The Future of Japanese Baseball

This is a very difficult one to comment on. Fortunately, as reported on some other threads, the Central League owners are starting to stand up to Watanabe and are coming up with a reasonable proposal of their own, allowing for inter-league games - but not a single league.

Proponents for the single league all talk as though another merger will take place in the Pacific League, but there's been no action by any other team that makes me think that such an announcement will happen this year. If/when it does, it will come as a shock to all, even though everyone assumes that it will happen.

Nabetsune looks to me to be someone who would rather see everything collapse than allow someone new (Horie-shacho) to join his private Old Boys Club.

What most disterbs me is that everyone has accepted that Kintetsu and Orix will merge and all of the talk is about merging the leagues. They need to address the merger of these two clubs first, and investigate alternatives. If these two teams don't merge, is the merger of the leagues still necessary? If so, why? If not, then why has everyone accepted it?

Regarding the future of Pro Yakyu, I feel that the Pacific League would be best to promote international baseball over inter-league baseball. I've written on the topic often enough, I won't reiterate it here.

LiveDoor bringing baseball to the Internet has a great deal of international potential if done right. And Horie-shacho, from what I've seen so far, appears to be capable of doing it right. But will Watanabe allow him to make baseball more popular? Unlikely.

Hmmmmm. All the controversy about Watanabe aside, why not introduce the Idea of Revenue sharing. I'd rather see that before they go for inter-league games. I think that has taken a fair amount of the fun out of the All Star Game and MLB World Series. I've read the other posts you've made about international play, and agree with that train of thought as a back up.

I've never really understood the rationale for having two separate leagues in Japan, with such a small number of teams. I would love to see the best players battling each other on a week to week basis. Surely that's something the fans would get excited about. I hope that with this current upheaval we'll finally get to see the formation of one league to showcase all of Japan's baseball talent, competing under the one roof, so to speak. Or at least inter-league play.

I'm all for revenue sharing, but as a fan, I'm rather more interested in seeing more exciting matchups in the regular season. All Star games? I never watch 'em. OK, they provide a bit of comic relief, but the regular season games are what count.

Mijow-san really put it well. I also want to see a larger variety of match-ups, rather than the same five opponents 28 times a season. That's why I want to see the Pacific League expand throughout the Pacific. It would be nice if the Central League followed along later. Expanding to take in other leagues would have the effect of giving fans a larger variety. Contracting to 10 teams just to become a single league just doesn't strike me as increasing choice.

Let's look at Taiwan for a second. The CPBL expanded beyond what the local talent pool could cover in the mid-1990s. Gambling scandals aside, a major factor that turned fans off of CPBL was the fact that over half the team was made up of suketto (migrant workers). Some teams went an entire season without a Taiwanese pitcher getting a single win. (Market factors are something that aren't brought up in talks about elimitating the foreign player limit. It actually serves to keep the owners from alienating their fans base, which Taiwanese owners did.) Nonetheless, I'm not discussing the merits or demerits of the foreign player limit. I'm noting that expansion caused a dilution of the local talent pool. In Taiwan's case, contraction was necessary to raise the percentage of local talent in the game. The TML showed the CPBL what the fans wanted, and CPBL eventually came around, contracted, merged with the TML, and Taiwanese baseball appears to be rebounding. (Anyone more familiar with the situation in Taiwan is most welcome to correct anything I missed on.)

Back to Japan. Many people have been fearing that all the local talent will move across the Pacific to the MLB. Has this happened? I don't think so. More talent comes up and fills in the holes. Look at the great job Nakajima is doing at short in place of Kazuo.

So, one reasonable reason for contraction would be a diluted talent pool. That demands the questions:

• Are there less players entering NPB than are leaving (retiring, released, going to MLB)?
• Is the level of play in Japan decreasing?

The answer to the first question appears to be "no" at first glance. After all, each team continues to have 70 players on their total ichi and ni-gun rosters. However, there has been an increase in the number of foreign players being put on those rosters as back-up suketto over the years since the total roster limit was eliminated. Hanshin had something like eight foreign players in all a while back, if I recall correctly. However, after an initial increase when the limit was abolished, the teams have pretty much leveled out and aren't importing more and more players each year, and thus, are not reducing the domestic turn over.

As for the level of play, that's much more subjective. The number of errors I see is alarmingly high on occasion, but I haven't investigated if it's any different than any other year. Some pitchers have gotten better, others worse. But that's not unusual and is not a sign of degradation of play. How does one calculate degradation? The number of people at extream ends of the mean batting average and/or ERA?

I'm not convinced that either of the above conditions are met, so I'm not convinced that contraction, and with it, consolidation into a single league of 10 teams, is best for Japanese baseball. Inter-league play would do a great deal toward providing variety without the need to reduce the number of teams. International baseball would go farther, but I'm not sure if it's in the best interests of Japanese teams to do so (expenses would most likely be larger than the take). If Japanese teams would only learn how to market their teams, they'd have a good international market in the Pacific - but they can't even market properly at home.

I, too, would like to see more variety in the match-ups. But the cost of two teams is too high. There are problems in NPB, but contraction is not the solution.

Even if the one league system is established, none of the teams in the Pacific League will go into the black. They will be in the red.

To get 8-oku yen, they try to reduce two teams while losing 30-oku yen a year. It doesn't make sense.