Nippon Professional Baseball is contemplating punitive action against Japanese amateurs who opt sign with MLB teams:
Tazawa’s move led Japanese baseball to rule that if a player decides to play overseas after being drafted by a Japanese team, he cannot play for a Japanese pro club for up to three years after he returns to Japan.
Japan’s 12 pro teams are looking for tougher rules to keep talented young players in Japan.
That’s going to work. MLB kept making the freedom of players to sign with teams more restrictive for 100 years, which finally led to a union and free agency, the latter made the game better. Maybe Japan should learn that lesson, and allow their players to move with more, not less freedom.
I like the idea you had a few days ago… Nippon would do well to declare themselves a major league. If they did that, and then started signing MLB free agents… I think lots of Japanese players would like to stay, and it would increase ticket sales. I’ve heard they have smaller parks there, so I’m guessing it’d be easy to sign MLB hitters, since you could suck them in with “you could smack more homers and be a bigger star than you could in the US”.
Combine that, with Japan’s supremacy at the World Baseball Classic, and Japan could claim they could beat any World Series winner… and then we might begin to see a real “World” Series.. the MLB winner vs the Nippon winner.
Can the Japanese teams really compete with American franchises on dollar terms? With the new tv contracts (national and local) I think it might be difficult. It would be a boon to some free agents I’d think if they have more teams to negotiate with.
t ball » My feeling is that if great players went to Japan, more people would want to watch Japanese baseball. I’d love to wake up and watch an hour of top players in Japan if they offered the product.