Tag Archives: Yoshinobu Yamamoto

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NPB’s silver-lining playbook

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Japanese pro baseball may or may not realize it, but NPB is currently at a crossroads in its dealing with MLB and should act now to fix a system that isn’t working as well as it should for Japanese teams.

Never has the MLB market for imported Japanese talent been so high as it was this offseason, with teams handing out big contracts to two players who moved via the posting system, a record $325 million deal for Yoshinobu Yamamoto and a contract to Shota Imanaga that could be worth $80 million.

The current posting agreement with MLB includes posting fees calculated on the total value of a player’s contract, but the use of options and opt outs have allowed MLB teams to defer paying what they owe since Yusei Kikuchi signed with the Seattle Mariners ahead of the 2019 season with player and team options after the third year.

Obviously that’s a problem. NPB teams have gone from huge windfalls, to $20 million windfalls, to a fraction of the amount the player is paid with opt outs making deferred payments interest-free loans from the players’ Japanese clubs.

“I tell them, every time you sit down in New York with these people (MLB), the big leagues benefit as a league, their clubs benefit, the Japanese players benefit, and you guys (NPB) just bend over and take it. It makes me so upset.”

— NPB team executive in December 2017.

With some MLB teams believing Lotte Marines right-hander Roki Sasaki will be available via the posting system 11 months from now, the interest shows no sign of slowing. Under the current posting rules and MLB’s collective bargaining agreement with its union, the Sasaki will be treated as an international amateur only eligible to enter MLB via a minor league contract with a signing bonus constrained by MLB’s signing bonus pools.

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Roki Sasaki’s challenge

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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.

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