Note: Updated this after hearing from one Pacific League team about the status of foreign amateur acquisitions.
The sellout crowds at Tokyo Dome from starting from March 15 to see the Hanshin Tigers’ and Yomiuri Giants’ exhibitions against the Chicago Cubs and Los Angeles Dodgers are a testimony to the fact that Japan, or at least the Yomiuri Shimbun, which is promoting the Major League Openers at Tokyo Dome, has come to peace with the fact that Japanese baseball will never seek to rival MLB.
The games, culminating with a two-game series between the Cubs and Dodgers and their five former Nippon Professional Baseball stars, are a symbolic surrender, as if the Tokugawa Shogunate not only welcomed Commodore Mathew C. Perry and his black ships’ incursion into Japan’s home waters but sold tickets to a parade in their honor.
For fans, the games’ attraction is undeniable. Five Japanese stars, including Shohei Ohtani, arguably the best baseball player ever, symbolize the quality Japan can produce. But on the flip side, their status as returning heroes for a foreign baseball power symbolize the fact that Japan’s major leagues are content to be second rate.
Don’t get me wrong. Japanese baseball is really good, really hard and really entertaining. It is a quality product. But it is also one whose proprietors show little desire in improving. NPB’s current mantra is: “Let’s have the best baseball we can while losing our best players to MLB, because we won’t spend one penny more to actually compete with MLB in terms of quality.”
A little history
NPB’s business model is a baseball version of the United States’ first governing agreement, the Articles of Confederation in that it subordinates the interests of the whole to the whims of the most powerful partners.
Yomiuri, since Day 1, has taken advantage of this situation to turn the pro baseball business into an analogy of Japan’s Tokugawa Shogunate, which petrified the country’s social system as it existed on Oct. 1, 1600, when Tokugawa Ieyasu decisively defeated his principal rivals for national power at the battle of Sekigahara.
For 250 years, the Tokugawa clan ran Japan through a divide-and-conquer system that ensured they would be the big fish in the Japanese pond by impoverishing the other clans, monitoring them closely to ensure they never acted in concert and banning virtually all interaction with foreign countries.
This latter policy, however, proved to have fatal consequences when the U.S., led by Commodore Perry, and its technologically advanced European rivals came calling in the middle of the 19th century.
For 89 years, Yomiuri has pushed rules and policies that curbed overall growth and development by guaranteeing each team exclusive rights to its home game broadcasts and merchandise income, making it harder for NPB to market lucrative joint broadcasting and licensing deals, limiting the growth of those channels that could benefit all teams.
Chronic stadium shortages through NPB’s first 40 years created a landscape where most clubs became tenants, surrendering not only a fixed annual fee to use their main stadium but also a large cut of the gate while collecting no advertising and concession revenue.
As parent companies became accustomed to their teams generating red ink with little hope the market could grow through joint action, NPB teams’ typical business model evolved to revolve around synergies, brand recognition and the advertising value of having the parent company’s name in the newspapers every day and on TV news almost nightly for seven months a year.
If this estimated value exceeds operating losses less the tax deductions on those losses, a given team is considered profitable. Because manageable operating losses are the norm and most teams see little marginal profit from winning, investment in player development beyond the required single minor league team has never caught on, with only the SoftBank Hawks and Giants even remotely bucking that trend.
The puzzle
Since 1995, Bobby Valentine has puzzled over how Japan’s major leagues could possibly lag behind MLB in player development and quality.
Japan’s passion for baseball is equaled by Cuba and the Dominican Republic but is otherwise unsurpassed in the world. That deep abiding passion, a strong economy, and world-class infrastructure, makes Japan fertile soil in which to grow the world’s best baseball leagues, but it hasn’t.
It’s not from lack of opportunity. MLB has become skilled at using its monopoly to extort lucrative stadium deals, something only the Pacific League’s Nippon Ham Fighters have learned to emulate.
Yet there are ample avenues for growth, especially in the area of amateur talent acquisition. MLB’s amateur signing bonus pools limit how much their teams can each spend on amateur signings, secure in the knowledge that NPB teams won’t try to outbid them, something they could easily do.
NPB guidelines limit how much its teams can spend on players taken in Japan’s draft, but not on imports, and in 2019 the Hawks showed what this could mean. That summer, they signed amateur pitcher Carter Stewart Jr, the eighth overall pick in MLB’s 2018 draft, to a six-year $6 million contract.
To fully exploit that route, Japanese teams need to broaden their coaching knowhow and development infrastructure but these are do-able provided the will exists.
It doesn’t take huge amounts of money to outbid MLB teams limited by their signing bonus pools. The Giants and Hawks have been scooping up amateurs in the Dominican Republic and, according to a PL source, the Fighters, Rakuten Eagles and Orix Buffaloes have begun signing amateurs from Taiwan.
Still, only a handful of teams, mostly from the PL, have shown any interest in exploiting the rule gap that exists between NPB and MLB.
But when it comes to this MLB tour, the Yomiuri Shimbun’s sports business department, at least, has shown it has mastered the art of profiting from how things are done differently in America and Japan.
Yomiuri learns the lesson
For the past 25 years, Yomiuri has been MLB’s principal promotion partner in Japan. It excels at promoting and selling tickets, and this time was in charge of local credentialing for the MLB tour, where it proved adept at exploiting the difference between reporting norms in MLB and NPB.
Media outlets at baseball’s big events in Japan typically receive a limited number of field-access passes, meaning only a portion of their staff at the park can actually be on the field. It is a system that does not exist in MLB or the WBC outside of Japan. And while NPB teams might not understand how to exploit rule differences, the Yomiuri sports business department does.
For this MLB tour, applicants for credentials who were denied field access were instead given the opportunity to purchase “interview seats,” pairs of seats for one person close to the field at a rate of 36,000 yen (roughly $250) for the two Cubs exhibitions, 48,000 yen for the two Dodgers exhibitions and 90,000 yen for the two MLB official games.
That way, an outlet in need of game photos but without the field access enabling its photographers access to the camera pit, or to talk to players on the field during practice would have no option but to shell out extra cash to the promoter.
Masterful.
Of course, none of this would matter if NPB’s owners actually pursued a brand of baseball that would attract the best players in the world. If that were to happen, MLB would be just another brand of major league baseball instead of “The major leagues.”
That route, however, is expensive and not what most owners signed up for, so instead, NPB owners spend their time thinking up ways to stick band-aids on their shortcomings and hoping for the best. Hawks owner Masayoshi Son has, since he purchased the team in 2004, aspired to have the world’s best baseball club, a dream the Giants’ founder, Matsutaro Shoriki shared.
Yet after decades of ruling a system that cemented Yomiuri’s place in the hierarchy while stifling innovation and growth so that NPB can’t compete with MLB, I suppose it makes sense that that company is now capitalizing on the gap in quality it has helped oversee between Japan and the United States.
While fans are selling out Tokyo Dome for the MLB exhibition and games, the real sellouts are taking place off the field.
