Category Archives: Commentary

Camp fires: March 6, 2024

My spring began Wednesday.

Japan’s spring training starts from Feb. 1, but unless I’m going to visit a camp somewhere, my baseball year doesn’t really get cranking until teams venture up to the Kanto region for preseason games.

The first game up here was Tuesday in Yokohama, but I was off with my wife and it was rainy, so I waited until Wednesday, when my iPhone said it would be only cold and windy in Yokohama. This morning’s rain was a bonus I guess.

The rain meant no BP in the stadium and precious little activity. The good news was that DeNA’s media sphincter has relaxed enough to let the vermin of the press set foot on the field before games en route to the camera pit, where we were prohibited from entering last year.

My lone DeNA interaction was with coach Beavis, AKA Hiroyasu Tanaka, who I swear would be smiling if it were raining cockroaches and he had to stand there without an umbrella.

On the Lotte side, I stopped to say hi to manager Masato Yoshii, who was sitting in the dugout with their veteran PR guy Noriaki Kajiwara. When I stepped into the dugout I explained why I hadn’t been to the parks much, and told Yoshii that Kajiwara was always a big help for me, to which he either guessed I was being polite or just used it to get a laugh, saying “Really?” and giving me a “You’re kidding right?” look.

I asked if I was breaking the rules by standing in the dugout, and Kajiwara said, “We’ll since we’re not practicing, no.”

And with that Yoshii and I had a five-minute chat, probably the first time we’ve been one-on-one since the season he returned from MLB and was pitching for Orix. It was certainly the first time I’d said anything to him since he was coaching Shohei Ohtani with the Marines in 2016.

Yoshii had some interesting things to say, which I’ll post this week, and things only got better from there. I had a long chat with the Marines veteran interpreter, Takafumi Yajima, who told me this was his 30th season. Man does time fly. He said he was hired after interviewing with first-year Marines coach Len Sakata ahead of the 1995 season, which was the first of two house-of-mirrors seasons Bobby Valentine had in Chiba.

We reminisced a good while before I let him get out of the rain, and as I was going to leave, two gentlemen said hi and introduced themselves as agents working for Don Nomura’s Amuse agency. One was former Rakuten Eagle Fernando Luciano, and by the time I left Yokohama for the office and my day job, Fernando and his colleague and I had a fantastic time telling stories over lunch near the ballpark.

I also had a chat with new Marines import James Dykstra, and he was informative.

Like I said, it felt good to be back. I really missed this pre-COVID existence.

2nd-class solution

The lords of Japanese baseball want you to know they are making every effort to raise Japan’s level of professional baseball. And the proof of that, they’ll tell you is they have added

two teams to NPB’s minor Eastern and Western leagues this season.

For several years, there have been calls for NPB to expand, and this is the best the owners could come up with.

This isn’t expansion. It isn’t even minor league expansion. It’s the creation of a substrata of second-class clubs who will essentially exist to service the 12 existing teams and get nothing in return except the knowledge that they are a rung higher in status than other independent clubs.

The new teams is Shizuoka and Niigata are being treated the way Japanese citizens were treated in apartheid-era South Africa, not as members of the ruling caste but as “honorary members” expected to be grateful to their NPB betters by being place above those the subordinate caste.

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In 2005, the demise of the Pacific League’s Kintetsu Buffaloes turned the WL into a five-team league, while the new PL club, the Rakuten Eagles, joined the EL to make it a seven-team circuit. Adding one team to each league fixes that problem, creates second chances for players who washed out of NPB, but after that does nothing, which is the plan.

The two teams, Niigata’s Albirex, and Shizuoka’s Hayate, who have both sold their naming rights to local sponsors, are sanctioned to compete in the EL and WL, respectively, but otherwise might as well be independent minor league clubs, whose players aspire to earn a standard NPB contract and be placed on one of the 12 70-man rosters.

According to Kyodo News, the plan was raised by Yomiuri Giants owner Toshikazu Yamaguchi when he was the chair of the 2022 owners committee. He said he wanted to raise the level of Japanese pro baseball and increase interest in the sport “without leading to actual expansion.”

It would be easy to say NPB owners hate change, but that is not entirely true. In 2004, most owners were bent on reducing the number of teams, thinking it would make their league stronger, so it’s not change they hate. My guess is that the most influential owners believe real expansion will lessen their sway and influence, and that doesn’t fly if you’re Yomiuri.

I hate to be mean, but nothing says “Yomiuri Giants owner” quite like forcing other owners to create rules that help your team at the expense of theirs and then bending those rules when it suits you.

When Masayoshi Son bought the Daiei Hawks after the 2004 season, he echoed the dream of the Japan League’s founder Matsutaro Shoriki, who wanted his Yomiuri team to be the best in the world. But there is little chance of the Hawks will succeed either, as long as the other 11 owners are content with a system in which they happily lose money on baseball teams that generate huge advertising value and tax write-offs.

What would happen if Japan’s baseball-mad population was served by an NPB establishment that really cared about being better? My goodness.

Japan’s owners could invest in knowhow and overseas scouting, create deeper minor leagues or coopt existing independent leagues to fill that role, eliminate roster limits on players acquired outside its domestic draft and expand to 16 teams. Japan could have the best stadiums in the world and be a circuit that the world’s best players dreamed of competing in.

OK. Let’s skip that pipe dream for a moment and talk about what the owners should have done this year.

The two new teams could have been admitted as NPB franchises, eligible to get players through the NPB draft and develop them with an eye toward winning games selling tickets, advertising, concessions, and broadcast rights. Those players would be theirs to trade or sell to NPB teams, and as these teams grew deeper talent bases, they would have the option of becoming full NPB major league clubs with all the costs and obligations that come with it.

This is one way to expand, by having teams develop local fan bases and their own talent.

Of course, it’s unrealistic, because most of today’s NPB owners remind me of the Orix Buffaloes after their merger, when the team hired Terry Collins to manage and gave him a mandate to revolutionize the team’s culture from top to bottom, provided he not change the way anything was done.

As I commented at the time, his job was like being asked to paint a room without being allowed to move any of the furniture.

Once more, NPB owners will be smug in the belief that only they can fix things, while doing absolutely nothing.

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