By virtue of running one of just two huge pro spectator sports in one of the world’s top economies, there is no reason to believe Nippon Professional Baseball could not possibly rival MLB in terms of quality and depth of talent. It would take time and investment, but there could be a world where Japanese teams attract their share of the world’s top baseball talent and market their games around the globe.

Why NPB is a historical anachronism: “Roki Sasaki and NPB’s rocky road”

Tip of the hat to John Lennon

Imagine a universe in which there was no appreciable difference between the talent depth in NPB and MLB, where the best players from North and Central America and the Caribbean dreamed of playing in Japan because it’s different, and where Japan’s best players were still drawn to MLB for the experience but were just as happy to compete here with American fans tuning in to see the next Shohei Ohtani competing in NPB parks with all their organized chaos.

During the years Bobby Valentine managed in Japan, we frequently shook our heads in amazement that a nation with such a strong economy and robust infrastructure and a love of baseball unsurpassed in the world could lag so far behind MLB.

The simple reason is that NPB has attempted to keep its system anchored in the past, while the outside world has dramatically changed.

How NPB and MLB stack up

MLB develops talent from all over the world, while NPB operates as if its fans want their teams to be purely Japanese, which was probably not even true in the 1960s, when Yomiuri billed its Giants as purely Japanese despite the club’s best pitcher, Masaichi Kaneda, being Korean and its most productive hitter, Sadaharu Oh, Chinese.