Es Con Field Hokkaido

Background In early 2016, the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, a Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) team, began considering constructing a new stadium in or around Sapporo. Since first relocating to Sapporo from Tokyo in 2004, the Fighters played their home games in Sapporo Dome, a multi-purpose stadium. Instead of being owned and operated by the team, the facility was owned by the city of Sapporo and operated and managed by Sapporo Dome Co., Ltd., a voluntary sector company funded by the city and its community. At the time, the dome was charging the Fighters approximately ¥16 million (about $108,000) per game to play at the facility in front of a capacity crowd; annually, the team was spending around ¥1.3 billion (about $8.8 million) to play there. Additionally, Nippon Ham did not make any money on concessions or advertising in the stadium during their games. The high rental fees, loss of in-stadium sales revenue, and inflexibility of a multi-purpose facility all contributed to Nippon Ham's decision to explore building their own stadium. in Sapporo was proposed as a site for the Fighters' new ballpark. NPB set up a task force in collaboration with Nippon Ham in December 2016 to advance the new stadium project and develop a firm plan by March 2018. The mayor of Kitahiroshima met team representatives to propose its sports park concept. It offered up 20 of the 36 hectares at its "Kitahiroshima Sports Park" site for a natural grass, retractable roof baseball stadium capable of seating 30,000 people. Additionally, the site could be home to an indoor practice field, training facilities, and commercial space. Initially, Sapporo appealed to the team to continue playing at Sapporo Dome, even offering to make the facility a baseball-only stadium. After Nippon Ham continued to pursue new construction and with Kitahiroshima quickly offering up a plan, however, the city looked for suitable sites for a new stadium to avoid the prospect of the team leaving. Four months later, Sapporo offered up two locations: 10 hectares at Hokkaido University and 13 hectares Toyohira-ku; both sites, however, were quickly deemed unusable due to various circumstances. With the Kitahiroshima negotiations progressing, Sapporo offered a third site by the end of 2017—Makomanai Park. The city proposed redevelopeding 20 hectares of the park into a baseball campus that included restaurants and commercial facilities with the new stadium being built in place of the park's aging Makomanai Open Stadium after its proposed demolition. As planned, a decision was made the following March with Kitahiroshima's Sports Park site being chosen as the home of the Fighters' new ballpark. Furthermore, Kitahiroshima's larger, 36-hectares location provided more space to construct the stadium and its planned surrounding facilities. Nippon Ham revealed the basic stadium design and further details later that year. Owned and operated by Nippon Ham, the ballpark was designed by Obayashi and architecture firm HKS, the architect of Globe Life Field, and its construction was estimated to cost ¥60 billion ($530 million in 2018). In January 2020, real estate company ES-Con Japan acquired the naming rights to the stadium. A ground breaking ceremony for the stadium was held on April 13, 2020, and construction started on May 1. The stands and roof were built concurrently to speed up the construction schedule; the roof sections were assembled and installed on the stadium later from the outside. Workers had to contend with heavy snowfall during the winter months. A total of 650,000 people worked on the project up until its completion on January 4, 2023; a completion ceremony was held the following day. With the stadium planned to be operational for the 2023 NPB season, the Fighters hoped to host opening day at their new facility. The team scheduled to hold the opening day game that year, the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, agreed to transfer the game to Nippon Ham after a year of negotiations. The ballpark's first game was a preseason match on March 14, 2023; its first official game was held on March 30. ==Design and features==

When designing the Es Con Field, Fighters executives saw a trend internationally that combined sports venues with other forms of entertainment to increase their overall social impact. With population declining and entertainment diversifying, their goal was for their new facility to provide forms of entertainment that would attract more people than just baseball fans. They hoped to create a new kind of ballpark concept in Japan by combining a stadium with Hokkaido's tourism, food and nature. Most baseball stadiums in NPB are similar in design to MLB parks of the 1980s and 90s that tended acutely separate the inside of a stadium from its outside environment. While MLB stadium designs continued to evolve, NPB designs stagnated and Nippon Ham hoped that Es Con Field would help to start that same evolution. Three tiers of stands allow the stadium to accommodate 35,000 people. Instead of one main scoreboard, the stadium features two LED screens along the first and third baselines. The facility includes seating, a bar, an onsen hot spring sauna from which you can look out onto the field, and a hotel open year-round including on non-game days. While the Eagles' Rakuten Seimei Park Miyagi in Sendai features lodging accommodations onsite, Es Con Field's hotel is the first ballpark in Japan to have rooms that overlook the field, similar to the Rogers Centre in Toronto, Canada. Along with Mazda Stadium, Es Con Field is only the second current NPB field to feature an asymmetrical outfield wall.; Teams' bullpens lie just beyond and adjacent to the outfield wall, allowing fans to watch pitchers warming up, a first for an NPB stadium. F Village On January 1, 2023, the city of Kitahiroshima officially changed name of the approximately 32-hectare area surrounding the new stadium from Kyoei to F Village. A miniature version of the ballpark would be built outside in F Village. It would be built because they hope that "a future Fighter" would born from the children that would play at the miniature park. It was announced that by 2024, there will be a senior home in the southeast corner, alongside a medical mall. Also, by April 2023, a new child care support center would be opened next to the farm area. ==Access==

on the Chitose Line Kita-Hiroshima Station on Hokkaido Railway Company's Chitose Line is currently the closest train station to the stadium. In anticipation of the opening of Es Con Field in 2023, the west exit of the station is being expanded and a shuttle bus terminal is being added to provide access directly to the stadium from the station. With the walk from Kita-Hiroshima Station to the stadium being approximately 20 minutes, a tentative plan to build a new station closer to ballpark with bridge directly connecting the two was announced in 2019. The new station, tentatively called , is scheduled to open in summer 2028. The Fighters’ stadium is also expected to have parking for 3,000 to 4,000 vehicles, unusual for ballparks in Japan which generally rely solely on public transportation. ==Attendances==

The home attendances of the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters at the Es Con Field Hokkaido: Source: ==References==