The , often shortened as the , are a baseball team based in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. It has played in Nippon Professional Baseball's Pacific League since the team's formation in November 2004. The team is owned by the Internet shopping company Rakuten. History 2004: Origins and formation During Nippon Professional Baseball's (NPB) 2004 season, the Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes and the Orix BlueWave announced that the two teams planned to merge into one for the start of the 2005 season. Both teams were in the Pacific League (PL), and a merger between the two would result in a team imbalance with the PL's opposing league, the Central League (CL). As a large number of players and personnel were expected to lose their jobs when the merger was finalized, the players conducted a two-day strike on September 18–19, 2004. With the threat of further strikes looming, team representatives agreed to ease the rules of entry for new teams into NPB and that one would be allowed to join the following season. To fill the void left by the merger, internet services companies Livedoor and Rakuten submitted applications to form teams to be based in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture. NPB selected Rakuten to create a Sendai-based PL team. The team would play its home games in Miyagi Baseball Stadium, which was being renovated by Rakuten. Marty Kuehnert and Yasushi Tao were hired as general manager and manager, respectively, of their newly named "Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles" baseball club. The name is derived from the Japanese golden eagle, a large, endangered, predatory bird found in the mountains of Japan's Tōhoku region. Instead of allowing the Eagles to draft players from all 11 NPB teams in an expansion draft, the team had to construct their roster from the 107 players left over from the dissolved Kintetsu and original Orix teams during a special dispersal draft. Furthermore, Orix was allowed to select 25 players that would be protected from the distribution process before the draft, thus giving them preferential signing rights. Included in these selections were all free agents and foreign players. Rakuten was only then allowed to select 20 unprotected players, not including any first- or second-year players. After that, the first- and second-year players were unprotected and Orix and Rakuten alternating selecting 20 more players for the last round of the draft. The league's decision to employ an unequal dispersal draft to build the