Dice K Dollars Don't Go Down The John

Recently, I read a great article about what the Seibu Lions of the Japanese Pacific League were doing with the posting fee that the Red Sox had to spend to acquire Dice K Matsusaka. From the article:

With the $51,111,111.11 posting fee the Lions earned from the Red Sox in the deal, they renovated the drab, outdated Seibu Dome, constructing concession stands and seating, resurfacing the playing field, installing an enormous video scoreboard and, most notably, building magnificent bathrooms with electronically warmed toilet seats.

I presented this article to a Japanese friend of mine who is very knowledgeable on the posting system and Japanese baseball in general. And while he thinks the Lions did a great job using the money he is worried about the irrationality of the posting system in its current state. He believes "improvements could be made to enhance the liquidity of the player market between the US and Japan."

I continued to press him on this issue and what he meant... "it could be improved by allowing players to flow more easily between the two leagues."

I'm assuming here he means that more players from major and minor league baseball could choose to play in the Japanese baseball leagues. Sort of in a similar way that some American basketball players go to Europe after college to continue their own professional careers.

He went on to say that the level of Japanese professional baseball has been significantly improved since Hideo Nomo came to the US... which I totally agree.

But another problem less talked about is the current free agent system in Japan that allows players to move freely to Major League Baseball without any compensation at all. Kenshin Kawakami and Koji Uehara were two players that left Japan this past winter to join MLB teams leaving no cash behind to improve the "facilities".

He thinks "it would be much easier to consolidate the current free agent and posting system as a new free agent system where the US team would pay a certain amount of money, which is based on the signing bonus and/or the salary, when the team signs the player out of Japanese professional baseball team."

It will be interesting to see in the future if MLB teams will make player trades with Japanese teams. Although it's more likely that Japanese baseball will operate in a way minor league teams used to be run in the first half of the century here in the US where they were unaffiliated from a specific team and were free to sell their players on an open market.

For those that don't know here's how the posting system works.

When an NPB player is posted, MLB holds a four-day-long silent auction. During this auction, MLB teams can submit sealed bids in an attempt to win the exclusive rights to negotiate with the player for 30 days. If the MLB team with the winning bid and the NPB player agree on contract terms before the 30-day period has expired, the NPB team receives the bid amount as a transfer fee, and the player is free to play in MLB. If the MLB team cannot come to a contract agreement with the posted player, then no fee is paid, and the player's rights revert to his NPB team.