Monday was an off day while the Japan Series moved to Fukuoka, but there were two news items worth mentioning, NPB’s expected difficulty in adjusting its rules to meet players’ demands, and the Sawamura Award announcement.
Both the owners and the Sawamura committee are faced with a conundrum. Owners want people to think they care about the players’ legitimate demands, when they don’t give a rat’s ass.
On the other hand, the ace pitchers who make up the Sawmura committee want to express sympathy with the plight of starting pitchers in an era when pitch counts and deep bullpens have changed the job, without stating the obvious, that today’s pitchers have it much harder than they did.
Owners do the free agency run around
On Monday, the players union and NPB’s player relations committee, headed by Hiroshima Carp executive Kiyomi Suzuki met in a working group session over the issue of the players’ demand to reduce the service time needed to file for free agency.
“We have had 24 meetings but have been unable to reach an agreement on ways to relaxt the rules,” Suzuki said.
On Dec. 7, union chairman Tsubasa Aizawa said the existing system limits the way changes can be made and suggested this year that a petition to Japan’s Fair Trade Commission was a possibility, claiming that the rules, imposed by NPB 30 years ago, violate the antimonopoly act.
NPB’s free agency has two stages of eligibility, domestic and international. Nine years of 140 or more days of service time on major league rosters are needed to file for international free agency.
Seven years of service time is needed for players who turned pro if they played amateur ball after high school to file for domestic free agency, while eight years is needed for guys signing out of high school.
Those who file for free agency forfeit the right to file again for three years, and teams signing players from other NPB teams are allowed financial compensation and for top-level free agents, they can be forced to surrender a player in compensation as well.
The union has called for abolishing all compensation as a tax that constrains the ability of players, who are ostensibly free, to get fair market value.
While Suzuki said talks should continue, management is in no hurry to make any changes, that do not directly benefit the owners. I have dealt with management in labor talks, and “we should continue talks” is company speak for “we are actually negotiating as required, but don’t think for one second that we’re ever going to give you anything unless you fight for it – and don’t think fighting for it will ever move us.”
Sawamura Award panel pitches a shutout
The Eiji Sawamura Award committee on Monday opted not to hand out the award this year, since, the five-member panel of former ace pitchers was unable to agree on a single worthy candidate.
The award, named in honor of the Yomiuri Giants’ first ace pitcher, is given to the starting pitcher in either league who best exemplifies Sawamura’s quality as a strikeout-throwing ace, and, technically is not about who is most effective.
Their problem is that the guidelines used to measure worthiness are out of step with today’s game — which has changed because the game has changed and become vastly more difficult for pitchers than when those guidelines were written.
Former Giants ace Tsuneo Horiuchi, who has chaired the committee since returning from a disastrous spell as Giants manager from 2024 to 2025, said the committee could not reach a unanimous decision on which pitcher was worthy of the award.
Although ERA’s plummeted with the disastrously aerodynamically unsound ball used in the first half, innings pitched did not increase the way they generally did in 2011, when then commissioner Ryozo Kato’s standard ball was introduced and home runs also decreased rapidly.
“It was a year of big pitching and poor hitting,” Horiuchi said. “And as such, we would have hoped pitchers would have worked more.”
The difference, most likely, was that the 2011 drop was predictable. Then everyone knew the ball would be deader than the Mizuno high flyers in use by most teams since the late 1990s. This year came as a surprise, and it took teams more than a month to figure out how to adjust their approaches to the new reality.
Pitchers are compared on seven benchmarks, games, complete games, wins, winning percentage, innings pitched, strikeouts and ERA.
“Many players’ names came up, but we couldn’t narrow it down to one,” Horiuchi said. “It’s not the best pitcher award, but an award with Sawamura’s name and authority. There’s no need to force a choice.”
The final top candidates boiled down to Hiromi Ito of the Nippon Ham Fighters and Shosei Togo of the Yomiuri Giants. Ito threw a Japan-high five complete games. His 14 wins fell one shy of that standard, and he was 23-2/3 innings short of 200, and did not have one of those super ERAs posted by a bunch of other contenders.
As usual, nobody matched the 10-complete game standard, and for the sixth straight year, no pitcher threw 200 innings. Part of the problem every year is that most managers today are aware that overwork is a problem, and are keen not to destroy their top pitching assets, and the committee recognizes this.
“This year, it’s difficult to choose a winner. The fact that so many names are mentioned means that the performances are the same. Even when comparing, there wasn’t just one,” Horiuchi said.
Every time the committee fails to have obvious candidates because no one pitches enough innings or throws enough complete games, they talk about revising the benchmarks, but the only thing they’ve done is add a “high quality start” to help them separate candidates.
“We need to give some thought to things like complete games and innings. I really don’t want to change them, but it will be easier for players to adopt (the criteria) if we gradually make them more in line with the times. There is a possibility that we will have such a discussion at the appropriate time,” Horiuchi said.
