would include a new baseball stadium and a general athletic stadium. The 28,000-capacity baseball stadium, dubbed Miyagi Stadium, opened in 1950 and Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) games were played there instead starting that same year. It hosted its first two official Pacific League (PL) games on May 5, three weeks before its completion on May 27. The games featured the Mainichi Orions playing the Nankai Hawks and the Daiei Stars and proved to be extremely popular. Spectators began arriving to the stadium the night before and thousands of fans had gathered by morning. In an attempt to quickly disperse the restless crowd, organizers moved the gate opening ahead from 10 am to 8 am. The crowd rushed into the stadium's entrance tunnel resulting in a crush that killed three people and injured others. Outside the stadium, the overflow crowd also began climbing a fence in an attempt to gain entry. The fence collapsed, injuring 31 people, twelve seriously. As a local ballpark, Miyagi Stadium hosted only about two professional countryside games per season, on average. In the spring of 1972, former baseball scout Isao Uko lobbied for the installation of lights at Miyagi Stadium to allow for night games. He believed that the lights could help attract up to 30 professional games to the stadium annually. With investments from businesses in the Tōhoku region such as the Kahoku Shimpō, Tohoku Baseball Company was created to help fund the project. Six 32-metre-tall light towers were installed along with a partially-electric scoreboard before the start of the 1973 season. Semi-home of "Gypsy" Lotte At the same time lights were being installed at Miyagi Stadium, Tokyo Stadium was getting ready to close following the 1972 season. This closure left the Lotte Orions without a home field next season. Miyagi's new lighting equipment helped lure the Orions to Sendai and the team agreed to play a portion of its games there in 1973. Lotte's first game at the ballpark on May 22, 1973, was also the stadium and the Tōhoku region's first night game. The ballpark hosted 32 NPB games that season, including 26 Lotte games. That year, Orions pitcher Soroku Yagisawa threw the stadium's first perfect game on October 10 against the Taiheiyo Club Lions. After utilizing Miyagi Stadium as a semi-home in 1973, the Pacific League and Lotte agreed to move the team's protected area from Tokyo to Miyagi for following the