Category Archives: Baseball

A lot has changed, Part 2

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.

Continue reading A lot has changed, Part 2

A lot has changed Part 1

Two Japanese baseball players this month have signed record contracts. On Dec. 9, Shohei Ohtani agreed to play 10 years for the Los Angeles Dodgers for $700 million, making the two-way superstar the highest paid team-sport athlete in the world. Less than two weeks later, Yoshinobu Yamamoto became baseball’s highest-paid pitcher with a $325 million 12-year contract, also with the Dodgers.

Yamamoto, whose contract eclipsed Masahiro Tanaka’s $155-million seven-year contract with the New York Yankees as the largest ever signed by a player upon his entry to MLB, earned the Orix Buffaloes a $50.6 million. If Yamamoto has options to quit the Dodgers after six seasons, the Buffaloes will not receive anything for his seasons from Year 7 to 12 until he actually remains with LA. If he stays in LA, the Dodgers will have gotten an interest-free loan from Orix, and if Yamamoto quits, and signs a huge contract elsewhere, Orix will not get one single yen.

It’s not an elegant system, but MLB is not run in order to be elegant. It’s run to maximize monopoly profit and generate high return on investment, and while fans of Japanese baseball are proud that guys who grew here and honed their craft in our major leagues, the Central and Pacific, are recognized by MLB as among the most valuable in the world.

But what about our major leagues?

Daisuke Matsuzaka’s $52-million contract with the Boston Red Sox on Nov. 2, 2006, led then Lotte Marines manager Bobby Valentine to say that NPB’s talent drain would put it on track toward following America’s Negro leagues into extinction.

That hasn’t happened, because there is a market for professional baseball IN Japan, where fans can see games live and cheer for THEIR teams.

Continue reading A lot has changed Part 1