Twenty years ago today, on Thursday, Sept. 9, Nippon Professional Baseball was forced to take part in an official negotiation regarding the Nippon Professional Baseball Players Association’s demands to stop the merger of the Orix BlueWave and Kintetsu Buffaloes.

It was a historic point in the clash between baseball players, fans and the leaders of an established business used to being treated with deference by employees, customers and the media. It came about because of what one longtime former team executive, Yasuyuki Sakai, called “an unscrupulous effort at union busting that smacked of fascism.”

The 12 owners had refused to discuss the union’s demands after the Nikkei Shimbun broke the news of the merger on June 13. The momentum for a merger began after the owners in February, led by the Giants’ Tsuneo “Nabetsune” Watanabe, rejected Kintetsu’s plan to sell the Buffaloes’ naming rights.

Watanabe, said publicly that such a move was against the rules, but as with so many of his pronouncements, it was just something he made up. (1)

Watanabe, had long wanted to contract Japanese pro baseball from 12 teams, believing that too many teams diluted the product, and this was a chance to realize that. It would be difficult to operate a league without an even number of teams, as had occurred in 1951 and 1952 after one of the CL’s eight founding teams, Fukuoka’s Nishi Nihon Pirates, went out of business after one season and created a seven-team league.

In an early taste of NPB’s future political politics, the best Pirates players wound up playing for Yomiuri in the subsequent reshuffle, and after one year of struggling with a seven-team setup, the CL owners decided to contract after the 1952 season.

In that plan, 1952’s last-place team would be forced out via a merger. The Hiroshima Carp, currently battling for the CL pennant, finished sixth, 3-1/2 games ahead of the 1950 champion Shochiku Robins, who merged with the Taiyo Whales to become the Taiyo Shochiku Robins in 1953.

But in 2004, teams began jockeying for possible merger partners, in the hope of creating one strong team out of two weaker ones in a new 10-team or even eight-team single league. Word of this broke on July 7, when Seibu Lions owner Yoshiaki Tsutsumi revealed that to the public.

This restructuring of pro baseball in Japan raised alarm bells with the players union since it would mean, that two 70-man rosters, comprised mostly of union members, would be thrown out of work. It would also mean an end to the two-league system that fans had become accustomed to since the 1950 expansion.

On July 8, Atsuya Furuta, the fifth chairman of the player’s union, founded by former Giants player and later DeNA manager Kiyoshi Nakahata in 1984, told reporters that the union had demanded an official negotiation session with management.

Asked what he would say to Furuta, Watanabe responded with his typical lack of tact and empathy, and completely misread a situation that was causing grave concerns among players and fans alike.

“He shouldn’t say such rude things,” Watanabe said. “You have to know your place. You are nothing but a ballplayer.”

And with that, it was game on. Players and fans fought to preserve the system, and Watanabe, through commissioner Yasuchika Negoro, seeing a chance to kill two birds with one stone.

Although Japan’s players union has been relatively meek compared to the Major League Baseball Players Association, it had dealt Watanabe an embarrassing defeat on its stance of prohibiting Japanese players’ agents from negotiating contracts with teams. Despite no specific rules against players employing agents, the owners’ stance had ostensibly been, “This is the way it is. We make the rules. No agents.”

In 1999, when the union prepared to take NPB to court, NPB announced it would accept agents on a “one-year trial.”

As far as I can tell, that trial is still going on, since NPB made no announcement that negotiations with agents that had ostensibly been “against the rules” were suddenly allowed. (2)

As teams began to wonder what a labor action by the players might do to their business and their plans, a top-secret memo was circulated by Negoro, although Sakai is certain that it was 100 percent Watanabe’s doing.

The plan was to let the players strike, and then sue them for damages, which Negoro assured the teams would be a slam dunk in court and would destroy the union. Negoro, a former public prosecutor, told the owners that the players had no leverage because they had no right to strike, since they were not company employees but independent contractors. “I know,” he famously said. “I basically wrote the law.”

Sakai, who had served as an executive with Lotte, with the Lions before and after they left Fukuoka and the Daiei Hawks, said he had been instilled with a sense of duty to society by his father, a Kyushu University Hospital pediatrician. Sakai said that when he held the memo with Watanabe’s plans in his hand, “my anger boiled over and my hand shook with rage.”

“‘Is this how our commissioner acts, someone who is supposed to protect and supervise the healthy development of professional baseball in our country and its contribution to society?’ I thought,” Sakai said. (3)

A meeting between Furuta and the head of Japan’s trade union council the next day solidified players’ resolve over the owners’ threatening bluster that was being happily presented in the media as facts – because Japan’s media is accustomed to reporting business leaders’ pronouncements as if they had been inscribed on tablets by God and brought down by Moses from Mount Sinai.

Support from other labor groups working with the union’s beloved secretary general, the late Toru Matsubara, resulted in a petition campaign aimed stopping the merger, declaring declaring Watanabe’s statement to be a violation of the players’ civil rights, and urging a boycott of the Yomiuri Shimbun.

At that year’s all-star games, fans showed solidarity with the players in their attempt to preserve the system, with all the players and many of the fans wearing woven miçanga “promise bracelets,” that included the colors of all 12 teams.

All this took place while the owners and the mainstream media displayed their incredible tone-deafness, and doubled down on the propaganda that the players were betraying the fans and were dragging pro baseball down.

On Aug. 12, the players union voted to give its executive the right to call a strike, and as if the owners needed a black eye, the following day news broke that teams had been funneling cash to university pitcher Yasuhiro Ichiba in hopes of securing his services through the system then in place that allowed each team to sign one or two players who were already out of high school prior to the draft.

Watanabe stepped down as Giants owner over its payments to the amateur pitcher and was joined by the owners of the DeNA BayStars and Hanshin Tigers.

At the Yomiuri office that day, there weren’t cheers, but there were plenty of smiles, since Watanabe was universally hated within the company for his tyranny.

The late great Wayne Graczyk, who had for years worked as a pre-game sideline reporter for Yomiuri’s TV network, Nippon Terebi, told me that the moment he heard the news that Watanabe was quitting, he rushed to the Tokyo Dome’s TV control booth and was stunned to find the NTV staff giving each other high-fives.

On Sept. 6, the Tokyo high court dismissed the union’s appeal for an injunction against the Orix-Kintetsu merger, but affirmed that as a union it had a right to collectively bargain with NPB, and issued a statement chastising NPB for its failure to negotiate with the union in good faith. The first official negotiations took place in Tokyo on Sept. 9, and two days of talks only served to postpone the players plan to strike a full slate of games set for the following Saturday and Sunday.

Notes:

1. The Nishitetsu Railroad after the Black Mist scandal dumped the team on the Pacific League, which found a private buyer who operated the Lions on a shoestring, starting from 1973 through funding provided from selling the naming rights to golf course developer Taiheiyo Club.
2. Watanabe publicly said the Giants would defy the rules and refuse to speak with agents, and was taken to task by the players union and other owners when Yomiuri negotiated a contract at the end of 1999 with free agent pitcher Kimiyasu Kudo’s agent. When word got out, Watanabe said, the individual was “Not Kudo’s agent but a consultant.” After NPB quietly backtracked and approved agent negotiations, Watanabe proclaimed that any Giants player who sent his agent to the negotiating table after the season would be immediately released. Ace Koji Uehara, who was keen at the time to move to MLB, promptly sent his agent to his contract talks, only for Watanabe to again say, “That individual was a friend of Mr. Uehara’s and not his agent.”
3. The commissioner’s secret plan to bust the players union