The Lotte Marines posting of Roki Sasaki two years before it makes any financial sense for them and with at least six more years of team control points to a sad reality for Nippon Professional Baseball, that in its current form, it will continue be the “stepping stone to MLB” that Hall of Fame manager Tatsuro Hirooka claims it isn’t.
Players going to play
Japanese baseball exists at the nexus of superior amateur infrastructure, a sports culture of intense practice and attention to detail and the ability to observe successful role models in the form of compatriots starring against the best competition in the world.
Because of that, individual youngsters will continue to think outside the boxes Japan traditionally uses to constrain the growth of players to accepted parameters. These individual players, who know how to work and how to dream, will continue to see beyond Japan’s traditional boundaries and seek out the best baseball in the world.
Because moving to United States as a teenager bound for the minor leagues is a huge leap for kids who grow up in a baseball world where everybody does the same thing and expects to be told what to do by their coaches. It might be easier for mavericks like Ichiro Suzuki and Shohei Ohtani but it is still daunting. And because of that, NPB is the preferred landing spot for teenagers hoping to move to MLB in the future.
Back in the day
In Hirooka’s day, NPB wasn’t a stepping stone to MLB. Despite the outlier success of Masanori Murakami as a young San Francisco Giants reliever, baseball remained locked in a social Darwinist mindset, where leagues were microcosms of populations, with some leagues most exceptionally good and others increasingly inferior, and even the top stars from “inferior” leagues could not compete in superior ones.
This belief led to the Yomiuri Giants shoving free agency down the throats of their fellow owners ahead of the 1992 season, secure in the belief that no Japanese stars could succeed in MLB, and thus would gravitate only to the team with the most money to spend, Yomiuri.
It took all of three years for Hideo Nomo and his stunning success in America to render that world view obsolete, opening the era of Japan becoming a stepping stone to MLB.
Unlike free agency in MLB, which led to a business partnership between MLB owners seeking new streams of revenue and players scooping up much of it until owners really learned to leverage their monopoly power.
Japan’s free agency did not usher in an era of prosperity or quality, but it did create an opening for stars to move to MLB freely, and without compensation, one of the reasons the posting system became desirable here.
NPB’s basic business model, created in 1950 when the single pro league expanded and split into two as NPB, could have been modeled after the systems created in 17th century Japan by the Tokugawa’s clan.
A tiny bit of history
The Tokugawa shogunate, set up in 1603 by Tokugawa Ieyasu, made the descendants of the his family’s three branches secure in their national dominance by hamstringing all other clans by keeping them in virtual poverty, enforcing strict sanctions on social advancement and interaction with foreigners, and preventing them from cooperating with one another.
Although technology, learning, art and culture all advanced during the peace of the Tokugawa’s reign, the idea was to fix Japan in time to maintain the central power’s authority. This worked really well until the imperialist west showed up in force in the 19th century and upset the balance of power.
For 265 years, the Tokugawa’s military order ensured peace but was unable to cope with rivals clans secretly acquiring modern weapons, peasant unrest and the direct external threat of western powers, and fell in 1868.
The Yomiuri shogunate
The Yomiuri Shimbun, as it exists today, was the creation of Matsutaro Shoriki, who purchased the newspaper and consolidated with a number of others. The politically connected Shoriki followed the lead of other newspapers at the time by sponsoring sporting tournaments to generate content.
He famously succeeded in getting Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig to join a high-powered American all-star team he brought to Japan. To curb the excesses of college baseball’s profit-taking, the Japanese government prohibited college players from playing pros, forcing Shoriki to create Japan’s fourth professional team to play the all-stars.
This was the Giants’ genesis, and after his team toured America, Shoriki went where Japan’s past pro teams had failed by creating a league for his team to play in from 1936.
I don’t know the business rules under which Shoriki’s league competed, but when NPB was formed ahead of the 1950 season, Shoriki followed the Tokugawa’s guideline to make sure teams operated within sets of rules he laid down and which discouraged cooperation in their joint business.
A legacy of that is that each of the 12 teams owns the exclusive rights to its own home games and exclusive rights to market and profit from its own merchandise. Numerous overseas broadcasters have tried to air Japanese pro baseball digests for their viewers only to be told they had to secure 12 sets of rights.
Because of that, one doesn’t have teams of announcers and analysts and broadcast engineers and producers who follow teams around the country covering all their games. Teams sell their home game broadcast rights haphazardly, and their fans get none of the local broadcast crew flavor for their road games.
Although Shoriki dreamed of building an environment that would allow his Giants to challenge MLB’s best for a world title, the real business of baseball is to generate advertising and publicity that is more valuable to the parent company than the operating losses minus the tax deductions stemming from those losses.
That explains why the Chunichi Dragons and Yakult Swallows continue to spend tons of money to play in rented ballparks from which they get only a share of the ticket income while getting none of the advertising or concession sales. They have invested in a business that – after taxes – is a net benefit, and they have little interest in spending more in order to shift toward building leagues that compete qualitatively with MLB.
NPB will continue to be a stepping stone to MLB, not because, as Hirooka asserts, players are selfish, but because NPB doesn’t want to change in a changing world.
