Tag Archives: Yoshinobu Yamamoto

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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.

Continue reading Roki Sasaki’s challenge →
Baseball, Commentary, Paid Content

A lot has changed Part 1

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Two Japanese baseball players this month have signed record contracts. On Dec. 9, Shohei Ohtani agreed to play 10 years for the Los Angeles Dodgers for $700 million, making the two-way superstar the highest paid team-sport athlete in the world. Less than two weeks later, Yoshinobu Yamamoto became baseball’s highest-paid pitcher with a $325 million 12-year contract, also with the Dodgers.

Yamamoto, whose contract eclipsed Masahiro Tanaka’s $155-million seven-year contract with the New York Yankees as the largest ever signed by a player upon his entry to MLB, earned the Orix Buffaloes a $50.6 million. If Yamamoto has options to quit the Dodgers after six seasons, the Buffaloes will not receive anything for his seasons from Year 7 to 12 until he actually remains with LA. If he stays in LA, the Dodgers will have gotten an interest-free loan from Orix, and if Yamamoto quits, and signs a huge contract elsewhere, Orix will not get one single yen.

It’s not an elegant system, but MLB is not run in order to be elegant. It’s run to maximize monopoly profit and generate high return on investment, and while fans of Japanese baseball are proud that guys who grew here and honed their craft in our major leagues, the Central and Pacific, are recognized by MLB as among the most valuable in the world.

But what about our major leagues?

Daisuke Matsuzaka’s $52-million contract with the Boston Red Sox on Nov. 2, 2006, led then Lotte Marines manager Bobby Valentine to say that NPB’s talent drain would put it on track toward following America’s Negro leagues into extinction.

That hasn’t happened, because there is a market for professional baseball IN Japan, where fans can see games live and cheer for THEIR teams.

Continue reading A lot has changed Part 1 →