bae Young-soo, Son Seung-lak, Yang Hyeon-jong, Kim Hyun-soo, and Choi Hyoung-woo have all been floated as candidates to join Hanshin almost every year — yet only one has ever actually signed: closer Oh Seung-hwan. Oh Seung-hwan pitched for Hanshin from 2014 to 2015, leaving a clear mark with back-to-back saves titles and Climax Series MVP honors. Lee Seung-yeop, by contrast, spent his career as the cleanup hitter for rival Yomiuri, even sweeping Hanshin in the 2005 Japan Series and hitting his 400th career home run (Korea/Japan combined) against Hanshin of all teams. After years of nothing but rumors, Hanshin picked up something of a 'boy who cried wolf' reputation among Korean baseball fans.

Franchise Legends

Championship History

League pennants (11)

Past Managers

Trivia Worth Knowing

• The club anthem 'Rokko Oroshi,' written in 1936, is the oldest fight song in Japanese professional baseball.
• The Colonel Sanders statue thrown into the river during the 1985 celebration wasn't recovered until 2009 — and its glasses and part of its left hand were never found.
• Akinobu Okada, the manager who led the 2023 title run, was also the third hitter in the legendary 1985 'Back-Screen Trio.'
• Manager Okada's habit of calling the title 'are' (それ) became such a social phenomenon it was nominated for Japan's Buzzword of the Year in 2023.
• Tomoaki Kanemoto's streak of 1,492 consecutive games and innings played (1999–2010), which began during his time with Hiroshima, still stands as a world record.
• Fearing a crush of fans diving into the Dotonbori River after the 2023 title, Osaka police deployed roughly 1,300 officers along the riverbank, and Korea's foreign ministry even sent a travel-safety alert urging Korean tourists to avoid the area.
• After Randy Bass won the home run title in 1985, it took nearly 40 years for another Hanshin player to win it — Teruaki Sato finally did it in 2025 with 40 home runs.
• There was long a jinx that 'if a club legend becomes manager, the team falls apart' — but Akinobu Okada in 2023 and Kyuji Fujikawa in 2025 both won titles as club-legend managers, breaking it.
• The current mascot lineup is the trio To-Ratty, Lucky, and Kii-Torie, with the formerly farm-team-only mascot Kohry officially joining the top-team lineup in 2025.
• Hanshin holds both the shortest (55 minutes, 1946) and longest (6 hours 26 minutes, 1992) games in NPB history.
• Starting with import slugger Randy Bass winning Japan Series MVP in 1985, Hanshin went a long stretch as the only one of NPB's 12 clubs never to have a Japanese-national Japan Series MVP — a streak finally broken by Koji Chikamoto, who won MVP in the 2023 title run.