Roki Sasaki’s posting at the age of 23 is a wonderful opportunity for a player who has tremendous talent and who I believe is not taking it for granted that a huge MLB payday will still be within his reach two years from now.
It is, however, a problem for Nippon Professional Baseball, unless we take what Lotte Marines at their word, that they are happily giving up one of the nation’s greatest pitching talents for a million dollars and change because it feels right to them.
Unfortunately, dealing with this problem is going to take the kind of clever strategic thinking NPB rarely displays, either by negotiating a solution with its union or with MLB, which has frequently rewritten the posting system rules to suit its needs.
“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.”
— NPB team executive in 2016
I don’t have objective proof that Roki Sasaki signed a contract as an 18-year-old amateur that contractually obligated the Marines to post him at the drop of his hat, but that is the best explanation for Lotte donating a player who makes millions of dollars a year for them to MLB.
I assume such a contract exists in the same way I assume that a guy running out of a bank with bags of money under his arm while alarm bells ring indicates the likely occurrence of a bank robbery.
The interesting thing is that while people allude to the possibility that such a contract might exist, pundits here blamed Sasaki for having the temerity to enforce it rather than the wisdom of having that huge loophole coexist with a posting system that rewards MLB teams for poaching Japan’s youngest stars.
It is reasonable to assume that Sasaki is not the first player to have negotiated such a deal. But the Marines letting Sasaki fly while getting so little in return makes it obvious in ways that were not clear in the cases of Masahiro Tanaka and Shohei Ohtani that he forced Lotte to post him when the team really, really, really didn’t want to.
Baseball: Roki Sasaki’s move to MLB at 23 breaks precedent
The problem now is that because Sasaki has made it painfully clear that top Japanese amateurs can have the power to force teams into making terrible posting decisions, it will eventually happen again.
There are two things NPB can do to fix this problem.
- Change the rules regarding the parameters of supplemental contracts between teams and players.
- Drop out of the current posting agreement until it is rewritten to suit NPB’s needs.
Let’s talk about these options.
Supplemental contracts
These are also known as riders or “side letters.” They are not subject to approval by NPB or the players union. They are essential in the current scheme because NPB only permits annual contracts, and because a player not under contract is not a technically a free agent.
These supplemental contracts allow teams to redress the weakness of NPB rules. They are used to specify the terms of multi-year contracts that NPB rules can’t manage. Because of that, they are commonly given to new import players, who then become virtual free agents when their contracts expire.
A player who is not under contract is not a free agent in Japan. If a team signs a guy who has been released by another club in Japan or abroad that player can be reserved until he has amassed the service time necessary to file for free agency.
If Shohei Ohtani were to return to Japan, he would be free to sign with any team he likes provided he is not under contract. However, he has amassed only five years of NPB service time (with the Fighters from 2013 to 2017) and would require another three before he could file for domestic free agency within Japan or four if he wanted to return to MLB as a free agent.
But because there are no real restraints on these deals, an amateur with leverage can demand anything that is not a violation of NPB rules.
Changing the rules for supplemental contracts would represent a change in players’ working conditions, and would, under Japanese labor law, require the consent of the union.
To get the players’ consent to more restrictive supplementary contracts, NPB would have to:
- Admit publicly that it has a problem with amateurs dictating terms to teams owned by huge corporate entities.
- Go to the union for help with a problem, which would allow the union to demand its current big ask of reducing full free agency from nine years to six.
I’m guessing NPB owners would as soon get herpes as go down that road.
The posting agreement
The first posting agreement was a necessity for both MLB and NPB created by three things:
- Hideo Nomo and Alfonso Soriano becoming MLB free agents by retiring from NPB.
- Hideki Irabu forcing the Lotte Marines to trade him to their MLB partners, the San Diego Padres.
- Japanese free agency, which allows NPB teams to receive compensation from Japanese clubs signing their free agents but not when those players moved to MLB.
However, after the Yankees and Rangers shelled out $50 million-plus in posting fees, respectively, for Daisuke Matsuzaka and Yu Darvish, and with a $100 million-posting fee looming for Masahiro Tanaka in 2013, MLB fixed that problem by capping posting fees at $20 million,
This created a situation where the Rakuten Eagles really didn’t want to post Tanaka, but said they would because they had promised, a plausible explanation, but just barely.
With Shohei Ohtani’s posting looming in 2017, MLB sweetened the deal a little by allowing for a fixed calculation based on how much money is guaranteed to a player.
NPB accepted this modification on the condition that Nippon Ham receive the previous maximum posting fee of $20 million for Ohtani in December 2017.
While the new rule allows for the possibility of the Orix Buffaloes getting over $50 million for Yoshinobu Yamamoto, its also presents two other problems.
The current posting system limits teams who post players under the age of 25 to a posting fee worth one quarter of a signing bonus that is constrained by MLB’s signing bonus pool limits for international amateurs.
It also opened the door for the opt-out clause loophole, that the Seattle Mariners first used with Yusei Kikuchi, who signed a seven-year deal with only the first four guaranteed.
The Seibu Lions received a posting fee based on the value of the first three years and his signing bonus ($43 million). Had Kikuchi exercised his player option to remain with Seattle the entire seven years, the Mariners would have had to pony up more to Seibu for that extra $66 million.
But had that happened, the posting fee would have represented a three-year interest-free loan from the Seibu Lions to the Mariners. We witnessed that again in Yamamoto’s deal with the Dodgers.
The other down side is represented by Sasaki’s posting fee being worth less than $2 million.
The obvious solution to these problems is do away with the current fixed rates and adopt a football-style system where overseas teams wishing to acquire a player negotiate a transfer fee, and if the player agrees to a contract with that team, he moves, if not, he stays.
In this scenario, the Marines’ transfer feee would be based not on Sasaki’s microscopic signing bonus but on an amount the team is willing to accept. I guarantee you that if this were the current rule, Sasaki might be getting a $5 million signing bonus while Lotte might be getting a check for $60 million.
MLB might hate this on the principle that it excludes small-budget teams from pursuing big players, but MLB teams are telling me that the way things are now, only five or six clubs now have any expectation of signing top-level Japanese stars.
To get such a favorable posting system rewrite, however, would require a serious attitude adjustment on NPB’s part.
Years ago, a team executive bemoaned NPB’s failure to negotiate meaningful concessions from MLB.
“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,” he said. “It makes me so upset.”
Whether it’s through negotiating a solution its union or with MLB, the only way Japan’s owners are going to solve this problem before it becomes an epidemic, is by acquiring the kind of balls Mizuno doesn’t manufacture.
