The Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles (東北楽天ゴールデンイーグルス Tōhoku Rakuten Gōruden Īgurusu) is a baseball team founded in 2004; it played its first season in the Japanese Pacific League in 2005. It is simply called Rakuten (楽天). The team was created to fill the void left by the merger of the Orix Blue Wave and the Kintetsu Buffaloes, after the 2004 season due to financial difficulties, leaving the Pacific League with five teams, causing the biggest crisis in the traditional two-league structure in NPB and finally caused the historical-first baseball player strike in Japan. The team is based in Sendai, in Miyagi Prefecture. It inaugurated its first season with a 3 – 1 victory over Lotte. The team is owned by the Internet shopping company Rakuten.
The team's manager was Katsuya Nomura, the oldest manager in NPB history, but he was replaced as of the 2010 season by Marty Brown the former manager of Hiroshima. Brown was in turn replaced by Senichi Hoshino after a last place finish in 2010.
The stadium was heavily damaged by floods during the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami on March 11.

The Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles