By Robert Whiting (2009)
One of the big differences between baseball in Japan and baseball in the U.S. is that in the former, 19-year-old high school pitching stars are the subject of intense, nationwide scrutiny, while in the US, they are virtually ignored. The only amateur baseball star to get mass media scrutiny that remotely came close to what left-handed pitcher Yusei Kikuchi experienced was college ace Stephen Strasburg, whom we discussed in an earlier column this year.
One reason for this difference is that amateur baseball has simply never generated a popular following in the US. Unlike Japan, which had a long history of high school and college baseball dating back to the mid-to-late 19th century—long before a Japanese professional baseball league was begun in 1935—baseball in America started out as a professional sport from the 1870s on, and that is what people became accustomed to watching. There is no national high school baseball tournament like the one that is so popular in Japan, only state and regional tourneys. As a result, most baseball fans in the U.S. have no idea who the best high school baseball team in America is or who the best player is. It is just not on their radar or that of the media.
In fact the only high school player that the US mass media has paid attention to in recent years is, ironically, Japanese: superboy Yusei Kikuchi, the 2009 Koshien star recently drafted by the Seibu Lions, who made waves this summer when he said his dream was not to enter the NPB draft but to bypass it and play in MLB, thereby attracting the attention of 8 MLB teams, including the Dodgers, Yankees, Mets and Mariners. This attention translated into media interest in America. Among the prestigious media organizations to do features about Kikuchi were the Washington Post, the New York Times, Bloomberg, USA Today and CBS News, who marveled about all the consecutive complete games he pitched in the 2009 Koshien tournament. Kikuchi became so popular that he even has his own Wikipedia page in English.
The main reason for MLB’s interest in Japanese high school baseball is economics. With the global recession hitting MLB—attendance has been down this year by a rather large 6%—teams have been looking to economize in their hunt for new talent and have been paying more and more attention to Japan’s amateur players, both high school and college. This reached a watermark with the signing of industrial league star Junichi Tazawa by the Boston Red Sox last year.*
In fact, the tourney used to be so far off the US radar that the Red Sox first heard of Daisuke Matsuzaka not from a professional scout but from a Stanford economics professor named Daniel Okimoto, who just happened to see Matsuzaka on TV pitching in the Koshien tourney while waiting for a plane at Narita Airport. He called his old college friend Larry Lucchino, a baseball executive who went on to become president of the Red Sox. This year an estimated dozen MLB scouts attended the tourney—a tourney they used to ignore. That’s how much MLB scouting of amateurs in Japan has changed.
As for Kikuchi, however, as we all know now, despite serious courting by MLB teams, he chose to stay in Japan. Kikuchi, in the end, tears flowing, opted not to sign with an American team, bowing to the entreaties of NPB leaders like Senichi Hoshino and sacrificing his own wishes for the good of his country. He was drafted. Whether this decision was really good or not for Kikuchi is debatable. On the one hand, if Kikuchi had signed with an MLB team, he would no doubt have spent the next few years in the minor leagues, riding buses for hours from one tiny town to another, where there is no Japanese food and no Japanese-speaking girls to comfort him. That’s a hard pill for any young kid to swallow. Although Kikuchi has a good fastball and good breaking stuff, the odds of Kikuchi making MLB before the age of 21 or 22 had he gone to America are extremely low, given the intensity of the competition for MLB jobs there.
On the other hand, Kikuchi now faces the prospect of 9 years playing in Japan. That’s 9 years of Spartan throwing sessions in practice, of pitching in games in which he is expected to throw 140-150 pitches, and, of course, two WBC tournaments where his arm is likely to be taxed even more. By the time he is eligible for MLB, he may find himself with his arm burned out, as seems to be the case with Daisuke Matsuzaka—unless, that is, Lions manager Hisanobu Watanabe treats him sympathetically.
With these conditions—not to mention the rule banning amateur stars who go to the US from returning to play in the NPB for 3 years—it seems it will be quite a while before MLB fans get to see a star Japanese pitcher face MLB batters while still in his prime.
Unless, of course, some sensei at Todai invents a new bionic arm and a technique to transplant it.
If the Kikuchi affair proves anything, it is the following: it is easier to convince a guy going on the age of 23, as Tazawa was, of the dangers involved in staying in the NPB and pitching for 9 years before becoming eligible for free agency, than it is to convince a fresh-faced 18-year-old, who is under all sorts of pressure from his fellow countrymen to stay in the country.
NOTE: Kikuchi pitched 9 long years in NPB, finishing with a record of 73-46 and an ERA of 3.46. He finally made it to the major leagues in 2019 when he signed with Seattle. He had four mediocre years before he found success with the Toronto Blue Jays—at the age of 32.
* To avoid conflict between Japanese and U.S. teams, Tazawa asked NPB teams not to select him in the October 30 draft, and the 12 teams complied with the request. However, the teams passed a rule requiring any amateur player who signs overseas to sit out two to three years before he can join a Japanese team; high school players would have to sit two years, while college and corporate players three years.
Tokyo Junkie 