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.