After meeting with NPB, Rob Manfred not expecting change to Japanese player acquisitions

TOKYO — At a time when premier Japanese baseball players are coming to the U.S. more frequently, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred said Monday he does not expect Japan’s top league, Nippon Professional Baseball, to push for change in the agreement that governs player movement between the leagues.

Manfred met with his NPB counterpart, Sadayuki Sakakibara, on Sunday, the second of two days of exhibition games between MLB teams and NPB teams in Japan.

“I think people are pretty satisfied with where they are,” Manfred said at a school in Tokyo where MLB held a baseball skills clinic. “The conversation yesterday was that we’ve found a balance where enough players are coming to the U.S. that it drives both of our businesses. And yet, as evidenced by playing these exhibition games, their domestic product’s damn good. I mean, damn good. And that’s kind of the perfect world for all of us.”

MLB is in the midst of a highly successful Opening Series in Japan, which includes the first two games of MLB’s regular season on Tuesday and Wednesday, between the Chicago Cubs and Los Angeles Dodgers. During the exhibition games over the weekend, NPB’s Hanshin Tigers stole the show at the Tokyo Dome, shutting out both the Cubs and the Dodgers — the latter the defending World Series champions — on back-to-back days. The score in both games was 3-0.

The Cubs and Dodgers carry five Japanese players between them, led by the best player in the world, the Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani. In part due to Ohtani’s tremendous success, some Japanese players are seeking out careers in the U.S. at younger ages than in the past, which has rankled some NPB owners. But they do not appear so dissatisfied with the overall system that they are planning to attempt a revision.

“Of course it is not positive about losing the best players to MLB, we want them to play here for our fans,” said NPB official historian Nobby Ito. “While at the same time, it is not necessarily negative because the exposure helps more and more kids to start playing baseball, dreaming of becoming pro players. Facing the competition against MLB for the last 30 years, playing levels have been up and the revenue and attendance are all-time high.”

The two leagues operate what’s known as a posting system. Through it, NPB teams put players up for bidding by MLB clubs, and the NPB team that loses the player receives a percentage fee. Although the posting system is not the only arrangement that influences how and when Japanese players come to the U.S., it is the one that provides NPB with the most leverage in its relationship with MLB.

Manfred also met separately with Heo Koo-youn, the commissioner of South Korea’s top league, Korea Baseball Organization. All three of KBO, MLB and NPB set attendance records in their most recent seasons, Manfred noted. Next spring all three countries will participate in another iteration of the World Baseball Classic, baseball’s premier international tournament.

“We have a nice relationship with both organizations,” Manfred said of KBO and NPB. “I think there’s a shared interest in growing the game internationally. And I think that both see the WBC as a really important part of their program, so a lot of common ground.

“The Japanese in particular, they want the WBC to continue forever, which we share that goal, obviously. And they’d like us to do events like this every three years, on kind of a regular cycle. Real positive.”

To Dodgers president Stan Kasten, whose team is the greatest beneficiary of Japanese talent, cooperation between MLB and NPB is key.

“I think there’s clearly room and a place for both in the baseball ecosystem, I’m sure of it,” he said. “Working together is the best way for both sides to maximize their reach.”

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The NPB posting agreement has a lot of nuance, as well as its share of critics.

“I never liked the posting system at all, because it doesn’t do anybody any good,” said player agent Don Nomura, who represented Hideo Nomo when Nomo arrived in MLB 30 years ago, a groundbreaking event. “It’s always a club that has the right to say yes or no, and I’ve seen (NPB teams tell) the player, ‘We agree to let you go next year, but we want you to pitch another year in Japan,’ and he got hurt, and his career was over. So there were some players like that that missed out on their dream.

If a player is either under 25 or has not played six seasons in NPB, they are considered an international amateur in the eyes of a different agreement, the collective bargaining agreement between MLB and its players. It’s an important line of demarcation, because the CBA caps how much international amateurs can be paid.

Nomura said he thinks that rule “sucks.”

Pitcher Roki Sasaki, who is 23, was posted this winter as an international amateur and signed with the Dodgers for $6.5 million. Had he not been posted for a couple more years, he could have made hundreds of millions more, and his NPB team, the Chiba Lotte Marines, could have made more as well. Typically, NPB teams don’t post players as young as Sasaki for that reason, and of course, out of a desire to keep them.

“The posting system has undergone a lot of changes over the years,” said Sasaki’s agent Joel Wolfe. “I think that the current system works as is. It would be very difficult to make substantial changes to it now.

“Now, the Roki situation was very unique because it had a collision with the international free agent rules, but that’s a very rare situation that could be addressed in the next CBA for the occasional times that it comes up. But right now, I don’t think it needs to be addressed.”

Two players have recently bypassed NPB’s amateur draft altogether, which means they’ll likely never go through the posting process either.

Nineteen-year-old Japanese slugger Rintaro Sasaki chose to go to Stanford University, where on Sunday he hit his first two collegiate home runs, the second a walk-off. He’ll likely be a high pick in the U.S. amateur draft someday. And Shotaro Morii, an 18-year-old who wants to be both a pitcher and hitter like Ohtani, over the winter signed with the Athletics and is in their farm system.

There is a point where NPB players can come to the U.S. without needing to be posted by their NPB team, where they can be courted as full-fledged free agents. But NPB players must play nine years in Japan to reach that point, too long for many of the best players to wait.

The NPB players’ union, the Japan Professional Baseball Players Association, is attempting to lower that wait time, but the union is not as strong as its U.S. counterpart, the Major League Baseball Players Association. The JPBPA is also trying to wrestle away player name, image and likeness rights, or NIL, from the NPB teams, which control them.

The MLBPA says it is supporting the Japanese players’ efforts.

“The game of baseball in Japan has some the most passionate fan support anywhere, and very talented players who play it, however there are tangible areas of growth available on the labor side and on the business side of the game that aren’t being realized based on what we know,” said MLBPA executive director Tony Clark in a statement. “When the intellectual property and personalities of the players who play the game and drive its popularity are a focal point — on and off the field — there is growth potential that benefits everyone.

“Historically, much like what we’ve seen in our game in the U.S., commoditizing players in order to drive their value down while implying they are essentially interchangeable parts, when we all know they aren’t, actually limits the upside growth of the entire industry. When that philosophy changes, interest and support of the game, and the players that play it, yields very real financial benefits.

“As we work with the JPBPA and their players to help them realize more of their value, we know it will benefit our players as well, and the game as a whole — on a more global scale. A win, win.”

The JPBPA last summer said it would challenge NPB on antitrust grounds in Japan by the end of 2024, but negotiations between the two parties have instead continued, according to a person briefed on the process who was not authorized to speak publicly.

In the past, MLB and NPB have discussed the idea of a true World Series — one that pitted both team’s champions against each other annually. But the idea doesn’t appear to be gaining any new traction.

“There’s been conversation about that over time,” Manfred said. “I think the more important thing is to develop an international event like the WBC that provides an opportunity for the leagues as a whole to compete against each other, with the spirit of nationalism behind it, and just like you see in soccer, the leagues are going to have their championships.”

(Top photo of Roki Sasaki / Masterpress/Getty Images)

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