The Orix BlueWave was founded in 1936 under the ownership of a Japanese railway companyHankyu Railway, as Osaka Hankyu Baseball Club. Later nicknamed the Hankyu Braves, it was one of the first professional baseball teams in Japan. In the early 1950s, the franchise made a dedicated effort to attract foreign talent, particularly African-American veterans of Negro League baseball, including infielders John Britton and Larry Raines, and pitchers Jimmy Newberry and Rufus Gaines. These players were the first Americans other than Wally Yonamine to play Nippon Professional Baseball after World War II. Starting in the mid-1960s, the Braves became one of the dominant teams not only in the Pacific League but in all of Japanese professional baseball. Between 1967 and 1972, the Hankyu Braves won the Pacific League pennant five times but lost the Japan Series each time against the Yomiuri Giants. Manager Yukio Nishimoto was known as "the great manager in tragedy" because of those losses. But the Hankyu Braves won Japan Series three times in a row from 1975, against the Tokyo Giants in 1976 and 1977, led by manager Toshiharu Ueda. At that time, many good players in Japanese baseball history played for the Hankyu Braves, including pitcher Hisashi Yamada and outfielder Yutaka Fukumoto. In the 1980s, the team still went strong but lost the pennant to the Seibu Lions every year except 1984. On October 19, 1988, Hankyu Railway sold the franchise to the lease company Orient Lease, in what was known as "the longest day of the Pacific League". The reason is that when the franchise sale occurred, the Kintetsu Buffaloes played the legendary "10.19" double-header for the Pacific League pennant, only to miss the pennant out because of a tie game. The sale was a surprise, at that time, it was much rarer for a Japanese professional baseball team to change owners, not to mention for a large company to sell one of its parts. In that case, Hankyu Railway was thought of as one of the big companies that would never need to do such a thing. The sale was not without two assurances: the team name would remain "Braves," and the franchise would stay in Nishinomiya. During the first two years of new ownership, the team was known as the Orix Braves and played in Nishinomiya.
BlueWave
In 1991, the team moved to Kobe and became the Orix BlueWave. Longtime fans were shocked by these changes. However, since Nishinomiya and Kobe are close to one another, and the new home field of the team was better than the old one, most fans accepted the move, although with some nostalgia for the historic "Braves" name. The team was sometimes called Aonami or Seiha by fans and the baseball media, which means "blue wave" in Japanese. Led by Ichiro Suzuki, in 1995 and 1996, the Orix BlueWave won the Pacific League pennant. In 1996, they also won the Japan Series.
Orix Buffaloes (2005 to present)
Following the 2004 Nippon Professional Baseball realignment, the BlueWave merged with the Kintetsu Buffaloes. The team struggled since its merger, only finishing in the top half of the Pacific league once from 2005 to 2013. In 2008, The Buffaloes finished 2nd in the Pacific League, going 75-68-1 and finishing 2 1/2 games behind the Saitama Seibu Lions, but were swept by the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters at home in the 1st stage of the Climax Series.
