This is the fifth and final article on the potential for growth of Japanese pro baseball following the national team’s World Baseball Classic triumph. The idea for these posts was Robert Whiting’s quick-hit reaction “WBC title is great for Japan, but NPB needs to concentrate on enhancing its product going forward” in March.
So far I’ve touched on:
- How MLB’s hypersonic growth was a reaction to its being stripped of its old business model in which it sold tickets and broadcast rights to its monopoly without having to pay market value for labor. Free agency was an accident of history MLB fought all the way, but which forced it to adopt a new business model in the way Japan has not had to.
- The objectively false notion that the World Baseball Classic is not a real competition but an exhibition.
- The ways in which Japanese culture both enables and deters change within pro baseball through the demands placed on coaches.
- An amateur baseball structure that discourages players from adopting innovative styles and ruins many of the nation’s best pitching arms before they even get to high school
Today, I want to address five specific changes that could lead to Japanese pro baseball being a much better product than it is now, and even a superior competition to MLB.
Paying to play
Since Japan’s first pro league opened for business in 1936, it has been a tool for selling newspapers, railroad fares and providing advertising for parent companies. At first there were just a handful of decent ballparks and teams had to share, with most clubs hosting at least a few home games in all the Japan League’s big parks. That’s no longer an issue, but the idea that it’s good enough to rent a stadium to host a game has persisted.
Leasing parks on a per-game basis, as half the Central League teams do, prevents them from collecting advertising and concession revenues from their home games. This was fine when the purpose of the game was solely to advertise the parent company, and though that is still a valuable return on investment, it prevents Japan’s baseball business from being more.
With four Pacific League teams, Nippon Ham, SoftBank, Seibu and Orix, owning their own ballparks, and the other two holding operating leases, the PL clubs have more cash to plow back into their teams and support more minor league development than the two CL teams that neither turn profits nor own their own ballparks, the Chunichi Dragons and Yakult Swallows.
The Yomiuri Giants, have been consistently profitable despite playing in Tokyo Dome, a ballpark that sucks up huge amounts of cash. It’s a bad deal for them, and is a great analogy for NPB, because it basically works, the establishment is unwilling to seek drastic change the way MLB did after free agency.
Growing the game
The second part of the program depends partially on the first, and that’s minor league expansion. NPB is now looking to add one team to each of its two minor leagues, the Western and Eastern leagues, for 2024, but that doesn’t solve the depth problem.
Japan’s establishment has long been comfortable in the idea that pro baseball teams absorb all the best talent in the country through its annual new-player entry draft, but one look at the SoftBank Hawks puts paid to that notion, since nearly half of the Hawks’ Japanese regulars turned pro on non-roster developmental contracts after all 12 teams declined to take them in the regular draft.
The biggest hurdle to teams wishing to emulate the Hawks is a lack of cash to spend on player development infrastructure. This is basically because fielding more than one minor league team is not required, and most parent companies still see the potential gold mines they own as advertising expenses, or simply spend most of their budget on ballpark rents.
The Hanshin Tigers should be able to fund a massive minor league expansion, but even though their parent company has an interest in Koshien Stadium, its two annual high school baseball tournaments have long had preferential treatment when it comes to stadium operations.
The last PL team to skip out on their landlord, the Nippon Ham Fighters, will eventually be in position to fund a minor league expansion, if that’s the way they want to go. Ten years ago, that seemed to be the course the club was on after it invested most of the $50 million it got for Yu Darvish’s posting fee on its minor league facility outside Tokyo.
Since then, the way the club has leveraged stadium deals with local governments in Okinawa and Hokkaido, raises the fear Nippon Ham could follow the current MLB model and compete only to fulfill its bare minimum obligation to NPB, and instead plow the profits the new ballpark generates into real estate rather than into a team geared toward winning pennants.
Major growth
Since 1960, MLB has gone from 16 teams to 30, while NPB has gone from 12, to well, 12. Just as baseball teams think there is never enough pitching, NPB owners think there is not enough playing talent to field more than 12 teams or enough markets to support more teams if the talent did exist. The first, of course, is a fallacy.
There are far more players talented enough to play major league baseball in Japan than there are players under contract. Likewise, existing established markets can be expanded while latent markets can be expanded. There are five teams in the Kanto area, two in Kansai, one in Nagoya and one in Fukuoka. Each could probably support at least one more, as could Niigata and Shizuoka.
The easy road to expansion is the one Taiwan’s CPBL has taken, to have new teams start out as minor league competitors before jumping into the deep end. This would also help the clubs get a head start developing their local markets.
Japan has never had expansion drafts, but if it did expand, it would be easier to add two teams in one league one year, and two teams in the other league a year later, to keep each league with an even number of teams.
Breaking down barriers
The obvious answer to the talent worries that come with expansion is getting rid of the current restriction on the number of active roster players who enter NPB outside of the new-player draft, in other words non-resident imports. With 16 teams instead of 12, there would be 33 percent more NPB playing jobs, meaning there would be more work for Japanese players than there are now, even if some teams had six to eight active imports.
Japan has a huge competitive advantage against MLB when dealing with overseas amateurs, because NPB teams are unbound by the MLB’s agreement with its union that tightly restricts spending on amateurs. Japanese teams can sign any import players to virtually any kind of contract they like and easily outbid U.S. teams even for American talent.
Of course, this is not a thing now, but if Japan’s minor league development structure gets deeper and better, and more players start coming from abroad to further raise the level of competition here, it is possible that the baseball here will be so good, that some players if given the choice will prefer Japan to MLB. This brings up the fifth and final point: the need to raise expectations.
An attitude adjustment
When Matsutaro Shoriki created a league so he could promote games between Yomiuri’s Giants and other pro teams, he dreamed of creating the kind of baseball that would be on a par with MLB. But the idea that Japan should aspire to be like MLB is probably too low a bar. Japan could be so much better in the way it treats players and fans and even in the quality of play, considering the degree to which Japan’s population really loves baseball.
As things stand now, the goal of most NPB owners is for their teams to continue to exist as viable advertising tools. But if that changes to actually striving to achieve something grand and lasting, it could entirely change the way people think about pro baseball and how there can be better baseball in other major leagues outside the establishment that arrogantly anointed itself as major league baseball.
