How Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto earned record MLB contracts this month is a story about the growth of Japanese pro baseball and the change of its players’ world view. It is a story that traces back through Hideo Nomo, Ichiro Suzuki and the miscalculations of Japanese pro baseball’s owners.
Ohtani and Yamamoto and a growing number of their compatriots have achieved extreme success by seeking their own unique solutions as individuals. How this happened in Japan is quite a story. For decades, pro baseball had mimicked Japanese industry by reinforcing a cultural bias toward conformity with a rigid belief that only uniform styles and methods could achieve perfection.
Part 1 outlined how NPB has continued to grow and thrive:
- Through unintended consequences of owners trying to restructure the existing domestic balance of power
- Through effort of individuals working on their own and eventually with others to create new paradigms within obsolete structures.
- Through a collective effort by players to combat owners’ abuse of power
Although the belief in baseball quality control lingers, largely through youth baseball coaches raised in the 1970s and ‘80s, it slowly began reversing through the success of one iconic player, and has accelerated rapidly because of one owners’ effort to rig the system in his team’s favor.
Even though Nippon Professional Baseball’s business model remains almost comically rooted in the 1950s with owners controlling nearly every aspect of the game and a relatively powerless union, the game on the field has become more and more vibrant with each recent generation.
The draft
One place to start might be 1965, when NPB’s 12 teams, acted collectively to institute a draft in order to deprive amateurs the right to sell their services to the highest bidder. The first draft took place just days after the Central League’s Yomiuri Giants polished off the Pacific League’s Nankai Hawks in five games to win the first of nine straight Japan Series championships.
That string came to an end in 1973, and the Giants ownership booted Hall of Fame manager Tetsuharu Kawakami so that retiring superstar Shigeo Nagashima could manage. Nagashima’s inexperience and the increased competitive balance resulting from the draft, however, ended Yomiuri’s dynasty.
From 1974 to 1991, Yomiuri won seven pennants but just two Japan Series, and enough was enough.
Free agency
Perhaps a better place to start our story about the development of Japanese players into MLB record setters would be the years 1992 and 1993.
In 1992, the owner of the Yomiuri Giants, Tsuneo Watanabe, unable to do away with the draft, blackmailed the other 11 teams into accepting a free agent system, starting from 1993.
The idea sprang from the belief that allowing nine- and 10-year veterans to sign with any team of their choosing, Yomiuri would be able to use its popularity and money to scoop up baseball’s biggest names and reclaim its spot at the top of the Japanese baseball world.
The system went into effect after the 1993 Japan Series, and everything went smoothly until Hideo Nomo poked a huge hole in view of the baseball world that existed at the time.
Hideo Nomo
Nomo and his agent, Don Nomura, hoodwinked the Kintetsu Buffaloes into letting him retire, and used a strategy devised by current Yankees executive Jean Afterman, then working with Nomura, to move to MLB, something NPB rules permitted “retired” players to do, since the assumption was they would never be good enough.
Years ago I asked the Giants executive who secured the final vote that enabled free agency in Japan.
“We never, never, never would have done it if we had any idea that Japanese players might be able to compete in MLB,” he said.
The balance of baseball thinking on both sides of the Pacific rested on a mistaken Social Darwinist belief that individuals within a less successful population must have lower potential than those in a more successful population. The NPB success of second-tier MLB talents and Triple-A players was seen as evidence that the ceiling for Japanese stars could not possibly be high enough for them to succeed in America.
But as Anthropologist Stephen J. Gould aptly put it, “Human equality is a contingent fact of history.”
With Nomo’s Dodgers debut, NPB struggled to put a stopper in the bottle but the Genie was out and wouldn’t go back in. There was no system allowing for player movement from NPB to MLB, and so Nomo’s move was seen as a one-off. Shigetoshi Hasegawa moved because the Orix BlueWave made good on an agreement they’d made when signing him that he could eventually go, and in 1996, Hideki Irabu demanded the Lotte Marines let him go, too.
His “trade” to the San Diego Padres ripped an even larger hole in the fabric of what had been considered a permanent and immutable system. Free agency widened that tear. After the 1997 season, Masato Yoshii left the Yakult Swallows, who got none of the compensation outlined in Japan’s free agent rules because those rules never imagine NPB players leaving to play in MLB.
The posting system
The posting system, and the transfer fees Japanese teams were able to demand for there stars, was an equitable solution to those problems created by the introduction of free agency and the discovery that Japanese players WERE good enough for MLB. In his most hypocritical best, Giants owner Watanabe decried the posting system as an abomination,” even though he was the single individual most responsible for its necessity.
MLB, of course, is not interested in equitable arrangements but in leveraging its power to set up one-sided deals. At first, Japanese teams were free to refuse posts if the posting fee was not to their liking. In the summer of 2013, when it appeared Masahiro Tanaka would generate a $100 million posting fee for the Rakuten Eagles, MLB changed the rules to a $20 million cap.
In a similar manner to the agreements MLB began using 100 years ago to transform America’s rich and diverse minor league landscape into soulless Soviet-style collective baseball farms, MLB has altered the agreement so that Japanese teams no longer have the right to recall players if the posting fee is not to their liking.
The movement of players to MLB has opened more Japanese eyes to different styles and possibilities, and have fueled the revolution begun 30 years ago.
That’s when one man’s defiance of Japan’s belief in “one-size-fits-all” approach to baseball success opened the door for a generation of players to innovate and experiment. Part 3 will take up the iconic Ichiro Suzuki.
