Thanks to an archaic ownership system, Japanese baseball is losing its best players, its fans and its soul.
When I first came to
Japan back in the 1960s, Japanese professional baseball was in its
heyday. It had produced, arguably, its best squad ever-the proud Tokyo
Yomiuri Giants, who were then in the process of winning nine
consecutive Japan Championships. The team was powered by Sadaharu Oh,
the man who would go on to break Hank Aaron's lifetime home-run record,
and its charismatic, clutch-hitting third baseman Shigeo Nagashima. Los
Angeles Dodger owner Walter O'Malley was so impressed with Nagashima
that he tried to buy his contract, but the Giants' aging founder
Matsutaro Shoriki turned the offer down flat. The quality of Japanese
baseball, once considered laughably bad, had advanced so much in the
postwar years-in a striking parallel to the then-booming Japanese
economy-that Shoriki was talking up an eventual Real World Series with
the American champions. Although Nagashima was interested in the Dodger
offer, duty to team and country would have to come first.
Fast-forward
to the year 2001, a decade into Japan's seemingly endless post-bubble
recession, and talk of an RWS has all but disappeared. Eight of Japan's
best players are now wearing U.S. major league uniforms, including new
Seattle Mariners' signee Ichiro Suzuki, perhaps the greatest pure
hitter the Japanese game has ever produced. And Japan's national sport
seems in danger of becoming a farm system for the American majors.
Until this year, only pitchers had ventured abroad, notably Hideo Nomo
who took his corkscrew delivery to L.A. in 1995 and won Rookie of the
Year honors. But if boyish superstar Ichiro (he goes by his given name)
and fellow emigrant Tsuyoshi Shinjo, a dashing slugger joining the New
York Mets, both perform as advertised, the exodus will only accelerate.
(American players have been part of the Japanese baseball equation for
years but only in the form of minor leaguers, benchwarmers and aging
stars. Never has an American of top status been guilty of defection-and
certainly no one like Ichiro who, with an exotic foot-in-the-air
stance, has won an unprecedented seven-straight batting titles.) "It's
a disaster in the making," says novelist and baseball writer Masayuki
Tamaki. "Japan is losing all its heroes."
Critics say Japan's
hidebound feudal practices have finally caught up with it. Ever since
Americans introduced the game in 1871, Japan has imbued besuboru with
its own philosophy: a Zen samurai emphasis on discipline, spirit and
selflessness reflected in the modern-day professional system, which
began in 1935. The 12 teams of the Central and Pacific leagues draw
more than 22 million fans a year. But because of a compliant union,
which refuses to strike (that would disrupt social harmony, or wa), and
restrictions that keep neutral salary arbiters and sports agents at
arm's length, players are underpaid and underrepresented. They are
expected to endure brutal workouts, which include dawn-to-dusk training
camps held in the freezing cold, and to obey petty rules that are more
befitting a military academy. During this off-season, after several
traffic violations, 20-year-old pitching standout Daisuke Matsuzaka of
the Seibu Lions was punished by being confined to his home and
forbidden to do any endorsements.
It's no wonder some players
want to leave. "I don't think the commissioner or management side are
aware of it," says noted playwright Tetsu Yamazaki, a longtime fan.
"But it's the freedom of the major leagues that is the most attractive
thing for Japanese players."
The first cracks in the system
appeared in 1995, when Nomo, then 26 and one of Japan's very best
pitchers, used a loophole in the archaic Japanese baseball-convention
rules that enabled him to circumvent free-agent regulations. A poster
boy for a new generation of restless youth fed up with the traditional
constraints of group loyalty, Nomo was at first heavily criticized by
older fans. Japan's hyperactive media labeled him a "troublemaker" and
even a "traitor." But when he started humbling Americans with his
wicked forkball, suddenly the country that had spent half a century
trying to catch up with the West saw fit to turn him into a national
hero.
Nomo's success inspired so many players to follow in his
footsteps that Japan's baseball executives were moved to action. Led by
Shigeyoshi Ino, general manager of the Pacific League Kobe-based Orix
Blue Wave (owned by Orix Corp., a major leasing company), they came up
with a plan designed to close the Nomo loophole and enable management
to profit from the growing rash of defections. The so-called posting
system gives a player still a year or two shy of free-agent eligibility
the opportunity to sign up with a major league team-if that team agrees
to pay his Japanese club a negotiating fee. Last year the 27-year-old
Ichiro became the first Japanese star to use posting. From the deal,
his team, the Blue Wave, earned a crisp $13 million. To some observers
such tactics smack of price-fixing, market discrimination and possible
violation of antitrust law: if the player does not like the U.S. team
negotiating the deal, his only recourse is to stay in Japan for another
year. Nomo's American-based agent Don Nomura called it a "slave
auction." The union, true to form, failed to file suit. Explained Toru
Matsubara, secretary-general of the Japanese Baseball Players
Association: "Trials last forever here." Japan was free to sell off its
best talent. And there was little the fan could do. As a disgusted
Tamaki creatively put it, "It makes me want to become a sports
terrorist."
Japan's game is structured differently from its
American cousin. In the U.S., the 30 major league teams, which draw
more than 72 million fans annually, exist purely for profit. They
maintain extensive farm and scouting systems and are run by people with
years of experience in the pro game. Japan's teams, concentrated mainly
in the Tokyo and Osaka areas, exist primarily to advertise the products
of their corporate owners-like the pork sold by the sponsors of the
Nippon Ham Fighters. They invest sparingly in player development: only
one farm team per franchise is the norm, and teams are often operated
by officials from the parent company who know little about the game.
The
defending Japan champion Tokyo Giants of the Central League, Japan's
oldest and winningest team, are owned by the nation's leading daily
newspaper, the Yomiuri Shimbun. They draw capacity crowds wherever they
play, including 3 million fans a year at home. That's comfortably ahead
of their nearest competitor, the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks, owned by a
supermarket chain. But many of the other teams, particularly in the
Pacific League, play to sparse crowds and operate at an annual loss,
using the red ink as an advertising tax write-off.
To Tsueno
Watanabe, the gruff president of Yomiuri, that's business as usual. He
insists that any talk of a baseball crisis is an invention of the
"anti-Giants media." He points to a March survey that shows Japanese
pro baseball is still the favorite sport of 55% of the people and the
Giants the favorite team of half of them. He dismisses any worry over
the hemorrhaging of players to the U.S. "It's a globalized world and
there's nothing unusual about players crossing borders," he says. It's
worth noting that the Giants have their own TV network, and the team's
games are telecast nightly nationwide to loyal fans. The Giants have
such a mystique that a valued player is yet to defect and the team has
even gone on a buying spree in recent years, picking up top players
from other squads via free agency. But Watanabe's words are scant
consolation to fans of Orix or of Shinjo's team, the Hanshin Tigers of
Osaka, where good replacements are not readily available. The fact is,
overall attendance has been slipping. TV ratings have fallen. And some
baseball officials have expressed concern about the deteriorating
quality of play.
This year may be criti-cal. With two Japanese
playing for the Seattle Mariners-Ichiro and vet-eran star reliever
Kazuhiro Sasaki-Japan's pub-lic broadcasting company, nhk, may set a
record for the most televised U.S. major league games in a single year.
Says veteran sportswriter Kozo Abe, who has covered baseball on both
sides of the Pacific: "The Japanese are finally beginning to realize
how much better American big league baseball is-in real competition,
that is, not goodwill games-in terms of power, speed, technique and
depth. That could spell doom for Japan's game."
Those who fear
indentured servitude to their American cousins are searching for
solutions. One frequently discussed option is contraction: a scenario
in which Japan's 12 teams are reduced in number to tighten up
competition and increase overall per-game attendance. Another idea is
expansion, as in a plan proposed by baseball columnist Jim Allen, which
would take advantage of a number of new ballparks built around the
country, courtesy of Liberal Democratic Party pork, to set up a broad
system of professional minor league teams in small markets. Still
another plan is a World Baseball Cup, like that of soccer, held once
every four years. But all require conviction and/or money, commodities
in short supply in recession-ridden Japan. Hiroshi Gondo, ex-manager of
the Yokohama Bay Stars, is especially skeptical: "I've been involved in
Japanese pro ball for 40 years, and the one thing I can say is that
nothing ever changes."
One idea definitely not being entertained
(though favored by this writer) is a merger with the U.S. major
leagues, creating, say, a six-team Japan Division. Thus those stars who
wanted to test themselves against big-league competition would not have
to move all the way to North America to do so, and fans would be able
to see all the great players in the world up close and live. "It's
totally impossible," says Yomiuri's Watanabe, citing a list of reasons:
higher travel costs, the shift that would be required from a system of
corporate sponsorship to one of business orientation, the opposition of
other clubs to the American invasion of their markets and the
restrictive rules of the Japanese professional baseball convention.
"The idea is nonsense and has no merit."
By contrast, Gene Orza,
attorney for the Major League Baseball Association, says, "It's
something that we expect to look at seriously someday if we can solve
travel problems." The Chicago Cubs played their first two official
games of the 2000 season in Tokyo, then returned home and, jet-lagged,
lost their next 10 games. No one on the team is eager to repeat the
experience.
There may also be a slight tinge of
ethnocentricity clouding the issue: Shigeo Nagashima, now the Giants
manager, told a meeting of supporters in 1999 that he wanted to make an
all-kokusan (made-in-Japan) Giants team. There is currently a limit of
three foreign players per team. Longtime Tokyo-based sports journalist
Marty Kuehnert wrote a critical piece about Nagashima's remarks, in
which he despaired at the cultural differences still separating the two
countries. "Any manager back in the big leagues who said he wanted a
pure all-made-in-America team wouldn't last very long," he said. "But
here, nobody uttered a peep." It might be noted that most North
Americans, for their part, still tend to view Japan as little more than
a glorified minor league.
In the end, the likelihood is that
Japan will just muddle through, much in the same way the Japanese
government has muddled through the past 10 recession-filled,
confidence-depleting years. Says playwright Yamazaki, whose devotion to
the Giants began to wane after Watanabe forced the free-agent system on
the other owners in 1993: "Let Japanese players go to the States. That
is good for Japanese baseball because someday they will come back and
raise the level of the sport. Japanese baseball is like Japanese
politics. One is dominated by the Giants, the other by the ldp. It will
take time to liberate them."
In the meantime, the hemorrhaging
will continue. Last month, Yakult Swallows' 27-year-old ace pitcher
Kazuhisa Ishii became the latest star to declare his intention to go to
the U.S. Even more startling was the recent decision by Giants slugger
(and the Central League's most valuable player in 2000) Hideki Matsui
to turn down an eight-year offer reportedly worth $50 million. Had
Matsui signed, it would have been the most lucrative deal in the
history of Japanese baseball. His refusal shocked team officials and
fueled speculation that the superstar outfielder, who becomes eligible
for free agency at the end of next season, might be contemplating his
own move abroad. If the leading member of Japan's royal house of
baseball deserts, the last taboo will have been broken. And when that
happens, either meaningful change will have to be made or there may not
be much of the Japanese game left to save.
With reporting by Hiroko Tashiro/Tokyo