A Hit With Players, Agent Is Screwball to Owners in Japan

First, he stole Hideo Nomo from Japan. Now, Don Nomura, the blunt-talking, bad-boy agent of Japan’s staid baseball world, is shaking things up again, asserting that young Dominican players here are being systematically maltreated with sub-minimum wages and seizure of their passports.

“It’s like slavery, involuntary servitude,” says Nomura, whose clients include Dodger pitcher Nomo, Seattle Mariner prospect Makoto (Mac) Suzuki and several American players in Japan. “It’s just like the Filipinas who are brought into Japan by mobsters and have to work off their debts.”

Sitting in his Tokyo office, surrounded by Nomo paraphernalia, Nomura proudly casts himself as the only person looking out for player’s rights in a sport dominated here by managers.

His ultimate goal is simple: the deregulation of Japanese baseball. “The Japanese teams are like car companies here,” says Nomura, 38. “They are totally closed. They are scared of new ideas and foreigners.”

In his skirmishes with the powers that be in Japan’s baseball world--first over Nomo, and now over Robinson Perez Checo, the Hiroshima Toyo Carp’s hot young Dominican pitcher--he is challenging the unspoken codes of baseball conduct here, which call for virtually no free agency and no agents during negotiations.

His aggressive moves clash with the back room negotiating style of Japanese managers and have made him outcast supreme. The Japanese Baseball Assn. refuses to talk to him; the Kintetsu Buffaloes, Nomo’s old team, hang up on him when he calls. With the latest ruckus over the Dominican players, Hiroshima, too, has blacklisted him, Nomura says.

Baseball officials here deny charges of discrimination and say Nomura is a show-boater who can’t accept the mores of a game that has evolved to reflect Japan’s cultural values. Unlike the American game, experts say such ideals as job security, seniority and a patriarchal sense of “family” are stressed here.

Suishu Tobita, doyen of Japanese baseball, once wrote: “Baseball is more than just a game. It has eternal value. Through it one learns the beautiful and noble spirit of Japan.”

But challenging those ideals as a intrepid outsider is in Nomura’s blood. The son of an American father who imported bowling balls, and a Japanese mother, Nomura grew up in a nation that tends to value homogeneity and conformity. He stands out with his casual confident grace of an American athlete, a beard that glints red in sunlight and Asian eyes.

His mother later divorced, then married into the baseball world. Her new husband was Katsuya Nomura, one of the most high-profile baseball figures in Japan. His stepfather, who is the manager of this year’s pennant-winning Yakult Swallows, and was once a baseball hero in his own right, adopted Don, giving him his Japanese name, and brought him up as his own.

Born in Japan, Nomura attended a Catholic school in Tokyo until he was expelled as a junior for fighting. Even before that, he had questioned the system, asking why he couldn’t wear his hair long, why there were so many one-sided rules and doubting Catholicism.

“I don’t question a lot of things,” says Nomura. “But when you ask questions and people don’t answer and try to force you to do things, it makes you curious. It’s just like Japanese baseball. The more you dig in, the more they try to cover up. It makes you wonder what they are trying to hide.”

Although being “half”--as Japanese children with one foreign parent are known--is considered “hip” today, growing up as one was difficult, he says. With a Japanese wife and an 8-year-old daughter, he has chosen to make his life in Japan. Still, as he zooms between his Los Angeles and Tokyo offices, he says he feels like an outsider wherever he is. Even in speech, he seems caught between two cultures, jumping from American locker-room banter to Japanese street slang.

Much of Nomura’s contempt for controlling managers seems born of his own experience playing for the Swallows from 1978-1981. “As a player, I had a lot of questions: Why is the system like this--this idea that I should be seen and not heard?” Nomura says.

He recalls one time when he asked his manager if he could play in a game. For his forwardness, he was denounced by his boss, ostracized by his teammates, and benched for two weeks. “It’s the authority problem,” Nomura says. “You’re not supposed to talk. They’ll do what they want with you.”

Seeking a new outlet, Nomura bought a minor league team in the United States, the Salinas Spurs. He was a magnet for dissatisfied Japanese players, and, in 1992, Mac Suzuki asked him to be his agent. Central to Nomura’s reformist agenda is getting players to use agents in the negotiating process--an act that the Aera news magazine branded “the taboo of Japanese baseball.”

“Players don’t use agents here,” Nomura says. “Players are brainwashed to believe agents are bad. If I were a manager, I would probably say the same thing.”

Robert Whiting, author of “You’ve Gotta Have Wa,” which recounts cultural differences between Japanese and American baseball, calls the absence of agents here “a feudal hangover.”

“The owners like to look at their relationship between themselves and their players as one big happy family. Their feelings are hurt if the players bring in someone from the outside.”

Japanese professionals see different motives in Nomura’s efforts.

Masaru Madate, a spokesman for the Japanese Baseball Commissioner’s Office, says Nomura is a self-promoter trying to create a niche for himself in a country that doesn’t need or want agents. His charges of a closed market are based in his own frustrations, Madate says, noting, “Japanese baseball is open. Just like our trade system is open.”

Madate argues that players, not managers, fear the introduction of agents. “We hear a lot of players say they think it would be regrettable if agents came into the picture,” he says. “As players, they are part of a family, but introducing an agent destroys the family feel, and reduces the whole relationship between players and managers to just a cold contract.”

Masaaki Nagino, a spokesperson for Japan’s Central League, also fears outside influences will bring an end to what is unique about Japanese baseball. “A contract is a contract. That doesn’t change between the U.S. and Japan,” Nagino says. “But it’s a difference in the human heart. Americans’ hearts are dry, all business; our hearts are . . . very emotional.”

Nomura’s current crusade began while scanning a sports newspaper, which reported that Hiroshima Carp pitcher Checo was earning monthly pay of $450 plus $4,800 in living expenses. Shocked that a major league pitcher with a winning record was getting less than half the $120,000 minimum salary of a Japanese player, Nomura searched down Checo and embraced his cause with the zeal of a human-rights activist. He also found that Checo’s passport had been taken away for “safekeeping” and suspected that the player’s signature on his contract was forged.

In Nomura’s eyes, the alleged actions fit into an all-too-common pattern of discrimination against non-white foreigners in Japan. Gesturing angrily, he says: “Japan has a history of discriminating against Koreans, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, anyone who isn’t white. This is just the same old story.”

The Carp had nurtured Checo in an ambitious program to develop overseas baseball talent at cut-rate prices through a baseball academy it established in the Dominican Republic. One of Japan’s poorest teams, the Carp cannot afford American players.

But Nomura sees the system as unfair and possibly illegal. The young players are asked to sign seven-year, non-negotiable contracts at half the salary of Japanese players.

After four months of being stonewalled by managers as Checo’s agent, Nomura took his story to the press. As word leaked that the Bungei Shunju, a respected monthly magazine, was ready to publish a scathing expose, Checo suddenly had his passport back and promises of back pay--at Japanese rates. Nomura sees the Carp efforts as face-saving gestures, which fall short of the broad reforms he has in mind.

The Carp refused to comment on either Nomura or their Dominican players.

Japan’s baseball gurus, however, worry that Nomura’s crusades could pick up steam and inflate costs--something they can ill afford in an era when television ratings have plummeted to an all-time low and soccer has surged past baseball in popularity.

Managers here are also shaking in fear that they will lose their best players or have to pay more to keep them in the aftermath of the Nomo defection.

“Even if only five or six pitchers go to the States, that is still too many from the Japanese perspective,” says Whiting. If that happened, he says, it could change baseball: “There would be a bidding war. There would be some kind of restructuring and the weaker teams would go bankrupt.”

But, to players like Nomo and Checo, Nomura is a guardian angel.

“I think he was sent to me by God,” Checo says.