This past week, Tokyo hosted two MLB games with five Japanese playing key roles in the Los Angeles Dodgers’ two-game series against the Chicago Cubs that attracted a herd of celebrities from both the United States and Japan.
Shohei Ohtani, of course, is big wherever he goes, and his first MLB games in his homeland were bound to be a huge event because, like it or not, MLB remains the world’s best pro baseball brand in terms of talent depth.
Thirty years ago, when Hideo Nomo signed with the Dodgers, many in both countries predicted he would fail, because they wrongly inferred that because Nippon Professional Baseball teams were not as good as MLB’s, Japanese players could not possibly compete against MLB’s best.
At that time, there was a parallel belief that a player’s minor league performance could not predict MLB success, which ironically contributed to the fallacy that Japanese talent was innately inferior.
When outstanding minor-league hitters with insufficient MLB opportunities such as Randy Bass and Greg “Boomer” Wells thrived in Japan after failing in minimal MLB trials, NPB was labeled substandard.
Although the nominal attraction this year were the games between the Cubs and Dodgers, the real show was about how Japan is now producing some of the best players in the world. And there are more where they came from.
There were references to the quality of Japanese baseball but only indirectly to Japanese pro baseball, because the games were all about the talented Japanese players who went to play in America and not the establishment they left behind.
Last week I wrote about how Japan’s pro baseball establishment was organized in a similar fashion to Japan’s last feudal regime, the Tokugawa Shogunate, to maintain the status quo: “MLB and Japan’s sellouts.”
Within that status quo, Japan’s pro baseball teams have done little to expand their development infrastructure and are wholly unprepared to take full advantage of the growing wave of amateur talent of which Ohtani and company are merely the beginning.
Much of Japan’s top amateur talent now escapes NPB teams’ attention, with many current pros entering either through the developmental draft or drafted only after they have played in Japan’s expanding independent minor leagues.
The Pacific League powerhouse SoftBank Hawks are where they are largely because their development infrastructure is unmatched, and can absorb and sort through a huge amount of new talent every year.
Four months ago, when MLB scouts converged on Tokyo for the Premier12’s final round, an executive from one team told me his club was ready to abandon Japan for scouting purposes. Players’ living and working conditions at NPB’s lowest rung had long been vastly superior to what minor leaguers in the U.S. could get, making it a very hard sell, and the team saw no future in continuing to pursue that avenue.
But things have changed. With the MLBPA’s unionization of minor league players in the United States and the introduction of a minor league collective bargaining agreement life in the U.S. minors is no longer a baseball version of life on a chain gang, even if it is still starker and a tougher slog than it is in Japan.
The decision of high school pitcher-shortstop Shotaro Morii to skip NPB to sign with the A’s over the winter and with Rintaro Sasaki now booming at Stanford University, some MLB teams that had been ambivalent about scouting Japan are now scurrying to get ready for the potential talent torrent that will be lukewarm about turning pro here.
Twenty years ago, Bobby Valentine said the steady talent drain of Japan’s top stars would turn NPB into a minor league. That day has yet to come, but if the best amateurs begin going overseas en masse, we may finally start to see, the gap in quality between NPB and MLB, that has been narrowing, begin to widen.
