Yoshinobu Yamamoto is on the market and his agent had things to say about that, while the biggest fish in a small Japanese free agency pond has signed.
Orix hits pay free agent pay dirt again
The Orix Buffaloes signed this winter’s top free agent, Hiroshima Carp outfielder Ryoma Nishikawa, who didn’t put up the best numbers of his career, but who has been a consistently valuable regular for the past five seasons.
His contract is reported as being four years for 1.2 billion yen, basically a 300 percent raise over what he was earning in Hiroshima. And as for whether players feel one league might be better than the other, Kyodo News quoted him as saying he was interested to see how well his game played in the PL.
Unlike MLB, which manages its media relations in an orderly fashion, NPB has, for reasons I still cannot fathom, never stepped in to ensure that media covering the Japan Series have orderly and predictable access before and after the games.
Other than the required managers’ meeting on the Friday before Game 1, and the obligatory press conferences that day, the teams run everything.
Since NPB delegated media access to the teams in 2020 to develop individual COVID responses in regards to the media and fans, Japanese pro baseball has ended a 70-plus year tradition of allowing reporters in every park at every game on the field and in the dugouts before games while letting them follow players after the games.
