The NPB rules are essentially those of the American Major League Baseball (MLB), but technical elements are slightly different.
[3] The end-of-season championship in MLB is the World Series, a best-of-seven competition in which a team must win four games to clinch the title.
Managers scratch three players before each game, typically including the most recent starting pitcher, similar to professional basketball.
[3] Unlike association football, which uses arithmetic coefficients to compare and rank the competitiveness of different leagues, no such system exists for club-level professional baseball.
[13] However, this was questioned by FanGraphs analyst Eno Sarris in 2017, who noted that contact rates in MLB are comparable to those in NPB.
[15] As American journalist Robert Whiting wrote in his 1977 book The Chrysanthemum and the Bat, "the Japanese view of life, stressing group identity, cooperation, hard work, respect for age, seniority and 'face' has permeated almost every aspect of the sport....
[17] Because of the relative strength of pitching in the Japanese league, some have suggested that batting and fielding statistics are more influential in differentiating successful NPB teams from unsuccessful ones.