There is no real news about Lotte pitcher Roki Sasaki today and the “will he or won’t he” move to MLB via the posting system before he turns 25, but when has that stopped people from commenting about such things?
Before going into the weeds, it’s easy to see why this story gets peoples’ hackles up. It’s about a Japanese player who is under contract with a team in Japan wanting to leave that club so he can go play in MLB even when his club has no desire and no obvious incentive to allow it.
Although the specific details of the Sasaki story are unprecedented, the responses echo two similar situations in the past, when the balance of power between an individual player, his team, and the top-down structure of NPB was challenged in ways few at the time thought possible.
Here are the publicly known incontrovertible facts:
- Moving to MLB via the posting system requires a team’s consent
- International professionals signing MLB contracts before they are 25 may only sign minor league deals with signing bonuses limited to a few million dollars.
- Overseas players with six seasons of professional experience who are 25 or older have no restrictions on the value of their MLB contracts. The Orix Buffaloes could potentially receive over $50 million in fees from Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s move this winter to the Los Angeles Dodgers.
- Posting fees paid to teams are calculated as a fraction of the value of the contract actually paid, and a team posting a player prior to his 25th birthday cannot expect even $1 million in exchange for releasing him.
The current posting fee calculations went into effect in December 2017, when the only NPB star posted before his 25th birthday, Shohei Ohtani, moved to MLB. But prior to NPB and MLB agreeing to the new rules, his team, the Nippon Ham Fighters, received an exemption to receive the previous maximum posting fee of $20 million, instead of the $700,000 or so they would have received under the new rules.
Unlike the Fighters, the Marines stand to lose in the area of $29 million if Sasaki is posted before his 25th birthday. Leaving aside the question of why the Marines would post a player before he turns 25, let’s talk about the responses to the whole issue.
These can be broken down into three categories
- Sasaki can’t possibly be posted. Any story that says it is possible is made up since the team would lose too much money, Sasaki hasn’t proved himself yet, and the player himself stands to lose too much money.
- Sasaki is selfish for telling Lotte he wants to move before he turns 25 since he has yet to prove himself capable of pitching a full season in NPB.
- Sasaki is being pressured by an “evil mastermind” who engineered the whole scheme and has convinced the pitcher that it is in his best interests when it is not.
It’s “impossible”
No. 1 is based on there being no obvious incentive for Lotte to allow Sasaki to go, and no financial incentive for the player. Yet it is the easiest to refute, because there is no rule that says when Lotte will be able to post one of its own players. Any one who tells you “it can’t possibly happen” is talking out his ass.
If they tell you it is “highly unlikely,” for those same reasons and the fact that it would be unprecedented, that’s different.
Lotte executives have said it is highly irregular to post a player who has yet to contribute fully to the team. One Twitter poster described this as an utter rejection of Sasaki’s demand, but the only thing revealed in that story was that Sasaki had expressed an interest in being posted, which doubters had been labeling “a rumor.”
So, let’s add that to things we know: Sasaki has told the team he wants to go to MLB.
Once that was out of the bag, it became time for media name calling.
Sasaki is being selfish
The first is from Nikkan Gendai. Its article didn’t come out and say Sasaki was being selfish and immature, but merely compared his numbers so far with what four other players, Yu Darvish, Masahiro Tanaka, Yusei Kikuchi and Shohei Ohtani, did before they left.
The article went on to say, “fans are saying Sasaki is being immature and selfish” and that his desire to move to MLB will find little support.
Sasaki is being used
This one comes from Asagei Plus. Writer Katsuhiko Abe implies Sasaki is being led by the nose by an “evil mastermind,” implying he would never be so devious to pull this selfish stunt on the Marines before a move would be in everyone’s best interest if he wasn’t being urged on by someone behind the scenes.
This article cites reporters who say, “A lot of people within the team are talking that someone is pulling the strings behind the scenes and manipulating Sasaki.”
The worst is yet to come
These articles are just the start. After all, we know very few facts about the matter. Sooner or later, however, Sasaki will become a target of condemnation for exercising his rights in a way other players haven’t.
Earlier, I referred to two similar cases. These two happened in rapid succession in the 1990s.
- Hideo Nomo’s defiance of precedent to move to MLB through a loophole in NPB rules prior to the 1995 season.
- Hideki Irabu’s 1996 walkout from the Lotte Marines that led to his move to MLB and the New York Yankees via a “trade” with the San Diego Padres.
Both Nomo and Irabu were attempting what no player had ever done—choose where they wanted to work in a system that told them where they had to work and gave them no obvious solution. In both cases, their plans to leave met with stiff opposition and condemnation. They were treated as traitors while the media searched for villains who had put such traitorous thoughts in their heads.
Hideo Nomo
Robert Whiting is the leading English language expert on Nomo’s exodus from the Kintetsu Buffaloes, but to put in simple terms, Nomo and his agent Don Nomura conned Kintetsu into accepting his retirement rather than give him what he demanded a multiyear contract – something no Buffaloes player had ever received.
Once Nomo had “retired,” NPB rules then allowed him to play in any other country, causing MLB to declare him a free agent. Right away, the Seattle Mariners were said to be interested, and the Nikkan Sports filled its front page with a story of NPB accusing the Mariners of tampering.
There was nothing to it, however, but the vitriol never stopped. Throughout the spring of 1995, baseball writers across Japan got special assignments. Normally tasked with the essential spring training work of counting bullpen pitches to catchers (standing or squatting) and batting practice swings and the number hit over the fence, writers were asked to find negative things to write about Nomo.
Writers quizzed players, coaches, managers and former players so that every day’s paper included a story about how and why Nomo would fail, and he would get his just desserts for betraying Japanese baseball.
These juicy stories continued right up until Nomo began to succeed, at which point, the public demanded stories about him as a hero, and the same players, coaches, managers and former players who had ridiculed him weeks before began extolling his virtues as a ballplayer and raising him as an example of an ideal Japanese hero.
And though Nomo was not Japan’s first MLB player, he was the first to leave Japan on his own power, and his treachery/heroism changed the game in ways Japan’s owners never expected and are still struggling to comprehend.
Hideki Irabu
In the summer of 1996, I was going to Tokyo Dome to talk to Lotte coach Len Sakata, and had my first encounter with Hideki Irabu. We entered the same doorway from opposite sides at normal walking speed and barely avoided a head-on collision, literally.
What I didn’t know at that instant was that Irabu was steaming having come from a meeting with then general manager Tatsuro Hirooka, who refused his demand to be allowed to play in MLB in 1997. Irabu walked off the team and only returned after Lotte agreed to a deal where Irabu would be assigned to the San Diego Padres, who would release players from their system so they could play in Japan for Lotte.
Before that deal was struck, my friend Marty Kuehnert published a column in whatever paper he was writing for at the time that said the Marines would never allow Irabu to move because the rules did not require them to. “There will never be another Nomo,” he wrote.
My thinking at the time was that baseball contracts and baseball’s reserve system are 19th-century artifacts of America’s Gilded Age, when workers’ rights were established by the terms of the contracts they agreed to in order to work for their employers, and that governments could not interfere as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Lochner v. New York.
But in today’s world, or even the world of 1996, the idea that we can force someone to exercise his chosen profession for only one employer in the world, and prohibit him from applying his trade where he chooses is absurd.
I argued in 2006 with my boss at the Daily Yomiuri that the arbitrary rules under which a ballplayer was required to sign away his present and future in order to play professionally might someday be challenged in court. Don Nomura, telling me the Irabu story a few years ago, said it nearly happened.
The Marines had a working agreement with the Padres, with whom Irabu refused to play, saying his dream was to play for the Yankees. Had MLB not stepped in and forced the Padres to trade his rights to the Yankees for a package of players, Nomura was prepared to sue MLB in a California federal court.
Why Roki?
This is the level of controversy where Sasaki is currently heading for a simple reason: People like things to be predictable and understandable, and by breaking with precedent Sasaki is causing people discomfort.
Baseball’s antiquated labor structure is out of step with the world, but people still see today’s game as a continuation of the baseball that was played decades or even a century ago. In December, Japan’s recent WBC manager, Hideki Kuriyama, spoke to legendary third baseman Shigeo Nagashima about his springs with the Yomiuri Giants, when they trained at the Los Angeles Dodgers’ facility in Vero Beach, Florida. Nagashima said there was talk of his playing in MLB. There may have been talk, but it was castles-in-the-sky “what if” talk, since the idea that players should be tied to their contracts for life was still strong.
When Daisuke Matsuzaka was posted after the 2006 season by the Seibu Lions, I discussed how the posting bids submitted by numerous MLB teams and the contract offer he’d received from the Boston Red Sox had established his value, and that he might have other options besides accepting Boston’s offer or returning to Seibu.
That possibility was an anti-trust lawsuit against MLB teams for neglecting to sign Japanese players of established value because of an agreement with NPB that was intentionally anti-competitive. That’s where Irabu’s case was on the verge of going when MLB avoided it by ordering his transfer to the Yankees.
In 2006, I told my boss that Matsuzaka should bail on the Red Sox offer, and then partway through the 2007 season say he wanted to play in MLB and would negotiate with any team. After all the Red Sox had offered a total of over $100 million for him in posting fees and contract money.
What was stopping him from suing MLB when it said it teams couldn’t sign a valuable player who wanted to work in America instead of Japan?
My boss’ response? “That’s illegal.”
It wouldn’t have been illegal, of course, but it would have been a violation of rules that are as crucial to the world view of fans as the laws that bind our everyday conduct in the real world.
Fans have an extremely exaggerated opinion of how solid major leagues’ business rules are. They root for teams and demand the rules that govern players and teams be hard and fast. They need that in order to hope for the future, that this year’s young players will be a bit better, that current veterans can defy the aging curve for one more season.
Thus, people say “Irabu will never be allowed to leave” and “Sasaki cannot possibly be posted this year” without realizing that baseball’s supposedly iron-clad rules and norms are still subject to changing ideas in the world around them.
By wanting to go to MLB before he is 25 and before Lotte wants to let him go, Sasaki is challenging our belief about how the system is supposed to work, and that can be disquieting.
As for how it will play out, I have no idea. My guess is that unless Sasaki has an abysmal season that makes him change his mind, the Marines will post him in December, because the only reason this discussion is going on at all is because Sasaki has a right to go that has not been made public – and never will be.
If he moves after having a banner season, Lotte’s rationale for giving up such a valuable player for peanuts will be “he earned it.” If he moves after a disappointing year, the Marines will justify it by saying they want to “encourage his dreams.” Since no team gives up talent like that for next to nothing when they don’t have to, neither explanation will be the truth. But the truth is something many of us.
Far worse than a challenge to the system, by wanting to move to MLB before he’s 25, Sasaki is challenging our beliefs.
