Japan failed to make the World Baseball Classic semifinals for the first time in Miami on Sunday, and it was also the first time I was unable to watch a Japan WBC game live.
Venezuela came from behind to beat Japan 8-5, ending Samurai Japan’s bid for a fourth WBC championship.
With the exception of 2013, Japan has fielded fairly competitive teams, and the Japanese are not easy to beat, so credit to Venezuela.
As used to success as Japanese fans are, the game was hardly a disaster or comedy of errors, but it does point to a serious weakness that no manager can fix, because it is fundamental and not to do with the manager’s or individual players’ efforts.
Japan’s starter Yoshinobu Yamamoto was spectacular with runners on base, allowing him to escape with only allowing two runs to that dangerous Venezuela lineup, which put good wood on the bad pitches thrown by Yamamoto, Chihiro Sumida and Hiromi Ito, and that was pretty much the game.
My first thought is that Japan has done awfully well in the WBC up to this point. Sadaharu Oh’s 2006 team barely scraped through the quarterfinals and survived his horrendous tactical decisions to win the original championship.
After a resounding 2009 title, Japan suffered through a pair of horrendous managers, Koji Yamamoto, who had long been out of the game and had limited success with an extremely powerful team in his years as Hiroshima Carp manager.
Hiroki Kokubo managed in 2017 and showed some improvement after his incompetent Premier 12 performance in 2015. The last two skippers have been able to get commitments from the MLB contingent, which Yamamoto and Kokubo completely failed at, and that’s a vital part of the job, too.
Nippon Professional Baseball prides itself on Japan’s baseball history and culture, and has an infrastructure unmatched outside of MLB, but its full commitment to the WBC and the willingness of its players to sacrifice for the tournament is no longer as big an advantage as it once was.
Japan’s handicap is its commitment to small baseball, and by that I don’t mean what Japanese mean when they use that term.
By small baseball, I am referring to NPB’s belief that the quality of its product is good enough for owners who are satisfied with having the second-best pro competition in the world in a safe, wealthy, well-educated country with solid infrastructure and an unsurpassed love for baseball.
Japanese baseball IS changing, but not where it counts the most.
“Everything in Japanese pro baseball has changed since I first turned pro, except the owners. They are as stuck in their ways as ever,” former Lotte Marines manager Masato Yoshii, said last Tuesday at Tokyo Dome.
With concerted effort, commitment and investment, Japan could have the best pro baseball in the world, but its owners didn’t sign on for that. The most influential of NPB’s parent companies to this point, the Yomiuri Shimbun, has worked hard to suppress the overall strength of NPB teams and leagues in order to secure its rule as the greatest among equals.
If Yomiuri was truly interested in raising the quality of baseball across the board in Japan, it would be taking action rather than selling out to MLB.
Japanese pro baseball lacks depth and it lacks diversity, but the owners have little interest in addressing either issue as long as their tax write-offs and the advertising value they get from having NPB teams outweigh their operating losses.
In my job as a tour guide, I give a tour of the Imperial Palace, where the focus is on how difficult it is for Japanese to come to grips with conflict: how the politeness culture makes it easier to just change the narrative and hope the problems solve themselves.
Because of this, challenging the status quo or vested interests is virtually impossible, so ending restrictions on imported talent are very hard to do.
And while Japanese players are getting better and better, NPB owners dig in their heels and take credit for the players’ success while completely failing to capitalize on it or accelerate it.
Japanese pro baseball is far from mediocre, which is more than we can say about its owners.
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