Former Lotte Orions outfielder Hideaki Takazawa recalled that he and his teammates would joke that there were more officials than fans at the stadium for their games back in the day.
The Pacific League was far behind the Central League in terms of media exposure and attendance in general in the 1980s. And Lotte, in particular, would always finish in the bottom half of the standings. It was one of the least-popular teams in all Japanese pro baseball, and poor attendance figures at home provided clear-cut evidence of that.
But its small, not-so-state-of-the-art home stadium, Kawasaki Stadium, has remained stuck in the minds of baseball fans of a certain age, even a quarter century after the club left to become the Chiba Lotte Marines.