The Draft and Money — The Feud Over Acquiring Players

Last time, we looked at the Black Mist Scandal, which shook the trust of the baseball world, as a problem of structure. Today’s theme is not the contest itself, but the question that lies just before it: how to acquire players. Which team takes in a promising newcomer, and under what rules? This problem, which at first glance seems plain, is in fact deeply tied to the fairness of the baseball world and the money that flows through it. Why has the draft system, which began bearing an ideal, swayed so many times and been remade? We trace half a century of the feud over acquiring players.

A Draft That Began as an Ideal

It was in 1965 (Showa 40) that the draft system was introduced into Japanese professional baseball. Until then, it is said that a system had been in place under which teams could freely negotiate and contract with promising players. This way, which at first glance seems free and fair, nonetheless had a major problem. Promising newcomers tended to gather at popular teams with financial power. Strong teams grew stronger still, and the gap in strength widened — it was feared that this imbalance might damage the appeal of the league as a whole.

What was born there was the draft system, in which new players are nominated all at once. By having each team choose newcomers in turn, the aim was to ease the concentration of strength on particular teams and to balance the teams’ strength. Regarding its introduction, there were also teams that strongly opposed it on the grounds that free competition would be hindered, and the debate is reported to have grown heated. Even so, the system was introduced in the end, and Japanese professional baseball took a step toward the ideal of ‘keeping the balance of strength together.’

The ‘light’ that the draft system brought was not small. Promising players could no longer be monopolized by financial power alone, and a path was opened even for regional teams and teams lesser in popularity to take in star candidates. Where the nominations would go became itself a major concern for fans, and the draft meeting settled in as an autumn tradition. The idea of sharing out newcomers equally became the foundation that enlivened competition across the whole league.

The Feud Over the Price of Players

Yet even a system bearing an ideal produced various frictions within reality. At its root was the gap between the calculations of the team a player ‘wants to go to’ and the team that ‘wants him to come,’ over a promising player. The player’s side has a team it hopes for, and the team’s side has a player it wants. How to reconcile both sides’ wishes with the ideal of balanced strength became a difficult problem that troubled the baseball world for a long time.

As one answer to this, in 1993 (Heisei 5) the reverse nomination system was introduced. This was a mechanism that made it easier for some college and corporate-league players to choose the team they hoped for. In the sense of respecting players’ will, it was a positive reform, but on the other hand, the observation arose that it might make it easier for promising players to gather at popular teams. Before long, this mechanism changed its form into the free-acquisition slot in 2001 (Heisei 13), while a form of taking in players in a slot separate from the draft continued.

The Money Problem That Surfaced, and the Reform of the System

The mechanism for respecting players’ wishes, however, also cast an unexpected shadow. As the room to choose a particular team widened, a concern arose that, over that choice, money hard to see from the surface might be moving. Before long, cases also came to be reported in which the passing of money — which should originally have been prohibited — surfaced.

What gave the baseball world a particularly great shock was a case in which it was made clear through investigation that a certain team had, against the rules, handed cash to an amateur player who was not yet a professional. This clearly showed what can happen when competition over acquiring players goes too far. With the surfacing of such problems as one trigger, the mechanism said to have become a hotbed of wrongdoing was pressed toward review.

Through such reforms, the rules over acquiring newcomers drew closer to something more transparent and fair. That said, there is no perfect correct answer to the fundamental question of how to reconcile players’ wishes with the balance of strength. That is precisely why the system will likely continue to be reviewed in step with the times. What matters is the stance of, each time wrongdoing occurs, grasping it anew as a problem of structure and reforming the mechanism itself.

What we do not want to overlook here is that this very path of trial and error was also a forward-looking maturing of the baseball world. Each time a problem surfaced, it did not avert its eyes, but rewrote the rules and searched for a fairer form. Because that accumulation existed, the draft meeting remains even now a healthy festival that many fans watch over with bated breath. That it has advanced its steps toward a better mechanism even while swaying between the ideal and reality — that, too, is one ‘light’ that should be told.

The feud over the draft and money, which at first glance looks like a behind-the-scenes story, was in fact a theme bearing on the very foundation of the baseball world’s fairness. Who takes in a player, under what rules, and for how much. The accumulation of each of those judgments shapes the balance and trust of the entire league. And when we pursue these individual problems of rules to their end, we eventually arrive at a larger question. On what kind of structure has Japanese professional baseball stood in the first place? Next time, we turn our eyes to the very mechanism of the ‘single dominant power’ that has long characterized the baseball world.