published on July 15, 2024 in Front Page News

How a new class of Japanese stars is changing MLB

Twenty-five years ago, in April 1999, there were six Japanese players on Major League Baseball rosters. Hideo Nomo was the most famous of the bunch, but there were other names, too. Masato Yoshii, Hideki Irabu, Mac Suzuki and Shigetoshi Hasegawa ended up pitching at least five MLB seasons. They were big leaguers and trailblazers. But they were rarities in MLB, which by and large still treated Japanese players as if they had something to prove.

A quarter-century later, Japanese stars are integral parts of MLB’s story, playing prominent roles on prominent teams and commanding as much attention and money as, if not more than, North American-born stars.

The highest-paid hitter in the majors, Shohei Ohtani, began his playing career in Nippon Professional Baseball. The highest-paid pitcher, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, earned his deal entirely based on his track record in NPB. Chicago Cubs left-hander Shota Imanaga has looked dominant. New York Mets right-hander Kodai Senga finished second in National League rookie of the year voting last season. In an era of fleeting starter durability, San Diego Padres right-hander Yu Darvish is sixth among active pitchers in career strikeouts. As many eyes are on young Japanese righty Roki Sasaki, who is still pitching for NPB’s Chiba Lotte Marines, as there are on any elite college player who might find himself drafted this summer.

The change came slowly, then swiftly, unleashing a torrent of Japanese talent coming stateside that will only pick up speed. And according to conversations with more than a dozen current and former NPB players, coaches and MLB executives, a shrinking world and changing attitudes combined to make it possible.

“I think overall, maybe 10 years back, the understanding for players in Japan was that it was going to be tough to make it over here,” Darvish said through an interpreter. “But I think the hurdle has become a little bit lower — or maybe it’s the other way around: Players over there are getting better, then doing a better job when they come here.”

When Darvish debuted in 2012, a Japanese player finding stardom in the United States still qualified as a rarity. The first Japanese standout to make the leap was reliever Masanori Murakami, whose promising MLB career began with the San Francisco Giants in 1964 and ended a year later when a contract dispute with his NPB team forced him to return to Japan.

It would be three decades before an NPB standout found his way to MLB again, when Nomo grew frustrated with the way his Kintetsu Buffaloes were using him and found a loophole that allowed him to make the jump to the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1995. His success signaled that Japanese aces could fare well in the United States, too, and pushed the leagues to establish the posting system, which allows Japanese stars to sign with MLB teams and Japanese teams to be compensated.

A few years later, Ichiro Suzuki arrived, and in the years that followed stars such as Daisuke Matsuzaka and Hideki Matsui inspired bidding wars among some of baseball’s most storied franchises. But for the most part, the trickle of talent across the Pacific was slow and limited to NPB’s elite players — or, at least, those who were most certain they would find success here.

In the years since, though, Darvish arrived and thrived. Starters such as Masahiro Tanaka, Kenta Maeda and Yusei Kikuchi waited out the requisite six years in Japan before heading to MLB and establishing themselves as valuable assets. Little by little, the question for top NPB talent changed. It is rarely a question of whether they will make the jump to MLB but rather when.

Ohtani was so good so soon that he did not even wait until he was eligible to head to MLB and instead made a deal with his NPB team to come over early. In the years that followed, players such as Seiya Suzuki and Masataka Yoshida found an MLB market willing to bet on Japanese hitters, too.

Darvish, meanwhile, emerged as something of a stateside mentor, the person Japanese pitchers would call for advice about whether they could make it here and how. The evolution of that role coincided with an unmistakable shift in posture for young Japanese players: Once, the stars who made the jump from NPB felt like untouchable heroes who sneaked through a door open only to the elite. Then, slowly but surely, their success started to prop that door open and show others how to follow them through it.

“The trend of Japanese players wanting to come play across the ocean started with the legend Ichiro. Everyone looked up to him. More recently it’s Darvish; he played a big role. Then came Ohtani. And I think more and more Japanese players are coming over, and everyone is looking up to them,” Senga said through an interpreter. “Because they look up to them, they want to come over here.”

‘How will I fare against the rest of the world?’

In the aftermath of the unforgettable 2023 World Baseball Classic final and in free agency this offseason, Imanaga was, the cerebral lefty probably would agree, something of an afterthought.

His two innings of one-run ball and two strikeouts in that game were eclipsed by Ohtani’s relief appearance and decisive strikeout of Mike Trout. And his hunt for a new MLB home was overshadowed by that of Ohtani and Yamamoto. Heck, in his earliest days of spring training this year, Imanaga wasn’t even the biggest Japanese star on his own team.

That Imanaga, who has yet to allow a run in three MLB starts covering 15⅓ innings, could repeatedly slide under the radar of so much Japanese baseball stardom is illustrative of the deluge of talent from the country in recent years.

“There have been a couple international tournaments, and it gets a lot of coverage in Japan. So people over there start seeing and thinking beyond NPB and wondering, ‘How will I fare against the rest of the world?’ ” Imanaga said through an interpreter. “They start seeing that as a goal. There’s a kind of mind-set change there.”

That shift is permeating more than just the minds of NPB players who might once have felt a leap to MLB was impossible. It also has trickled into the minds of players in Japan’s storied high school baseball system, a system so rooted in tradition that change is hard to come by, if not sometimes frowned upon entirely.

But longtime Japanese high school baseball coach Hiroshi Sasaki, who coached both Ohtani and Kikuchi, sees change coming to the shape of his players’ dreams.

“Back in the day, there were very few players in the U.S. league. It was very rare to see Japanese players in the U.S. But now it’s become so common, from Nomo to Matsui to Ohtani. As a result, television coverage has become much more prevalent as well,” Sasaki said in a phone interview. “Little kids are seeing U.S. baseball games on TV. They’re aware of the names of the teams. It’s become much more close to them.

“Back in the day, I think kids in elementary school wanted to become professional baseball players. Now, I think kids in elementary school want to go to the U.S. to become a professional baseball player. It’s so much more tangible.”

International competition helped, too. Japan had always fared well against the United States in international play. Japan’s dismantling of an American all-star team in 1990, for example, seemed to plant the seeds of belief that led Nomo and others to make the jump later that decade. In 2006, Ichiro Suzuki scolded his Japanese teammates for their deference as they watched the United States take batting practice before a WBC matchup in a tournament Japan ultimately won. A decade and a half later, it was Ohtani seizing the WBC moment to urge his Japanese teammates not to admire the Americans but see them as equals. Japan beat the United States in that tournament, too.

Those showings helped spur a mind-set change stateside, too. By the time Samurai Japan beat star-studded Team USA in last year’s WBC, it was clear to Japanese stars that they could compete with the best the Americans had to offer. And it was long since clear to major league clubs that scouting NPB regularly — once unthinkable unless one of those can’t-miss stars was coming — was now necessary.

High-level executives such as Brian Cashman and Andrew Friedman flew to Japan to see Yamamoto. Friedman has been there to see Sasaki, too. A.J. Preller, according to one person familiar with his behavior in free agency, followed reliever Yuki Matsui’s statistics day-to-day. And in the meantime, teams that can afford it are rotating scouts through Japanese stadiums regularly, and it is easier for MLB representatives to watch NPB games and track statistics than ever. Even Driveline, the high-tech U.S.-based data lab that helps pitchers and hitters optimize performance, is starting to establish a presence with NPB teams.

“When you talk to baseball development people … they will tell you it was just a matter of time. Great baseball players find their way to great baseball teams, and that’s what we’ve seen happen here,” said Jim Small, president of the WBC. “I don’t think it’s a surprise. I think it’s something that’s been coming for quite some time.”

Trying something new

Sasaki, Ohtani’s high school coach and early mentor, knows better than anyone the benefits that traditional Japanese baseball training — high-volume drilling of fundamentals, an emphasis on mental toughness, the sense of duty to a team and to Japanese baseball values — can have for a young player. So it was a somewhat seismic departure from the norm when he and his family decided this year that his son, Rintaro, would head to Stanford University to play college baseball instead of making himself eligible for the NPB draft.

The reasons, Sasaki explained, were as uncomplicated as they were indicative of the ways in which American norms are becoming more accessible to Japanese players. Japanese college and NPB teams, Sasaki explained, evaluate players mostly on traditional metrics — batting average, limiting strikeouts, defensive fundamentals.

He worried his son, who was the top-ranked Japanese high school player last year largely because of his power, might find himself docked because of what he does not do well instead of lauded because of what he does. He said, in his experience, MLB evaluators are more willing to overlook shortcomings in one area of a player’s game to foster excellence in another. A power hitter such as his son, for example, would benefit from a scouting system that would be more intrigued by a high OPS than scared away by a low batting average.

“I wanted him to be looked at for what he can do well,” Sasaki said. “For my son, who is really good at one specific portion of the game, we felt the U.S. was the best way to encourage him.”

The differences in priorities between Japanese and American baseball have also, at times, limited the ability of elite NPB players to see themselves in MLB. NPB traditionally looked for and rewarded well-rounded players who can execute fundamentals, especially hitters who limit strikeouts, and eschewed the boom-or-bust approach so many MLB teams have adopted lately. The same has been true for pitchers: Maximizing velocity has been less important than prioritizing control, and training has focused more on stamina than explosiveness, more on throwing a lot between starts than throwing with purpose — repetition yields success, full stop.

But as MLB teams began prioritizing power and velocity, some Japanese stars started hunting for the kind of training that could help them get there. Ohtani emerged as a global superstar while embracing some of Driveline’s more strength-based approaches. Others started to wonder whether maybe they should try that, too.

Frank Minamino, a former Northern Virginia high school player who became Driveline’s Pacific Rim emissary, said he found a uniquely positioned disciple in Senga. The right-hander, who worked with Minamino and explored more strength and rest-heavy methods when he was a member of the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks, was respected enough in NPB to try something new and raise interest among his peers.

“Organizationally in Japan, they like to stick to their roots, stay with the ways they have been doing things, so it can be a little tough for players to try new things. But the players themselves are not like that at all. They’re eager to learn,” Senga said. “Whatever is trending over here, they’re eager to learn, and they’ll try new things to get better and make their way over here.”

Neftali Soto, who played in the majors for the Cincinnati Reds and spent a decade in the minors before signing with NPB’s Yokohama DeNA BayStars in 2018, said he already has noticed a difference in the way his Japanese-trained NPB peers are approaching the game.

“One thing I think is changing is the way they are taking care of their bodies now. My first year here, there were a lot of people that did a lot of running, a lot of baseball stuff outside. Now, people are thinking, ‘I got to rest; I got to hit the gym more,’” Soto said. “They see Ohtani, who is jacked, throwing 100, hitting 40 bombs, so a lot of the young guys especially are looking at that and working on those things.”

The more Japanese players see themselves in MLB, the more they start to build themselves to the specifications MLB prefers. The more MLB sees Japanese stars thriving in its ranks, the more it starts to look for them. The century-old exchange of baseball culture, it seems, has reached a new, and in some cases very lucrative, apex.

On Thursday morning, the Baseball Hall of Fame announced an upcoming exhibit that explores the shared baseball history of the United States and Japan, an addition to the museum’s collections that will open next summer. The exhibit was planned to coincide with Ichiro Suzuki’s first appearance on the Hall of Fame ballot, which is fitting: When the results of that vote are announced in January, he almost certainly will become the first Japanese player to be elected. It has never seemed so certain that others will follow.

Julia Mio Inuma contributed to this report.

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