of Yukihiro Nishizaki and Yasumitsu Shibata began to emerge. Keiji Osawa came out of retirement to manage the team for a third time in 1993, only to see his team sink to the bottom of the standings; he gained notoriety for kneeling to the fans at the end of that season, begging for their forgiveness. With the Fighters experiencing more managerial troubles in 1996, then-manager Toshiharu Ueda suddenly took a personal leave during a pennant race with the Orix BlueWave, eventually causing the Fighters to fade over the last month of the season. However, new life was born in Tokyo Dome in 1998. Hitters such as Nigel Wilson, Jerry Brooks, Yukio Tanaka, Atsushi Kataoka, Katsuhiro Nishiura and a young Michihiro Ogasawara formed what became known as the Big Bang lineup and subsequently shattered various batting records. They ran away with first place for the first half of the season, but a pitching collapse in the second half caused a fall of historical proportions. The Fighters would ultimately finish in second place to the Seibu Lions. Hokkaido Nippon-Ham era Prior to the 2002 season, the idea of moving the Fighters to Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaidō and Japan's fifth largest city, emerged. The Seibu Lions also had preliminary plans to move to the northern metropolis. Tokyo's Fighters fans voiced their opposition to the proposed relocation (though the franchise never drew as many fans as their co-habitual counterparts, the Giants, while playing in the capital), but it was eventually announced that the team would indeed call the Sapporo Dome its new home beginning in 2004. Aiming to build a grassroots relationship with its future fans, the team decided to change its name to the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters. At first, with the unhappy Seibu Lions suddenly changing their approval vote, Giants owner Tsuneo Watanabe and Seibu owner Yoshiaki Tsutsumi voiced their concerns over the move. They believed that Nippon Ham's choice to move the team would spur a decentralization in Japanese professional baseball, and they threatened that a decrease in the number of teams in the Kantō and Kansai regions should merit a one-league system instead of two. As a matter of fact, the question of reorganizing baseball's league structure eventually became a bigger issue than the sale and renaming of the Kintetsu Buffaloes. The issue eventually settled down, though, and the Fighters' relocation was eventually approved by the league. The response from