Two Japanese baseball players this month have signed record contracts. On Dec. 9, Shohei Ohtani agreed to play 10 years for the Los Angeles Dodgers for $700 million, making the two-way superstar the highest paid team-sport athlete in the world. Less than two weeks later, Yoshinobu Yamamoto became baseball’s highest-paid pitcher with a $325 million 12-year contract, also with the Dodgers.
Yamamoto, whose contract eclipsed Masahiro Tanaka’s $155-million seven-year contract with the New York Yankees as the largest ever signed by a player upon his entry to MLB, earned the Orix Buffaloes a $50.6 million. If Yamamoto has options to quit the Dodgers after six seasons, the Buffaloes will not receive anything for his seasons from Year 7 to 12 until he actually remains with LA. If he stays in LA, the Dodgers will have gotten an interest-free loan from Orix, and if Yamamoto quits, and signs a huge contract elsewhere, Orix will not get one single yen.
It’s not an elegant system, but MLB is not run in order to be elegant. It’s run to maximize monopoly profit and generate high return on investment, and while fans of Japanese baseball are proud that guys who grew here and honed their craft in our major leagues, the Central and Pacific, are recognized by MLB as among the most valuable in the world.
But what about our major leagues?
Daisuke Matsuzaka’s $52-million contract with the Boston Red Sox on Nov. 2, 2006, led then Lotte Marines manager Bobby Valentine to say that NPB’s talent drain would put it on track toward following America’s Negro leagues into extinction.
That hasn’t happened, because there is a market for professional baseball IN Japan, where fans can see games live and cheer for THEIR teams.
A more likely scenario is that Japan’s pro baseball business will continue on as it has, producing some of the world’s best players, many of whom will move onto MLB, with most of its 12 teams losing money in order to exist as powerful advertising engines for their parent companies while also generating huge tax deductions.
With Japan’s third World Baseball Classic championship in March, a better comp for NPB than the Negro leagues would be Brazilian professional football.
Despite its record as a producer of world class football talent, and its remarkable success international competition, Brazil’s top club team, according to FiveThirtyEight’s final rankings in June, is Palmeiras, at 53rd.
Of course, one reason for the state of Brazil’s pro teams is that they compete in the world’s ninth largest economy with a per capita GDP $10,410 on Dec. 4, 2023, according to Forbes, less than a quarter that of Germany ($52,820), the United Kingdom ($48,910) or France ($46,320), and less than a third of Italy ($37.15).
The top baseball salaries in MLB are about nine times NPB’s although America’s $80,410 per capita GDP is only about 2-1/2 times Japan’s $33,950.
The Westbay hypothesis
The talent drain hasn’t made NPB a less attractive product than it was in 2000, before Ichiro Suzuki became the first Orix player to make use of the posting system and the last for 22 years, quite the opposite. It has, as Michael Westbay predicted in 2011, when Yu Darvish signed with the Texas Rangers for $60 million, that new stars would rise to take their place and allow the game to move forward.
And Japanese pro baseball has moved forward and changed, although never easily.
Ohtani and Yamamoto and their value to MLB teams exist because a highly structured system that, starting in the 1970s, had sought to eradicate individual variation in the name of quality control failed to completely suppress human individuality and structure individual ambition along pre-ordained paths.
The system intended to turn Japanese ballplayers into automatons failed because of changes that came about:
- As unintended consequences of owners trying to restructure the existing balance of power, and…
- Through a collective effort by players to combat owners’ abuse of power, and…
- Through effort of individuals working on their own and eventually with others to create new paradigms within obsolete structures.
And while players still come out of Japan’s relatively uniform youth baseball system where they only play one sport all year every year, at the pro level, the diversity and variety of individual styles that was a trademark of Japanese baseball until the mid-1970s has crept back, allowing players and coaches to chart and take ownership of new pathways.
It’s also important to note that Ohtani would not be a two-way player if Japan did not have professional major leagues independent of MLB, or if the Dodgers had signed him out of high school in 2013 and made sure he only batted ninth and wore a helmet with a “P” on it.
Nor would Ohtani be a two-way player if Hideo Nomo had not begun to demolish baseball’s social Darwinist belief system in 1995, which led MLB teams to begin looking to Asia for talent, after NPB’s owners accidentally left a door open through which its players could leave.
This is a good time to stop for today, because that door began opening 30 years ago this month because one NPB team was not content with a system that didn’t allow it to dominate play the way it had in the 1960s.
