Always with Us?
Shiba Taguchi, Ryukyu Sports News Special Report
Naha, Japan -
January 10, 2021: In the wake of the LRS merger with the PEBA, unusual events in Japan have caught the attention of baseball fans both here and abroad. One is the formation of a new League of the Rising Sun here in Japan, billing itself as the home of 'real' Japanese baseball. Another is the appearance of Japanese and Korean baseball players with no professional experience, but significant talent, on the free agent market. Naturally, these events have led to a lot of questions and speculation. I spoke with Shisa executives, some on the record, and some who wanted their names withheld, who believe that they have some answers, and that these events are linked.
Shisa head scout Daisuke Wakabayashi spoke on the record regarding this unexpected crop of players. “What you have to understand is just how hidebound the previous professional baseball leagues in Japan were,” says Wakabayashi. “In the LRS, and the NPB before that, if someone didn't play ball in high school or college not only were they not scouted, they weren't eligible to be drafted. It was as though they didn't exist. Capable athletes fell through the cracks, and we're just now discovering them.” The Japanese Amateur Baseball Association, or JABA, oversees the industrial leagues, where adult amateurs continue to compete playing on teams either sponsored by their employer or on club teams, but the LRS more or less ignored these leagues as a source of talent.
Current Shisa third baseman and off-season acquisition Tsukasa Okada stands as a perfect example of a former industrial league amateur turned PEBA pro. “In high school we were discouraged from playing more than one organized sport,” says the thirty-two year old Okada. “I chose soccer.” But trouble with his knees developed when Okada was in his twenties, limiting his ability to run and ending his hopes for a career as a professional soccer player. Okada says that he, like many other athletes from other sports, joined an adult amateur baseball team sponsored by his workplace. “I had just gotten a job at the East Japan Railway at the time as a ticket agent, so I tried out for their team. I had fond memories of playing baseball as a child, and wanted to rekindle my love of the game.” Okada made the team and became a standout third baseman, and as many are learning both here and abroad, he was far from the only world class athlete to be playing baseball in Japan as a near complete unknown.
The recent formation of a new Japanese professional league took many by surprise. It has, somewhat brazenly, taken to calling itself the League of the Rising Sun, and has also, to the surprise of no one, drawn a quick legal response from the PEBA, owner of the LRS trademark. A current Shisa executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, explains that, given the state of turmoil professional baseball in Japan has been in for the past year or so, this perhaps shouldn't have come as a great surprise.
“Several bridges have been burned and enemies made, not just here, but in North America as well. The men who owned and ran MLB and NPB didn't just fade away. They're still with us. And you can see that in the makeup of this counterfeit LRS management, from league offices staffed by former NPB and LRS executives, to the teams managed by former NPB coaches. The purge of these men and women from the game didn't, at a stroke, erase them from existence.” As to the question of ownership, matters are not as clear. “You have ownership groups made up of what look like shell corporations that didn't exist two years ago,” continues my source, “themselves subsidiaries of other entities, owned by shadowy investors and faceless capital funds.”
Not only are these teams of the new LRS fairly well organized, they are extremely well-funded. Public records regarding the initial capitalization of these teams reveals that they almost certainly have budgets to rival PEBA clubs, both those here in Japan and those abroad. I asked my source in the Shisa front office about this. Although he was reluctant to speculate, he said that when MLB folded, the Angeloses, Dolans, Steinbrenners, Wilpons, and Lorias of the baseball world were still very wealthy, still interested in milking the game for whatever profits they could glean from it, and still very much in a mood to strike back at a league that had frozen them out. “Can you imagine how the current state of professional baseball must have sickened them? Teams paying for their own stadiums without fleecing taxpayers? A 'Players' Bill of Rights'? Big league ball abandoning the most lucrative markets? It must have seemed to them like the inmates were running the asylum. The kind of money we're talking about backing this phony LRS couldn't have all come from Japan. It has to come from parties outside the country, parties interested in making over the baseball landscape worldwide. This new league could well prove to be the opening shot in a war on the PEBA itself. First they'll try discredit it in Japan after the historic, but not universally popular, merger. They have the capital to run most of the teams in the Rising Sun Division into the ground, eating into their fan base and also competing for talent.”
In the meantime, while the new LRS is so mired in litigation that it seems doubtful that it will play a single game in 2021, it has had an effect on professional baseball that has been both good and bad. In November, when it first announced its existence, the new league did something not attempted in either of the Japanese major leagues that came before it. It held open tryouts and invited players from across Japan to participate. Most of these players came from the industrial leagues. When the tryouts were first scheduled, Japanese PEBA clubs took notice, even if they at first didn't take the event seriously, says Wakabayashi. “Sure, we sent a guy up there to see who showed up, more out of curiosity than anything else,” says the Shisa head scout. “I hear from him at 10:00 the next morning. 'Boss', he says 'come up here quick. You won't believe it.'” Wakabayashi shakes his head. “He was right, I didn't believe it. Some of those guys were good. Real good.”
Word quickly got around and soon scouts from throughout the PEBA were in Japan checking out the talent. Scouts were so impressed that teams from both the nascent LRS and PEBA began bidding for players who had, a few months ago, been playing simply for the joy of it. Wakabayashi is rueful. “If we had paid more attention to the industrial leagues, we [the clubs of the old LRS] could have kept all those guys to ourselves.” The original association agreement between the LRS and PEBA virtually assured that LRS teams would be the PEBA's only source of Japanese players. Even if the PEBA had scouted the industrial leagues themselves, they could not have signed any players out of them, as the association agreement basically put up a fence around Japan. But nobody scouted the industrial leagues, and nobody saw this coming.
A new professional league looking to cash in on discontent with the state of affairs in Japan, and advertising itself as the home of 'real' Japanese baseball appears to have had an effect on the makeup of the teams of the Rising Sun Division. Many observers and fans who opposed the merger decried it as the death of Japanese baseball, saying that Japanese players, and the Japanese 'style of play' would be washed out of the five teams in Japan, and that the clubs would become 'internationalized', but a look at the rosters tells a different story. A few months removed from the lifting of the gaijin rule limiting the teams to just eight non-Japanese players, no Rising Sun team has more than that number of non-Japanese on its roster. Okinawa signed its eighth gaijin player today, and reportedly is out of the free agent market. Lupin has just four foreign players; Neo-Tokyo and Niihama-Shi, six; and Shin Seiki eight. Officials from the five teams all denied that there is any 'gentleman’s agreement' between the owners or managers regarding the makeup of their teams, but it appears as though they are responding to the pressure to keep their teams 'Japanese'. Of course, time will tell.
For now, many players are getting a chance to shine on an international stage, earning salaries they could only have dreamed of a short time ago. “It doesn't seem real,” says Okada. “I mean, I could never have imagined that a team like Okinawa would be holding a press conference just to announce my signing, with the GM handing me a jersey and cap in front of all those cameras.” The infielder actually looks awestruck. “I was managing an office at a railway station, and now, this!” he says, indicating Shisa Stadium, visible outside the windows of the team offices. For all the headaches that this new league has caused thus far, it may well be worth it to see Okada and his former colleagues of the industrial leagues take the field in the PEBA this spring.