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.
Within NPB, there is a strong belief that baseball jobs should primarily go to Japanese. The union constantly pushes for limits on imports—those who enter NPB without going through its draft. Foreign residents playing amateur ball in Japan must enter through the draft along with Japanese citizens regardless of their residence or previous pro experience.
Like MLB, Japan has guidelines on the amounts that can be paid in salary and signing bonus to newly drafted players. Unlike MLB, there are no such restrictions on imports, even amateurs. In 2019, pitcher Carter Stewart Jr. joined SoftBank on a deal that was much more lucrative than he could have received in MLB after the Atlanta Braves stiffed him on the size of his signing bonus.
Japan’s overseas advantage
If they want to, Japanese teams can loiter around MLB’s Dominican Republic academies and snap up the kids training to play in MLB by offering more than American teams are able to. Indeed, there are now a handful of these youngsters in Japan with the SoftBank Hawks and Yomiuri Giants, and a kid from Taiwan with the Nippon Ham Fighters.
In 1993, Japanese players got a kind of lame-ass free agency because it suited the goals of the Giants. If Yomiuri and SoftBank believe they can leverage their wealth to secure a significant edge in the overseas amateur talent market, they might pressure other teams to make concessions to the union to end restrictions on imports.
More work for everyone
One solution to the work-for-Japanese issue is more total baseball jobs, and this ties into two areas that would push NPB to be more competitive, expansion at the major and minor league levels.
The Hawks are a tremendous example of how much raw baseball talent in Japan goes undrafted. A quarter to a third of Japan’s most successful team in recent decades comes from players who signed through the developmental draft after all the other 11 teams ignored them.
The biggest obstruction to progress is that most teams’ primary business model is geared toward generating brand familiarity for parent companies by being one of only 12 teams mentioned almost daily on TV news and in the papers. Japan could expand to 16 teams but it will not be an easy sell – unless there was a motive for the additional costs of more minor league teams, coaches and expanded facilities.
Show them the money
That motive would be profit, with an end target of competing directly with MLB for talent and television revenues, and a real World Series? Forget about it. The World Baseball Classic? There wouldn’t be a rake in the world large enough for that pile of money.
But long before that, NPB could profit immediately from reorganizing its broadcast rights and selling its product to overseas TV networks, a side of the business that is run less efficiently than a neighborhood bottega.
I can buy PL TV for about 1,250 yen a month or $9.00, and only get Pacific League home games, but the quality of the streams is superior. The package also includes the interleague home games of the CL’s Giants and Hanshin Tigers.
PL TV is now available in North and South America and Taiwan, but to stream every NPB game – even in Japan – one must buy multiple subscriptions since Hiroshima Carp home games and Chunichi Dragons home games against the Giants are not on the biggest domestic streaming service, DAZN. And overseas, one needs a different subscription for each CL team.
The idea is to gear NPB’s business model toward generating profit and way from treating their teams as extremely valuable tax deductions that might occasionally make money.
The dark side
It’s probably inevitable, but I hope Japanese teams don’t succumb to the urge that they should profit at the expense of taxpayers, the way MLB owners do.
Traditionally, Japanese teams did not adopt MLB-style blackmail tactics to get bargain rates on facilities, but the Nippon Ham Fighters have since adopted that technique, getting locals to pony up to upgrade the club’s spring training site in Nago, Okinawa Prefecture, and getting concessions in the construction of their fancy new park in Kitahiroshima, Hokkaido.
I don’t know if that’s the wave of the future, but teams owning or leasing stadiums should be. It represents an investment in the stadium experience in order to maximize profits. Nagoya Dome and Jingu Stadium are fine, but a far cry from what the other 10 teams that invest in their stadiums are doing. Even the Seibu Lions park, the domed stadium formerly known as Prince, is – when not an ice box or the world’s largest outdoor sauna in summer, a more entertaining experience than Jingu or Nagoya Dome.
With a profit motive, NPB would have increased incentive to tighten its contract loopholes and renegotiate its posting agreement with MLB.
Although I hate the draft and the reserve system, and believe both should be eradicated like a disease, they are here for now. If teams can get a compensation pick at the end of the first round of the next draft, they will have one less reason to sacrifice their best interests just to avoid wasting a draft pick, as the Marines would have been forced to do had they not come to terms with Roki Sasaki after the 2019 draft.
A better option
Another possiblity is for NPB to agree with the union to place curbs on what teams can and cannot agree to in their secret agreements with players, although I would prefer a more humanistic approach: If you want to secure a player’s services for multiple years, you pay for it.
When players turn pro you offer club options to extend their contracts, and incentives. In other words, treat them like adults in a normal society. Problem solved.
Making NPB into a much more competitive operation only seems like rocket science because owners have only tried to make changes by fine tuning the kind of 19th century American gilded-age management practices that pro baseball is immersed in here and in the United States.
