Potential Defection of Yusei Kikuchi Again Calls Into Question Posting System

With the news this week that top Japanese prospect Yusei Kikuchi is contemplating jumping straight from a Japanese high school to American professional baseball, the relationship between Japanese baseball and the major leagues continues to grow complicated. Like Junichi Tazawa last year, Kikuchi is expected to be the first pick in this year's Nippon Pro Baseball (NPB) draft and will probably command a seven-figure bonus in the States.

Like his predecessor, though, Kikuchi is worried about the restrictive transfer agreement between NPB and Major League Baseball hindering his ability to have a full career in America.

In Japan, players are drafted right into NPB after high school, where they remain property of their teams for nine years before declaring free agency. The only way to move to an American team before that deadline is for the player's team to "post" them, allowing American clubs to bid on the rights to negotiate with them.

The posting system was mainly created in response to the early defections of Hideo Nomo, Alfonso Soriano, and Hideki Irabu to America in the late 1990s. Since its institution in 1999, 10 players have been successfully posted to American teams, including Ichiro, Daisuke Matzusaka, and Akinori Iwamura.

Most Japanese players that come to the States choose to wait for their free agency, but in doing so sacrifice a large part of their career (and potential earnings). Think Hideki Matsui here, who came to the U.S. at the age of 29, and who's been a solid, above-average performer for the Yankees over his seven-year U.S. career after being a superstar in Japan.

What makes the choice by Tazawa (and the potential choice by Kikuchi) to bypass Japan entirely different is that they stand to make more money early in their career by staying with NPB. The top draft bonus in Japan is capped at about $1.1 million and first-year salary is about $160,000, but for the nine years of club control the players renegotiate their deals each season and their salaries can escalate into seven figures (American) by their second season, if their performance merits it.

If Kikuchi signs for a bonus in the $1-2 million region and then spends two or three years in the minors, he'd still be subject to major league team control for the first three years of his big-league career, meaning that he might not make the sort of money that a pitcher like Yu Darvish makes right now in Japan until he's been in the U.S. for four or five years.

The biggest problem is the posting system. Posting is an expensive process for American teams that strongly limits where Japanese players may end up, placing the decision entirely out of their hands. On the other hand, granting free agency to players that skip the NPB draft entirely actually gives them an advantage over American prospects of the same age, because they're freely available on the open market.

NPB wants to create hurdles for its star players to move to MLB, to keep their league relevant (in the wake of Tazawa's defection, they instituted a three-year ban for any player that skips the NPB draft for America), but the system isn't close to ideal.

Where this goes from here may rely entirely on how Tazawa and Kikuchi (if he skips the draft) fare in America. So far, Japanese players have been a mixed bag in America. For every Ichiro Suzuki, there's a Kazuo Matsui. The two biggest fees of all-time were paid to Daisuke Matsuzaka, who's had varied success for the Red Sox, and Kei Igawa, a disaster for the Yankees. But how will a talented Japanese pitcher fare after being groomed in the American minor leagues instead of NPB? If a few players find success here, a larger number may try to follow in their footsteps.

If that happens, NPB may be forced to revisit the posting agreement; keeping players like Kikuchi and Tazawa around for two or three years in the domestic league is better than not having them at all, one would think. It also may create the unwanted impression that NPB is simply a de facto farm league for Major League Baseball, but if this sort of defection becomes more regular, something will have to change.

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I'm not sure anything is going to change on this front any time soon, but a high-profile player moving in the opposite direction may prompt action. Patrick Newman of NPB Tracker (who, along with his co-blogger Ryo Shinkawa, was a huge source of information on the Japanese draft and contracts for this piece) says that while an undrafted American would not be subject to the NPB draft, he would likely be subject to the nine-year rule, unless something different was agreed to in his contract.

Imagine this: the Nationals take Bryce Harper with the top overall pick in next June's draft, but can't sign him. Instead of playing in an independent league and re-entering the draft, Harper jumps to Japan, knowing he'll need a year or two of minor-league seasoning in America anyway. In his contract is an agreement that once he turns, say, 20, his Japanese team will agree to post him back to America, bringing in a huge sum of money for the team that signs him (if he performs), and getting Harper around the American draft. So Harper signs an NPB contract and bonus, gets paid for a few years of Japanese baseball, then comes back to America to a huge contract.