The Meaning of Ichiro (18 page)

In 1975, however, two other players who followed Flood’s lead and challenged the clause wound up changing history. One of
them was Andy Messersmith, a 6′1′, 200-pound blond-haired surfer from Los Angeles who won 20 games for the Dodgers in 1974
and opted to play the 1975 season without a new contract. Instead of challenging the legality of the reserve clause as Flood
had, however, Messersmith decided to question its
interpretation.
He argued that any fair reading of his contract clause by an unbiased court would conclude that a player who played a full
season without signing his contract would automatically become free at the end of the year. The other player was Dave McNally,
a four-time 20-game winner from Billings, Montana, who was nearing the end of his long career. McNally was extremely bitter
because his bid for a two-year contract with his new team, the Montreal Expos, had been summarily rejected. Thus McNally too,
using the same line of reasoning as Messersmith, decided to play without a contract.

Messersmith enjoyed another standout season, winning 19 games, and when it was over, he declared himself a free agent. McNally
finished with a less inspiring mark of 3-6 and an ERA of 5.24 and declared himself a free agent as well. Both men were advised
by Marvin Miller, a polished Brooklyn economist who had come from a long career fighting on behalf of steelworkers to run
the MLB Players Association in 1967—eventually molding it into one of the most powerful unions in history, on the basis of
several strikes.

Instead of going to court again, the Messersmith and McNally cases were heard by an outside arbiter named Peter Seitz, who
had been hired by MLB to arbitrate salary disputes. And much to the shock of the management side, in late November 1975, Seitz
ruled in favor of the players, a decision that forever altered the balance of power in the major leagues.

Fearing total chaos with all the restrictions on player movement removed, the owners struck a deal with the union whereby
a player joining the big leagues would be required to stay with the team that signed and nurtured him in its farm system for
six years. But from then on, free-agent declarations came in droves and salaries suddenly skyrocketed. Multiyear contracts
and sophisticated sports agents became a permanent part of the MLB scene. In short, it was the American willingness to
confront,
however belated it may have been, that led to free agency and the earth-shaking changes that baseball subsequently underwent.

In Japan, such a dramatic shift in the status quo was not so easily achieved. The Uniform Players Contract long used in NPB
was a descendant of a direct translation of a 1930s U.S. minor league contract. It had the same annoying reserve clause in
it and it denied the right of collective bargaining. But Japan was not the United States. Whereas litigation and courtroom
confrontation, rightly or wrongly, was a part of the fabric of American life, in Japan, a society whose members traditionally
shied away from legal confrontation to resolve disputes, there had never been a movement to challenge the UPC in court.

One need only look at the long tradition of Confucianism and feudalism, where the obeisance of subordinates was as marked
as the arrogance of those with high social rank, and where civil disputes and grievances were redressed by a powerful feudal
magistrate from whom there was no appeal. Although that situation changed somewhat in the Meiji Era (1868-1912) and its aftermath,
as Western institutions were adopted, the lawyers who appeared during that time to represent the common man were generally
regarded as being in the same suspect class as reporters and gangsters. The image of the legal profession received a boost
in the wake of postwar allied occupation, but the new postwar system, with its tight constraints on the number of attorneys
permitted to practice and subsequently on the number of judges, meant that lawsuits and trials could take ages and ensured
that litigation remained an endeavor that ordinary Japanese would not enter into lightly. By the end of the 20th century,
Japan had only a fraction of the lawyers the U.S. did.

However, there was also a cultural bias against insisting too emphatically on one’s individual rights. Parties involved in
a litigation were invariably encouraged by judges to accept a
wakai
or harmonious settlement. It was an arrangement that the general populace seemed to prefer.

Pro baseball in Japan reflected and was affected by this condition. Thus, modern Japanese pro players, unlike their American
counterparts, tended to see themselves by and large as company employees, rather than performers with special skills to sell
to the highest bidder. The sense of individual rights and responsibilities that arose from the U.S. brand of democracy remained
foreign.

Japan did indeed have a Professional Baseball Players Association, a famously cooperative wa-oriented one. It wasn’t until
1985 that, after some lengthy and quiet behind-the-scenes maneuvering, it managed to obtain the legal right to strike—a right
it seemed reluctant to exercise. The players themselves made it quite clear from the outset that they would not be following
in the footsteps of Miller’s union, which by this time had succeeded in raising the minimum salary twentyfold, beefing up
the players’ pensions and giving them their rightful share of merchandising money by calling several crippling strikes. Instead,
the NPBPA’s player representative at the time, Kiyoshi Nakahata, the captain and first baseman of the Giants, behaved as if
he was representing management. In his memorable declaration before the national TV cameras, he said, “Although we hope to
work for higher pay and better working conditions, we could never strike like the U.S. union has. It would not be right.”

Four years later, when discussing the possibility of a work stoppage, Hiroshi Ogawa, the player representative for the Fukuoka
Daiei Hawks, would be equally resolute.

“Although there may technically be the possibility of a strike,” he told
Japan Times
veteran columnist Wayne Graczyk, “most players would be bothered by their consciences. We realize we are playing for the
fans and could not enjoy peace of mind if we stopped playing. We would walk out only as a last resort. In that way, the attitude
in Japan is very conservative and quite different from that of the American major leagues.”

Indeed, the majority of the players in Japan continued to speak not only of team loyalty and a greater sense of obligation
and duty to each other but also a feeling of responsibility to the parent company, the stadium food vendors, the parking-lot
attendants, the transportation companies and other individuals and businesses dependent on professional baseball who would
suffer economically in the event of a work stoppage (although whether or not they actually felt that way deep inside was unknown).
With the exception of the
Akahata
(Red Flag), the Communist Party organ in Japan, and a few other publications, the Japanese media generally supported this
position and many unequivocally condemned the actions of the MLBPA, comparing them to those of old labor unions in the U.S.
that demanded more money, even if it bankrupted the company that employed them. Some American fans might agree they had a
point.

In the middle of all this, however, there was also the complicating fact that ball club ownership, for the most part, was
not primarily concerned with making a profit. Generally speaking, it was PR for the parent firm that they wanted, which rendered
the specter of a player strike not very relevant.

Japan’s game was set up differently than its American cousin. In the U.S., professional baseball was run as a business. The
teams existed purely for profit, maintained extensive farm and scouting systems to keep up their competitive level and were
run by people with years of experience in the pro game. In Japan, by contrast, the teams of the Central and Pacific Leagues
existed to advertise the products and services of their corporate owners. Thus, when the Kintetsu Buffaloes met the Nippon
Ham Fighters it was a battle for supremacy between a private railway and a pork manufacturer. Although the independently owned
venues changed over the years from dark, dank utilitarian parks to high-tech outdoor stadiums and domes, the franchises were
operated largely by officials temporarily dispatched from the parent company who knew little about baseball and, in some cases,
even disliked the sport. (The Daiei Hawks and the Seibu Lions were two notable exceptions.) They invested sparingly in player
development—with only one farm team composed of 35 players per franchise—and, on the balance sheet, at least, they generally
reaped as they sowed. Although the parent organizations usually had revenue to spread around, they just preferred to spread
it elsewhere.

Few clubs made any real money from baseball itself. The Tokyo Giants, the franchise to end all franchises in Japan, raked
in as much as the New York Yankees, from combined ticket, TV and souvenir sales, and more than doubled that of their nearest
competitor, the Tigers of Osaka owned by the Hanshin Railway Company. Much of the Giant revenue was said to be funneled back
to the parent company, the
Yomiuri Shimbun,
to support costs and losses in the company’s vast communications and publishing empire. However, many other teams in NPB,
mostly in the Pacific League, played to sparse crowds and operated at an annual loss—a state of affairs the parent companies
have simply shrugged off. With the corporation’s name in the sports pages every day and, locally at least, on TV every night,
it was cheap advertising … a loss leader. When Orient Leasing bought the Hankyu Braves from the Hankyu Railway Company in
1988 and renamed the team the Orix Braves, then the Orix BlueWave, the firm’s name recognition value shot up to 90 percent
nationwide.

If the players wanted to strike, so be it. The parent company would spend its advertising budget elsewhere. In theory, of
course, a strike could be embarrassing, if not economically damaging, but as no one would dare ruffle the game’s all-important
wa,
it wasn’t a real threat. And the truth of the matter was that the owners were so power-hungry and egocentric that they would
rather shut down baseball altogether than give in to American-style player demands.

“A baseball team in Japan,” remarked author and prize-winning reporter Yoichi Funabashi in the
Asahi Shimbun,
summing up the game for his readers, “is similar to a corporate fiefdom where the ‘company first’ attitude dictates the nature
of competition…. The Japanese approach to sport incorporates moral guidance, business management and company-based role assignments,
making professional baseball a simple job for wages.”

It was so simple, in fact, that ties even counted. The 1988 and 1989 Pacific League seasons went down in history because in
both years, the team that won the most games did not win the pennant, due to the fact that the championship team had more
ties and therefore a higher winning percentage. When, in an interview for the magazine
SPA,
a sportswriter quizzed the PL president whether something was going to be done to change this awkward state of affairs, he
was told, “No. Ties suit the Japanese national character. They reward both teams for playing well.”

“Playing a 12-inning tie game,” said Funabashi, with just a hint of sarcasm, “is considered competition at its finest in Japan,
because nobody loses face, or the game.” By contrast, when the professional soccer J.League was established, Chairman Saburo
Kawabuchi opted for a “golden goal” sudden-death overtime, proclaiming “Ties don’t suit Japanese fans.”

The NPBPA’s pursuit of free agency further demonstrated the odd lopsided nature of the power structure in NPB. (The word “pursuit”
is used loosely here.) For years, the union leaders had continually requested that the owners implement a free-agency system
paralleling that of the United States, but the owners had stonewalled, offering instead only a token form of free agency to
unwanted minor league players. In 1992 the union player representative, infielder Akinobu Okada of the Hanshin Tigers, in
what must have been a fit of temporary madness, threatened to call an Opening Day strike if free agency was not immediately
granted. It was telling that no one took him seriously, not even the union’s own lawyer, who immediately issued a polite correction
saying that Okada had spoken in error. A year later, well after he had regained his senses, a chastened Okada would tell the
International Herald Tribune
that a strike was “unimaginable” in Japan.

Free agency finally did make an appearance in Japan, in 1993. But, typically, it came about not because of anything the union
did, but only because of the actions of one man, the tyrannical boss of the Tokyo Giants, Tsuneo Watanabe, who deemed its
imposition an evil necessary to protect the Yomiuri dynasty. Watanabe, who had taken over the reins from Matsutaro Shoriki’s
successor Mitsuo Mutai (known as the “god of newspaper sales” and for his boast that he could even sell blank paper) in 1991,
had been concerned by the initially explosive popularity of the newly formed soccer J.League, with its dynamic, eye-catching,
hip-wiggling, hair-dyed youth-oriented culture. In its first season, the J.League threatened to loosen the grip that Japanese
pro baseball held on the nation’s sports fans. The Central and Pacific Leagues, whose players wore solemn expressions and
short unretouched hair, much like the officer workers who went to see them play, had just gone through one of their most colorless
seasons in history. Worse, the proud
Kyojin-gun
(Giant Troop) had fielded one of its most boring squads ever, struggling to finish above .500—a fact that was reflected in
slumping TV ratings. The Giants games had always had prime time percentage ratings that averaged in the 20s for the whole
season. But that year, the ratings had slipped into the teens. It wasn’t life-threatening, mind you. The Giants still dominated
all sports on the airwaves. But if you were an owner who was accustomed to having everything go your way, it was cause for
some concern.