The Meaning of Ichiro (19 page)

Watanabe’s solution was to construct a free-agent system by which he could sign many top stars from others teams and create
one super Giants squad that would strengthen the pre-existing monopoly. A cantankerous silver-haired sexagenarian, Watanabe
had long made his presence felt in Japanese society. A onetime leader of the leftist student group
zengakuren,
which opposed the Mutual Security Treaty between the U.S. and Japan, he had joined the
Yomiuri Shimbun
and had risen through the ranks, first as a star political reporter, then as editor, whose support had helped Yasuhiro Nakasone
attain the prime ministership in 1982. He was appointed president of the
Yomiuri
in the late ‘80s which brought with it automatic control over the ball club and honorific title of team
ohna
(owner).

Running a baseball team was something he knew little about—he had been a longtime fan of sumo and was a ranking member of
the sumo association—but this did not prevent him from trying anyway. Like Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, to whom he was often compared, he was a blustering alpha male who did everything but
urinate on the floor to make his mark. He was used to being obeyed and earned himself many enemies with his totalitarian ways.

When 10 of his fellow owners voiced their objection to his proposal for a new free-agency system, Watanabe threatened to withdraw
from NPB and start his own new baseball association if they did not change their minds. Accustomed as they were to the fringe
benefits of the Giants’ tremendous drawing power, the other owners reluctantly buckled.

“Watanabe didn’t give a damn about the other teams, or players’ rights, for that matter,” said former Orix general manager
Shigeyoshi Ino, one of the many NPB executives who had unsuccessfully opposed Watanabe’s demand for a free-agent system. “He
just wanted all the superstars on his team.”

The free-agent system that was subsequently introduced was not a hallmark in the history of human rights struggles. Players
could only become free agents after ten full years of service on the parent team; time on the farm club did not count. Moreover,
under this agreement, while compensation in the form of money and a minor league player would be sent to a team losing a free
agent from the team gaining his services, the salaries of free-agent signees would be limited to only 150 percent of their
previous season’s pay. It was largely designed to appeal to those players who wanted the cachet of wearing a Yomiuri Giants
uniform. And there were, of course, lots of those, the Giants being one of the most exclusive private clubs in Japan.

Yet another restrictive aspect of the Japanese free-agent system was the banning of player agents from any kind of negotiating
process. Only foreign players who entered Japanese baseball from abroad were allowed that privilege. The Japanese players
tepidly accepted such conditions, prompting one disgusted baseball critic to write that theirs was “the behavior of people
who belong to a welfare state.”

Indeed, it wasn’t until the 2001 season that the owners finally decided to allow player agents, but with restrictions so severe
they might as well have continued the ban. The agent had to be a bona fide attorney in Japan and said attorney, who must also
be a Japanese citizen, was limited to only one baseball client. At the same time, Watanabe, true to form, made it clear that
he would not tolerate any of
his
players using an agent, and even publicly scolded his manager, Shigeo Nagashima, for being seen at a dinner party
talking
with one.

“If one of my players brings an agent into contract negotiations,” he was quoted as saying, “then we’ll cut his salary. If
he’s expecting 5 or 6 hundred million yen, we’ll give him 2 or 3 hundred instead. If he doesn’t like it, we’ll release him.
There are lots of guys who would want to take his place.”

MLB owners could only drool with envy.

The early results of the new free-agent era in Japan were as different from the U.S. as they were predictable. Whereas in
America, scores of eligible free agents changed teams annually in pursuit of bigger bucks, in Japan, movement was all but
invisible. Of the 60 eligible in the first year, only five filed for free agency. The next year, only four of 59 free-agency
qualifiers worked up the courage to switch uniforms, while the figures in years immediately following were no better—two of
58, three of 64 and so on. It took a while to get used to the idea. Kimiyasu Kudo, perhaps the best pitcher in the Pacific
League in 1995, left the Seibu Lions to join the Daiei Hawks in order to be reunited with his former general manager who had
become the Hawks GM, for
no
raise and a one-year contract. In a magazine interview, Kudo said he thought the free-agent system was a “bad influence”
on the players and should be abolished. However, this did not stop him from moving on to the Giants a few years later.

Salaries did rise somewhat. Then, in the 1997-1998 off-season, in exchange for a lowering of the free agency time limit to
nine years, the union made a stupefying concession: they agreed to a complete
freeze
on salaries for a year. Their compliant attitude puzzled MLB union leaders, who were watching from afar. Said players’ association
attorney Gene Orza, “It makes you wonder why they ever established a union in the first place.”

It was not surprising to learn that after that particular nine-year deal was instituted, the secretary-general of the NPBPA
took a position with Yomiuri. He followed in the footsteps of the aforementioned union chief Kiyoshi “A strike wouldn’t be
right” Nakahata, who became a TV commentator with the Yomiuri group.

At no time in the union’s existence was there even an attempt by its leaders to wrest control of the rights to the players’
names and their likenesses from the ball clubs, which had held such rights since the game’s inception. If a company wanted
to use a ballplayer in a TV or print media advertisement, it had to first negotiate with the club he played for; the club
then decided yes or no, and if the answer was yes, took a sizable 20 percent commission off the top.

Said one NPB official, who preferred to remain anonymous, “In the U.S., the players effectively took over control of their
game, but I think it will be a long time before we ever see anything like that in Japan. It takes a lot of courage to change
the system and that’s something that’s generally lacking in ballplayers here… . The players don’t understand the system. They
don’t even try. All they want to think about is playing ball.”

It wasn’t until 2004 that the NPB finally experienced a player walkout, albeit one that lasted a mere two days. Ailing from
the long recession and the defection of star players to MLB, NPB owners began discussing a major restructuring. In June, the
merger of the Orix Blue-Wave and the Kintetsu Buffaloes was announced—the first step in contraction to one league under the
aegis of the Giants. When the NPBPA requested a meeting with the owners to discuss the move, Yomiuri strongman Tsuneo Watanabe
dismissed them by saying “Players are only baseball players. They’re unconsequential and should know their place.” By September,
the union was reluctantly forced into a strike to protect the 60 some jobs sure to be lost. However, the way they did it had
a decidedly Japanese twist—with tearful apologies all around and games cancelled only on the weekends so as not to totally
inconvenience everyone. Most players in fact seemed so guilt-ridden they spent their first weekend off the job signing autographs
for the fans at their respective parks and conducting free baseball clinics for kids. The owners, faced with opposition from
the public, and even criticism from the prime minister’s office, which wanted to maintain or even expand the existing system,
relented and agreed to replace the lost team—thereby ending perhaps the shortest strike in baseball history.

The biggest weakness of Japanese players is that they don’t have balls—with the exception of Nomo, that is. He has the balls
and the heart of a lion. He is the only Japanese like that where his individual rights are concerned. The others …

MLB E
XECUTIVE

What the Americans did in regard to Nomo was reprehensible. They knew what they did was wrong and Japan won’t forget that.

NPB E
XECUTIVE

J
APAN IN
1995
WAS A MUCH DIFFERENT PLACE THAN IT WAS IN
1965. For one thing, satellite TV was bringing the outside world into sharper focus. There were daily reminders in the Japanese
sports media of the preferential treatment and special opportunities that major league stars enjoyed in North America. True,
a debilitating lockout had wiped out the last half of the 1994 season and caused the cancellation of the World Series for
the first time in history, but the players emerged wealthier and better protected than before. Moreover, the gap in pay and
privileges between U.S. and Japan athletes had come to seem all the more disproportionate as the gap in the two countries’
level of play perceptibly narrowed. In 1990, a Japanese All-Star squad swept the first four games in a seven-game exhibition
series against a visiting team that featured some of MLB’s brightest names—like Cal Ripken Jr. and stringy-haired strikeout
king Randy Johnson.

The protestations from the embarrassed major leaguers that they were not serious because the games were meaningless and that
the postseason trip to Japan was just a vacation for them seemed like a poor excuse. In truth, they had been blindsided by
a Japanese pitching corps that included a right-handed rookie pitcher with a weapons-grade forkball named Hideo Nomo. Randy
Johnson buttonholed the 23-year-old at a private dinner one night during that visit and told him that he was wasting his time
playing in Japan. “You belong in MLB,” he declared. Nomo was not inclined to disagree.

He had been thinking about taking his ball and glove to the U.S. ever since he had dismantled the Americans in the 1988 Seoul
Olympics. MLB had not signed a Japanese player since the 1967 United States–Japanese Player Contract Agreement went into effect.
But Nomo’s desire to play in the major leagues would change all that. In fact, so successful would he eventually be in attaining
his goal that it would dramatically alter the baseball relationship between the two countries, creating resentment that would
linger for years. As one NPB executive would later put it, “We will never forgive the Americans for what they have done to
our game.”

Nomo was born to a working-class family in the teeming section of industrially gray Osaka known as Honohanaku, in 1969. His
father was a large, broad-shouldered man from a remote fishing village off the coast of Hiroshima in Western Japan, who had
forsaken life on a deep sea trawler to become a postal worker in the big city. He and his wife, who also worked at various
jobs, fed their son copious quantities of protein-rich boiled fish paste so that he would grow up to be big and strong, and,
indeed, by the time young Hideo hit primary school, he stood head and shoulders above the rest of his classmates.

Father and son played catch together often and it was in these sessions that Hideo invented his bizarre twisting “corkscrew”
style of throwing. It was a conscious effort, he said, a way of getting extra speed on the ball, as well as impressing his
father.

“By twisting my body and by using this force,” he explained later, “I was able to throw harder. And, at the same time, with
that motion, it would be difficult for batters to pick up the ball.”

As the ace pitcher on the baseball teams at
Ikejima Sho-Gakk
(primary school) and
Minato-ku Ch
gakk
(middle school), he was known both for his speed and for a frightful lack of control. He would often walk the bases loaded,
only to strike out the side.