Where, Oh Where Is Shohei Going?

The name of Shohei Ohtani is being bandied about the world of baseball these days, and I thought I would do some bandying myself.  There are a few reasons for that, but those reasons are fascinating because they all bring in very unusual aspects of the game that we have not seen previously.

Ohtani is a ballplayer from Japan, who until now has been toiling for the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters in the Japanese baseball leagues.  Nippon Ham is, of course, the sponsor of the team.  They are a meat-packing company that has been around for about 70 years; they are commonly called Nippon Ham in Japan, or at least the Japanese words for Nippon Ham.  The team plays in Hokkaido.  They are called the "Fighters", and only now are the American media types properly referring to them as the Fighters, after years of ignorantly calling them the "Ham Fighters."  Don't ask.

But I digress.

Ohtani is only 23 years old, and he wants to come to play in the majors.  Many Japanese players have come over, of course, since Masanori Murakami, the first of the modern era, pitched effectively for the Giants for a couple years in the mid-1960s.  Murakami was only 20, but most players coming over since then have been older, subject to the arcane "posting" system that requires Japanese teams to agree to offer their players for a bidding war for the right to sign them.  Since the players have no value until they've played for a while, they don't get posted until they're closer to 30.

That system is on its last legs, but it still applies, so it has impact here.  Nippon Ham has agreed to let Ohtani come over, and major league teams will be able to bid on him.  It's not strictly an auction in any sense, however.  Ohtani will end up choosing the team whose offer he wants to accept.  That team will pay Nippon Ham $20 million for the rights to the services of the player, separate from the salary Ohtani will get that is, of course, paid to him.

Why do we care?  Because Ohtani is a very, very different player.  By Japanese standards, he pitches very well, he hits very well, and he wants to do both in the majors.  And he wants to do them full time, meaning that he would take a starting rotation spot, and when he is not pitching, he would play the field (or DH if he goes to an American League team).  No one, we should point out, is doing that, certainly regularly, nor has any pitcher regularly played the field or DHed since, well, no one anyone can remember.

Now, I said he "does both well", but that is a pretty squishy assessment.  He has been doing his playing in the Japanese leagues, and the competition there is generally thought to be about Triple-A level, the highest level of the minor leagues over here.  Players have, of course, come over and starred.  Hideo Nomo threw a couple no-hitters in a fairly lengthy USA career.  Ichiro Suzuki was successful enough to have come over at 27 and still gotten 3,000 hits, and will probably play in 2018 at age 44, delaying his inevitable Hall of Fame candidacy.

But there have also been some failures with short careers, who were no different from American Triple-A players who had great careers in the minors but never really got it done in the majors.  Kei Igawa and Hideki Irabu come to mind there, and some position players we don't recall.

So with the background of the uncertain level of competition this two-way player Ohtani has faced, the major-league teams have to decide how good a player he really is.  It is generally assumed that is "excellent", but what if he turns out to be about a 5th starter-level pitcher?  Do you just let him hit and maybe get a start once in a while or do long relief?  The man wants to start and hit.  He even sent a questionnaire to the 30 teams asking how they would use him, to help him decide.

There is also the question of money.  International players are restricted in initial salary to what the teams have in their "pools" -- all teams get a certain amount to sign international players, and while they can actually trade players for another team's pool money, the most that any team has is about $3 million or so, relatively little compared to what a star player would be making a few years later.

So Ohtani can be really picky about going to a team that intends to use him the way he wants to be used, figuring that the money will come.  At 23, he is apparently idealistic enough to know that he will make his money; more important to him is how historic a player he can be.  And he has already declined to take offers from New York and Boston, apparently preferring to play on the west coast.

I don't know where he is going to end up, nor do I know if I care if the team I root for gets him or not (and we already know they won't, which is OK).  What I do care about is that an American player, with half the skills Ohtani is supposed to have, has exactly zero control over what franchise he signs with.  He is subject to the Rule 4 amateur player draft, meaning that the teams annually select players from high school and college in roughly inverse order of their record in the league the prior year.  But Japanese (and Latin and other) players can choose their teams, choose their cities and negotiate free of the same restrictions that American players do.

Shohei Ohtani has done nothing to deserve treatment any different from an American amateur player, but he gets a much better shake than USA players subject to a player draft.  I wish him well, but I absolutely want to see major-league baseball subject every incoming Japanese player to a draft sequence that is fair to all teams and fair to the American amateurs.  I realize that the international signing pool is an attempt to level that, but if I were a 22-year-old who just got drafted by a franchise with no expectation of incipient success, I'd be screaming.

I'm 66, and I'm screaming.  Fix the system!

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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