Category Archives: Baseball

NPB will open without service-time agreement

A long time ago, in a baseball-loving nation far, far away there were two leagues where the owners were not greedy extortionists bent on sucking all the short-term profits out of the game while leveraging their monopoly status to abscond with local taxpayers money and land.

In that nation, labor and management believed in peace, harmony, loyalty, and duty as stewards of the game. In that land, the owners never collude with the players union to hamstring amateurs’ bargaining power, and don’t have draft slot allotments or signing bonus pools, minor leaguers on starvation wages or labor strife.

I’d tell you that was Japan and the leagues were the Central and Pacific, but we all know that such a place only exists in fiction. While compared to MLB’s return-on-investment real-estate-development barons, Japan’s owners appear downright humanistic, and labor strife is (except for four dates erased from the 2004 season by Japan’s only players strike) is all but unheard of.

There were no pay cuts by owners, because the rule structure didn’t permit it, and on Monday, four days away from Opening Day on June 19, the players union said it will go into the season without a service-time agreement in place. Like the owners inability to cut salaries because of the law and their rules, the players’ inaction likely has nothing to do with altruism.

By going into the season without an agreement, the union is on the verge of giving owners an extra year of team control in addition to the seven-to-nine they already have. Essentially, players need 145 days on the first-team roster in order to qualify for one year of service time. But this year’s 120-game schedule will span just 151 days, meaning anyone deactivated for anything other than an injury, will not get a full year.

A typical 143-game season takes place over a span of 190 days, and the players want the rate for service time increased so that one game counts as more. They are also concerned about players making less than the first-team minimum of 16 million yen. These players get pro rated up to the minimum, but with fewer games, a player appearing in all 120 games might not come close to the minimum.

So the players are worried that if they go into the season without an agreement, the owners will, say thank you very much for your understanding then tell them say no one forced them to agree to terms favorable to the owners.

The players are going to do it, however, because they are unaccustomed to fighting for their rights. On one level there is a desire to play, and on another level, there’s a fear of appearing disloyal to the fans. But the real bottom line is that labor rights, although engraved in Japan’s constitution, are frequently ignored. Japanese court decisions are overwhelmingly pro-business, and the players have done little to maneuver themselves into a position of leverage.

The union fought the teams’ ability to control players’ image rights and lost, with the judges’ decision boiling down to, “Well the owners have a lot of expertise in selling things, so let’s just let them keep managing these things shall, we.” That decision was made despite the owners’ experience in managing licensing rights as waiting for people to throw them money and not always messing up the deal.

Labor negotiations in Japan make the MLB-MLBPA talks seem positively progress and engaging. More often they look like this:

Labor: “We’d like better raises, given all we’ve done.”

Management: “So would I. Our policy is not to give raises.”

This process is repeated forever until the labor negotiators, who are not paid for their time, get worn down by the sheer futility of it all.

What the union needs to do is attack some of the huge gaping holes in the Pro Baseball Agreement that governs Nippon Professional Baseball and exploit those for meaningful concessions, such as shortening the amount of service time needed or creating a real pension plan.

The real place to start would be Japan’s reserve clause, which a former GM said recently are essentially unconstitutional, with courts rejecting the claim of companies and pro sports teams that their contracts allow them to block the movement of entertainers and pro athletes.

“The reserve clause is inherently unconstitutional,” he said. “I have to think it will fall under the slightest challenge.”

Some black lives matter to SoftBank Hawks owner

Baseball may be a universal language, but when it comes to professional team owners, hypocrisy is the real lingua franca. And if actions speak louder than words, trouble may be in store for the SoftBank Hawks.

On June 3, SoftBank Group Corporation CEO Masayoshi Son took a bold step toward empowering entrepreneurs shackled by racial discrimination with the announcement his organization would establish a $100 million “Opportunity Growth Fund” the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag.

Racism is a deplorable thing. In order to break through the unfair world that hinders the success of blacks and Latin entrepreneurs, the SB Group will launch a $100 million (Opportunity Growth Fund) fund.

That is a truly admirable and righteous step for Son. But it raises questions about whether the owner of Japan’s best baseball team, the SoftBank Hawks, is as concerned about human rights on his own doorstep as he is in America. More specifically is it OK for the club to keep signing Cuban players who are denied adequate explanation of the deals they are entering into?

The man asking the question is Oscar Luis Colas, a powerful left-handed-hitting outfielder, who also throws in the mid-90s as a southpaw. He is now in the Dominican Republic having defected from Cuba. He now wants to fulfill his major league dream, but the Hawks have placed him on Nippon Professional Baseball’s restricted list, preventing him from going anywhere except back to Japan.

His agents, Charisse Dash and Alex Cotto, are appealing to the Hawks on the grounds that Cuban players are routinely signed without the implications of their contracts ever being explained to them or even the ability to review them in advance.

According to Colas, a few weeks after appearing in a 2017 showcase in Santiago de Cuba, he was summoned to Havana along with his mother who needed to sign his contract as he was an unmarried 18-year-old. When they arrived, they were shown the two contracts they needed to sign and received a cursory explanation.

One document was a standard contract and the other a supplemental attachment stipulating the full terms and obligations of both parties that named Cuba’s baseball federation as his agent. Colas and his mother said recently they understood that the standard non-roster developmental deal was renewable by SoftBank for up to three years.

The supplemental deal, however, ties him to SoftBank for an additional five years.

And though the deal is more lucrative than anything he could get from a major league team, Colas and his mother felt they were sold down the river by the federation without their knowledge.

According to Dash this is standard practice for players in Cuba.

“It is a commonality,” Dash said Saturday from the United States. “None of these players have their contracts adequately explained to them. I’m extremely confident that it never happens.”

A former executive who had dealings with the Cuban federation when it sought out NPB as a trading partner said, “I completely believe Colas’ story. The federation is the government, and it is eager to send players to Japan. The government sees the players as the property of the state.”

Dash cited a Cuban attorney she spoke to in a call with Colas’ mother, Karelia.

“The lawyer said, ‘It doesn’t happen. An athlete has no jurisdictional existence in Cuba,'” said Dash, who is seeking an amicable settlement with the Hawks that would be in both parties’ best interests.

The Hawks, however, have responded by saying in essence, “We have a deal. He has a lucrative contract. We expect him to honor it, period.”

So while Son can wave the Black Lives Matter flag, the team policy of saying “Whatever happens in Cuba stays in Cuba” is pretty standard for how Japanese baseball treats inexperienced Latin players of color and is more in line with what passes for race relations in Major League Baseball.

Sure, MLB loves to crow about Jackie Robinson’s triumph in breaking the color barrier. Yet, every Jackie Robinson day is complete without acknowledging that MLB itself was responsible for the barrier Robinson broke, or the fact that most clubs were not suddenly singing “kumbayah” but had to be dragged kicking and screaming into integration.

And in some respects, major league owners have found a soulmate in Masayoshi Son.

When he took over the Hawks in 2005, he was a man on a mission to have not the best baseball team in Japan, but in the world. One pillar of that is to never give away a single day of team control to a player.

Although service time manipulation is not really a custom in Japan yet, there is some indication the Hawks may have engaged in it last year to prevent their biggest star from becoming a free agent this November.

And now that the Yomiuri Giants have posted pitcher Shun Yamaguchi, the Hawks are Japan’s last holdout against the posting system.

Because the Cuban relationship benefits both the Cuban government, most players, and has become a pillar of five Hawks’ Japan titles in six years, SoftBank should be able to ask the Cubans to do more on their side to make sure a situation like Colas’ does not happen again.

That day of change, however, is not yet on the horizon. One NPB executive with knowledge of the Hawks’ business believes Son’s need for good PR could be the trigger.

“He hates bad press,” the exec said. “The second this thing looks like it’s going to blow up, he’ll put a stop to it. He doesn’t want to get torched in the media.”

“Unfortunately, because Colas is not Japanese, it’s not a story Japan’s media is interested in. They like to portray imported players as greedy and selfish and the teams as being weak for giving in to the their demands. If Colas were Japanese, the media wouldn’t stand for this shabby treatment. They’d be all over it. But he’s not and they’re not.”