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By Root 735 0

Masaichi Kaneda, perhaps the best pitcher in the history of the NPB. The stars could have easily aligned for Kaneda to come to the States, as both the San Francisco Giants and New York Yankees were very interested in him. After the 1966 season, Kaneda was coming off a twenty-seven-win campaign, and was released from his contract with the lowly Yakult Swallows. The second-division team couldn’t afford him anymore, and the pitcher finally had an opportunity to go someplace where he could win. But Masaichi was hesitant to come to the U.S. because of the language barrier. He also wanted to set career pitching marks in Japan. (He would finish his career in 1969, after piling up 400 wins.) Even more important, Masaichi was being paid 15,000,000 yen at the time, which worked out to about $125,000 plus living expenses. No Major League team was going to pay a Japanese player as much as Willie Mays. It would have been unthinkable.

Was there a conspiracy to keep Japanese players out of America? As a result of the trans-Pacific tiff over Murakami, the U.S. and Japanese commissioners had signed something called the United States-Japanese Player Contract Agreement, informally known as the “Working Agreement,” in which both sides pledged to respect each other’s baseball conventions.

American baseball players won the right to play out their contracts and sign with any team of their choosing by 1975. The reserve clause, however, still existed in Japan. The Japanese players union was much less effective and vocal than their American counterparts. It wasn’t until 1985 that they managed to obtain the “right” to strike. Free agency finally found Japanese ballplayers in 1993, and then only because the owner of the Tokyo Giants wanted to sign all the superstars to his team. Other owners finally caved on free agency, but it was very different than what the U.S. was used to. Players could only become free agents in Japan after ten full years of service on the parent team, and that didn’t include time spent in the Minor Leagues. It wasn’t until after the 1997 season that free agency eligibility was lowered to nine years.

Years went by, and then decades. All the time, however, the Japanese players were quickly closing the talent gap. In 1990, a Japanese All-Star squad swept the first four games of a seven-game series against a visiting team of American stars that included Cal Ripken, Jr. and Randy Johnson. Hideo Nomo pitched in this series, as well as he had in the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, when he led Japan to a silver medal.

Nomo was the best pitcher in Japan in the early 1990s. An agent named Don Nomura helped get Nomo to the States while he was still young and healthly. Nomura took Nomo’s Japanese contract to powerful U.S. agent Arn Tellem, who found a loophole with the “voluntarily retirement” clause: a voluntarily retired player was obligated to return to his former team only as long as he stayed in Japan. Nomo, calculatingly, asked for much more money in his contract negotiations than he could have expected to receive. Knowing he wouldn’t get a close counter-offer, he then voluntarily retired (he said it was to pursue other areas outside of baseball). Nomo was the first to find this loophole, and sprang free of his contract, headed for the Major Leagues.

Who were the conspirators that caused three decades to pass between Japanese Major Leaguers? One party was the Japanese media, who made it hard on Murakami and who would later call Nomo an ingrate. (Interestingly, Murakami was a member of the Japanese media, and a strong critic of Nomo.) Other conspirators included the commissioners of the Major Leagues and the Japanese Leagues. And then, there were the Japanese players themselves. Sadaharu Oh said, “In my era, if I had tried to go the States to play, the public [in Japan] would have turned overwhelmingly against me.”

According to Whiting’s book, “Some published reports speculate that there was a de facto ban in place. The U.S. needed Japan’s cooperation in matters relating to defense. Assuming the government played no part, why