Japanese pro baseball showed its true colors this week, when the Nippon Ham Fighters revealed Monday that they were smacked down for asserting the individual team rights that NPB trumpets as the foundation of its business.
Although it was a small story, by revealing it, the Fighters did a huge public service for lovers of Japanese baseball by shedding some light on the hypocrisy that is NPB’s heart of darkness.
On Feb. 1, NPB officially banned fans from sharing video or photos on social media of players at the ballpark “during games”—which it defined as the moment the fans enter the park until the moment the on-field hero interview concludes.
According to the announcement, this commandment strives to “enhance fans’ experience at the stadium” and “for the popularization and development of professional baseball and the improvement of the value of stadium watching while also protecting the rights and legal interests of the host organization.” The rule, however, also gives teams the right to grant permission to the sharing of game video and photos.
That exception is in keeping with NPB’s façade that the rights and interests of each host organization, the home team, are the foundation of its business. The Fighters tested it, were called out for doing so, and then artfully publicized the issue.
Publicizing NPB’s hypocrisy
After the rule was issued, the Fighters issued a blanket permission to its fans to ignore the rule at their home games in their home park. This week, Nippon Ham publicly explained that its policy was intended “to enhance fans’ experience at the stadium” in accordance to the new rule, but said NPB objected to its “interpretation of the rule.”
“We sincerely apologize for causing confusion among our fans, NPB, and the other 11 teams,” the statement read.
By bringing the dispute into the open, the Fighters revealed the hypocrisy at the root of NPB and opened the door for change a crack, in a way that was foreshadowed in high school baseball in 2019.
That year, Niigata Prefecture’s high school baseball federation incurred the wrath of the national federation by implementing pitch limits only in those events 100 percent under their the Niigata federation’s jurisdiction.
By publicizing the step, getting publicly smacked down by the national federation and then rescinding its new rule, Niigata forced the national federation down a road to change. You can read about Niigata’s historic move in “Former greats weigh in on high school pitch limits.”
It is a model the Fighters appear to be carefully following, because change is definitely needed.
One for all and all for Yomiuri
This incident is yet another example of how Japanese professional baseball’s establishment, nominally organized as a group of independent partners, is more like a feudal structure with a single dominant overlord, the Yomiuri Shimbun.
For 90 years, since it founded Japan’s first pro league so its team would have opponents to play against, Yomiuri has stifled any systematic change that would threaten its role as NPB’s chief power broker.
Because NPB is founded on individual teams’ rights, teams don’t have regular broadcast crews covering all their games at home and on the road to build their brands.
Instead, each club sells its home-game rights to the broadcasters of its choosing, and pockets all the loot. The league and visiting team get zilch.
Want to watch all the games of your favorite team, or listen to them all on the radio? Good luck.
The PL unites while NPB stands still
The Pacific League, to which the Fighters belong, long struggled for popularity in the shadow of the Central League’s Yomiuri Giants and Hanshin Tigers, and has thus had to innovate more. When those innovations are announced, Yomiuri harshly criticizes them before adopting them when they prove their value.
The PL created Pacific League Marketing as a joint venture to pool its six teams’ power, and built its fantastic streaming service, Pacific League TV, which is now available outside Japan. But even with that, one can’t see all of a favorite team’s games with a single package.
Overseas broadcasters have long sought to air NPB digest programs but have been daunted by the requirement of getting all 12 teams’ permission. People are trying hard to give NPB money to watch its product, but that’s not how things are done. My experience working in Japan’s media has taught me that companies are more invested in protecting the way they do things than exploring opportunities that might require change.
And in 2006, when a golden opportunity presented itself, NPB showed its true colors.
A golden opportunity
Months after Bobby Valentine’s PL champion Lotte Marines swept the Central League’s Hanshin Tigers in the 2005 Japan Series, Valentine, who had connections with American media, suggested NPB might be able to negotiate a deal to sell the U.S. broadcast rights to the Japan Series.
After winning the Japan Series, Valentine negotiated a contract extension with Lotte that prevented him from returning to the States to manage the Los Angeles Dodgers and also left him as the team’s de facto general manager. This shoved Lotte’s top executive at the time, the infamous Ryuzo Setoyama, into an uneasy partnership that lasted until 2009, when Setoyama regained power by orchestrating a coup in a story that copied the plot of the movie, “Major League.”
In 2006, however, Valentine still referred to the duo’s new agreement in positive terms, how he would suggest ideas to enhance NPB and Setoyama would craft official proposals to NPB’s executive committee.
As I recall, the idea was to have ESPN2 broadcast the Japan Series, but NPB’s executive committee had zero interest in a revenue stream, and rejected it, ostensibly because of its fear of failure.
“Setoyama told me the other teams were afraid that if there were some kind of mishap, it would be embarrassing for NPB,” Valentine said at the time.
Even though the Japan Series is a tremendous product, NPB’s weak governance over independent teams has been a huge drag on growing its marquee product’s value. NPB sets the bare minimum standards of media quality for the event, requiring only one pre-series managers press conference, and leaving it up to the teams after that.
With no rule to prevent teams from acting up, the event suffered the second longest argument delay in its history, on Oct. 16, 2004, when Seibu manager Tsutomu Ito pulled his Lions off the field to protest a mistake by home plate umpire and series crew chief Atsushi Kittaka.
On a one-out swinging bunt with Chunichi Dragons runner Omar Linares on first base, Lions catcher Kosuke Noda swiped at but missed the batter. Kittaka, out of position, called batter Motonobu Tanishige out but signaled in such a way that no one on the field could see. Noda threw to second well ahead of Linares, and his teammate, seeing no out call in front of the plate, stepped on the bag rather than attempting a tag. Linares was ruled safe and chaos ensued.
After repeated conferences with other umpires and more insufficient explanations to Ito and Dragons skipper Hiromitsu Ochiai, play was eventually resumed, but it left a mark. Kittaka, who had famously been involved in several troubling incidents in the past, was removed from the umpiring crew the next day.
Second chance: Sharing is not caring
While the possibility of embarrassment was a plausible excuse in 2006, events in 2020, when South Korea’s KBO negotiated a U.S. broadcast contract while NPB sat on its hands, again, suggest there was more to it than that.
NPB could have made a profitable deal, and definitely received offers from the U.S., but was apparently just not interested in the “popularization and development of professional baseball” it professes to be at the heart of its restricting fans from sharing game images.
Why is a good question, and while I don’t know the answer, my guess is that the real reason for NPB’s refusal to broadcast its product overseas is that the profits from such a package would likely have to be split 12 ways, and that’s not how Yomiuri rolls.
Since Day 1, Yomiuri has acted as if the Giants ARE the act and the other teams are merely the backup band nobody pays to see. Rather than coming out publicly against teams that stir its displeasure, Yomiuri generally gets NPB to issue directives.
We saw this recently when purchasers of tickets for baseball-themed tours of Japan were put out of business by NPB, because Yomiuri went ape shit when it learned outsiders were profiting from selling tickets through a channel Yomiuri didn’t serve.
Ironically, the NPB’s two oldest franchises, the CL’s Giants and Tigers, have shown interest in a joint streaming package and now sell their home interleague games against PL teams on Pacific League TV.
According to several sources, Yomiuri would love all its games to be on Pacific League TV, but would only do so if it could insist on changes, in the same way the CL adopted the PL’s playoff system in 2007 under different rules under its ridiculous new “Climax Series” brand name.
Major League Baseball vice president Jim Small, who long worked in Tokyo and now runs MLB international, said MLB.com has offered to step in and act as a conduit for NPB streaming on its platform, but NPB has shown no interest in that lucrative opportunity.
Since there is zero chance the six PL teams will accept any NPB streaming or broadcast package unless each of the 12 teams gets an equal share of the loot, such a package is unlikely ever to happen, because it conflicts with Yomiuri’s need to be in total command.
