Nippon Professional Baseball, as the umbrella organization of the 12 franchises who operate Japan’s major league teams and 12 of the minor league teams in Japan’s Eastern and Western leagues. Its sole job is to ensure quality control by setting the boundaries within which teams operate, officiating games, and keeping records.
And while all 12 teams and Japan’s game as a whole would benefit from greater quality control and universal coordinated action, NPB tends to leave things up to the teams to do as they like, often to the detriment of the entire product.
If owners really wanted what was best for the fans and for their businesses’ overall success, they would work together to remake NPB, but each team’s parent company, especially in the better established Central League, can barely see beyond its own short-term interests.
When a central authority leaves quality control questions to the decisions of local interests, it is abdicating a principle responsibility and opening the door for bad actors, and it is never a surprise when those bad actors are the ones urging the loosening of central authority.
I was reminded of this in my homeland last week and on the field this week, when a Nippon Ham Fighters PR apparatchik interrupted my conversation with outfielder Shun Mizutani at Seibu Dome to tell me I must not to speak to players during practice.
Excuse me?
I was speechless in a way I haven’t been since a time on a train 20 years ago and two young men asked an older man to move over next to me so they could sit together and the old guy said in Japanese, “Forget it. There’s no way I’m sitting next to some lousy foreigner.”
The whole thing at the ballpark was absurd, because the only time before the game we have access to players is during practice. Prior to COVID, pre-game practice was any accredited member of the media had unhindered access to every player, coach and manager willing to talk. Some didn’t talk, but that’s fine, most would agree to answer questions and explain things.
That environment attracted lots of former players to pre-game practices, where they mingled with the media as well as with the guys in uniform. It was occasionally dull, but often magical. I made contacts and friendships there, learned of the old days, heard interesting stories from players, current and former, and had the ways of Japanese baseball explained to me from many different angles.
Before each game, media access on the sidelines and in the dugout and selected areas under the stands was ensured by NPB. In order to combat the coronavirus pandemic, NPB owners decided to delegate that authority to each team, while restricting reporters on the visiting team-side to the camera wells next to the visiting dugout.
When the coronavirus ceased to be a national health emergency in 2023, the Seibu Lions and Hiroshima Carp let reporters back on the field during the home team’s practice. The Lions also let reporters back in the dugout.
The Lotte Marines let reporters use a small portion of their stadium’s massive dugout while the home team practiced, but rather than let them access that space through the convenient corridor they had shared with players until 2020, media are required to go walk up back steps to the stadium concourse and then walk through the stadium to the camera wells, and then to the dugout.
Two examples of this came to mind this week in Japanese baseball, and my only regret is that this issue is not limited to Japanese baseball, but first things first. At the other extreme, the DeNA BayStars didn’t let reporters stand in the camera well next to their dugout. To talk to a player, one had to shout down from the stands and then get them to go down the foul line to Yokohama Stadium’s field seats.
The excuses for these restrictions have been monumentally disingenuous, but their combined effect is to discourage reporters and players from interacting without team permission, and has been a particular burden on reporters whom teams have the least amount of leverage over.
Beat reporters owe their ability to function on the good will of the team, and they have to be careful to not offend the teams. On the other hand, reporters who cover baseball as a whole for weekly magazines, evening papers or foreign language media depend far less on teams’ good graces. Because NPB accredited them, teams could not keep them off the field before games, and could not control who they talked to, until the pandemic that is.
While NPB is still in charge of accreditation, teams are now allowed to make reporting before and after games as difficult and inconvenient as they like. Until this year, fans had a space at Tokyo Dome from where they could watch the Giants take BP up close – a space off limits to reporters for the “sake of safety.”
Teams are working hard to control what is being written about them because it is easier for them. But it is bad for their business in the long term. Former players no longer wander over to the ballparks unless they are working in the media that day. Reporters don’t bother with going near the field. At a Giants-Buffaloes interleague game last month, the Tokyo Dome press box was as empty as it ever was in the 1990s at one of the Nippon Ham Fighters’ meaningless late-season throw-away games.
The owners run NPB, and it is no surprise that once COVID whetted their appetite for strict restrictions on reporters, they would refuse to surrender that control now.
The traditional pre-game practice access was a generational link between the working media and Japanese baseball’s living past. Clamping down on access to players is, geezers like me, sad and annoying. But for future fans, it’s a tragedy. Through their desire to control reporting of their teams, owners are inadvertently watering down the context future generations will be able to glean from reporters who will never have the access I enjoyed for 25 years.
If you asked an owner about it, you would get an answer like those we heard 20 years ago this summer, that only the people in the business of baseball were qualified to discuss what was best for their product, not the consumers, and not the skilled craftsmen who actually were the product.
Media access to pre-game practice may be a tiny thing to the owners, but they have dug in their heels and rejected demands from the Baseball Reporters Press Club, insisting that owners, and not NPB should be in charge, that NPB’s previous media access rules infringed on the owners’ freedoms to run their teams how they see fit.
Away from the field and across the sea, I’m hearing the same story from my homeland, where a small minority — and a radical majority on the U.S. Supreme Court–is arguing that the only way to protect the rights of individual Americans is to neuter the federal government and give states the power to restrict human rights, ban books, restrict health care, suppress the right to vote.
This was essentially the position of Southern slave-holding oligarchs in the 1850s, whose ambitions were only curbed by individual Americans who wanted no part of becoming a permanent laboring underclass in a nation ruled exclusively by a few of their wealthiest compatriots who saw government spending on public health and education as unimportant, and business regulation as un-American. It required individual Americans of all colors to take up arms to assert the rights and freedoms promised to them in the Declaration of Independence.
I’m not suggesting baseball reporters resort to violence, but I would like fans to know that nothing good ever comes from curbing freedoms.
