Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles

Rakuten Mobile Park Miyagi

The Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, often shortened as the Rakuten Eagles, are a baseball team based in Sendai, in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. It has played in Nippon Professional Baseball's Pacific League since the team's formation in 2005. The team is owned by the Internet shopping company Rakuten. The team was created to fill the void left by the merger of the Orix BlueWave and the Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes during the 2004 Nippon Professional Baseball realignment. The merger was to leave the Pacific League with five teams, causing the biggest crisis in the history of the NPB, including the first player strike in Japanese professional baseball history. After posting losing records in their first four seasons, the team finished second behind the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters in the 2009 pennant race under the leadership of manager Katsuya Nomura, the oldest manager in NPB history.