Our gain is Japan’s loss

It’s the bottom of the ninth inning, and the Chicago Cubs are in a familiar position. They’re losing.

Kosuke Fukudome, the right fielder who joined the Cubs in December from the Chunichi Dragons in Japan, digs into the batter’s box in his first game in the U.S. major leagues. With two runners on base, Fukudome smacks a home run over the brick wall at Wrigley Field, tying the opening day game against the Milwaukee Brewers and triggering screams from Chicago fans.

After the game, which the Cubs lost 4-3, Fukudome walks into an interview room packed with 50, mostly Japanese, reporters. A two-time batting champion and four-time Gold Glove winner back home, the latest import from Japan takes questions while sitting in front of a hanging wall advertisement that measures 8 feet (2.4 meters) by 8 feet. Nippon Life Insurance Co., Japan’s biggest life insurer, paid the Cubs an undisclosed amount to display its red and white diamond logo during Fukudome’s interviews for two seasons.

Japan’s top players are flocking to the U.S. like never before, taking advertisers and fans with them and threatening the future of the 12 teams in Nippon Professional Baseball.

“Japanese baseball has been defeated for now because Japan allowed the U.S. to take not only our players but money as well,” says Hidetoshi Kiyotake, general manager of the Yomiuri Giants, whose 20 championships since 1950 make it Japan’s most successful franchise. “Through broadcasting and advertising, Major League Baseball took a significant portion of revenue from Japan.”

‘Kill the Sport’

Since 1995, U.S. clubs have swiped 33 of Japan’s best players, including center fielder Ichiro Suzuki, a slap hitter who’s won two batting titles with the Seattle Mariners since leaving the Orix BlueWave in 2000. Major-league teams have dished out more than $600 million in contracts to players -- often tripling their salaries -- to cross the Pacific.

The departures have stunted the growth of Japanese baseball while boosting the sport in America: From 1997 to 2007, total revenue for NPB remained at about $1.2 billion a year, says Ryuzo Setoyama, president of the Chiba Lotte Marines. MLB’s revenue tripled to $6 billion in the same period, with the value of the league’s sponsorship deals with Japanese companies quadrupling between 2003 and ’07.

“MLB is trying to kill the sport,” says Bobby Valentine, an American who managed the Texas Rangers and New York Mets for 15 years and has led the Marines since 2003. “It should be trying to help it.”

The baseball ties between the two countries run deep -- all the way back to 1872, when an American professor of English named Horace Wilson introduced what would soon become Japan’s most popular sport.

Surpassing Hank Aaron

More than a century later, beginning in 1995, American agents and scouts played the leading role in harvesting Japan’s best talent, sidestepping NPB’s recruitment barriers and overcoming the players’ loyalty to their clubs.

Japan’s top players are lionized. Sadaharu Oh of the Giants was awarded the Japanese National Medal of Honor in 1977 after he surpassed, at age 37, American Hank Aaron’s record of 755 home runs.

The country of about 127 million people has at least 11 newspapers devoted to sports, mostly to baseball. Fans also travel to the U.S. to follow their heroes. Agents have booked more than 10,000 tours for Japanese fans since 2001 to watch Suzuki and countrymen Hideki Matsui of the New York Yankees and Daisuke Matsuzaka, a four-time strikeout king in Japan who moved to the Boston Red Sox in 2007.

Babe Ruth in Japan

Boston paid $51 million to the Seibu Lions for the rights to negotiate with Matsuzaka, 27, and another $52 million to sign him to a six-year deal. The right-hander sparkled in his 2007 debut, striking out 10 Kansas City Royals with his 95-mile-per- hour (153-kilometer-per-hour) fastball. He finished the season with a 15-12 record and helped the Red Sox capture the 2007 World Series title.

“We couldn’t have won without Daisuke Matsuzaka; that much is clear,” says Larry Lucchino, the Red Sox’s president. This year, he’s 8-0.

Sixty years after Wilson taught the game to his students at Tokyo’s Ichiban Chugaku University, it was none other than Babe Ruth -- one of the greatest players ever -- who put baseball on the map in Japan. Ruth, who was known as the Sultan of Swat, would own the major-league career home run record for 39 years.

In 1934, Ruth led a squad of major leaguers to Japan that included Yankees teammate and two-time American League Most Valuable Player Lou Gehrig. In an era before television, several hundred thousand fans lined the streets of Tokyo for a parade welcoming the big-league stars. The Americans crushed Japan’s top amateurs, winning all 16 games of an exhibition series. Ruth smacked 13 home runs.

World War II

Matsutaro Shoriki, owner of Yomiuri Shimbun, publisher of Japan’s largest newspaper, was inspired by the 65,000 fans who filled Meiji Jingu Stadium in Tokyo to watch Ruth and Gehrig.

Months later, Shoriki started Japan’s first professional baseball team as a means to advertise Yomiuri’s brand. Baseball flourished, expanding to seven teams by 1936. The sport continued during World War II, pausing only in 1944 because of U.S. airstrikes against Japan.

Giants pitcher Eiji Sawamura, who struck out Ruth and Gehrig in the same 1934 exhibition game, was killed in battle, prompting Japanese baseball to name its pitching award for him after the war. Three months after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the Japanese held an all-star game in Tokyo.

Pioneering Agent

The first Japanese player came to America in 1964 when the Nankai Hawks sent pitcher Masanori Murakami to the San Francisco Giants for seasoning in the minor leagues. The Hawks protested when the Giants laid claim to Murakami the following year, spurring NPB to issue its first recruiting restriction: MLB teams now had to get permission from their counterparts in Japan before pursuing players.

The man who found a way around the NPB barrier was Don Nomura, a Los Angeles-based baseball agent born to a Japanese mother. In 1994, Nomura concocted a plan that freed pitcher Hideo Nomo from the Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes to play with the Los Angeles Dodgers.

“Don’s the one who started this all,” says Alan Nero, an American agent who represents five-time Cy Young winner Randy Johnson of the Arizona Diamondbacks. “Nippon did everything they could do to prevent the players’ leaving, but Don kept pushing.”

Japanese Train Harder

Nomura’s enthusiasm for baseball was stoked by his stepfather, Katsuya Nomura, the legendary slugger whose 657 career home runs rank second in Japan, behind Oh’s 868. Don’s baseball career went as far as the Japanese minor leagues before he moved to California in the 1980s. With $41,000 in winnings at the baccarat tables in Las Vegas and profits from real estate, he bought a minor-league team. In 1993, he sold it for $1.4 million and started KDN Agency Inc.

The agent knew that many Japanese players were unhappy because clubs had total control over their careers. Teams set the financial terms of contracts, and players, bound to the franchise that drafted them for 10 seasons, had no recourse.

“High school kids don’t dream of the U.S.; they dream of playing in Japan,” Nomura, 51, says. “Once they get into the system, they find out how crappy it is. Players leave because MLB is superior in many ways.”

In Japan, players train harder than Americans in facilities with fewer amenities. During spring training for the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters on the island of Okinawa, pitchers throw batting practice, infielders scoop grounders and outfielders shag fly balls on a cloudy and damp February morning. Hardly anyone is idle.

‘We Found a Loophole’

Off the field, the Fighters eat lunches of rice and curry in a trailer outside the ballpark that serves as their clubhouse. Players often work out into the evening and are in bed by their 10 p.m. curfew.

“It’s like a school,” Kazuo Fukumori, 31, a pitcher who signed with the Rangers in December after spending 13 years in Japan. “We are not children. We have a good idea of how to control ourselves.”

By comparison, MLB players enjoy clubhouses equipped with flat-screen televisions, weight rooms and hot tubs and often cut out of practice after lunch to golf in warm and sunny Florida or Arizona.

In 1994, Nomura and American attorney Jean Afterman pored over the fine print of NPB’s recruiting rules and discovered a flaw: a player could move to the majors without permission from his team if he was retired.

“We found a loophole,” says Nomura, who next convinced Nomo, a former MVP in Japan, to jump through it.

‘Courage and Stamina’

Nomo’s arm was injured from the rigorous pitching schedule required by the Buffaloes, and he wanted out after four years at the age of 26.

“Don had been looking for some time for a player who had the courage and stamina to change the system,” says Afterman, now the Yankees’ assistant general manager. “It turned out to be Nomo.”

Nomura instructed Nomo to request an unprecedented six-year contract worth $21 million -- a demand that the agent expected the team to reject after paying the pitcher $1.4 million the previous season. The team refused, offering the injured player a pay cut or retirement.

Nomo retired and signed a one-year, $2 million contract with the Dodgers. With his corkscrew windup, Nomo went 13-6 for Los Angeles in 1995 and won the National League Rookie of the Year award. Fans gathered in busy intersections in Tokyo’s Shibuya and Shinjuku neighborhoods at 8 a.m. to watch Nomo’s games on big screens on the sides of skyscrapers.

“He is the pioneer for us,” says pitcher Yasuhiko Yabuta, 35, who left the Marines in November for the Royals.

Suzuki Hits .350

NPB, concerned that more players would exploit the loophole, imposed a posting system in 1998 that would at least compensate Japanese teams for losing players. Under the rules, players with less than nine years of experience -- which accounts for more than three quarters of them -- can go to the major leagues only if their team auctions their rights to an MLB club.

“Nobody thought we would lose a lot of players through posting,” says Shigeyoshi Ino, the former general manager of the BlueWave.

Two years later, Suzuki, 34, became the first Japanese posted player to move to the U.S., netting his BlueWave club a $13 million fee and proving that position players -- not just pitchers -- can succeed in the big leagues. Suzuki hit a major- league high .350, winning the 2001 American League MVP award with the Mariners.

Since then, soaring bids have become an incentive for clubs to sell players to MLB. U.S. teams have paid a total of $108 million just for the rights to eight players.

‘Stupid Idea’

“It is a stupid idea,” the Yomiuri Giants’ Kiyotake, 57, says. “A team becomes wealthy temporarily with a huge sum of money, but in the long run, it’s choking itself.”

After Nomura pioneered Nomo’s escape, American agent Nero ushered four more players to the U.S. by mastering the cultural intricacies of working in Japan.

The former life insurance salesman and head wrestling coach at the University of Rhode Island made his first trip across the Pacific in 1993. Nero wanted to assess if Japanese clubs would hire his MLB clients if players followed through on threats and went on strike the following year. Nero says he read 26 books on the country’s culture and business practices before he left and took lessons from language tutors on how to conduct a meeting in Japan.

‘A Big Bearhug’

“They kept telling me, you can’t do that; you are too touchy,” says Nero, 61, who runs Chicago-based agency CSMG. “I am an Italian guy, and where I grew up, you give someone a big bearhug. I had to learn that those are things that you can’t do. You have to respect the culture.”

For the visit to Japan, Nero brought Cross pens, made in Lincoln, Rhode Island, for executives from the 12 teams, adhering to that country’s custom of giving gifts from your hometown. At a meeting in Tokyo with Kuniaki Nakajima, the Yakult Swallows’ director of international relations, Nero bowed and extended both hands to present his business card and give Nakajima a pen. It didn’t seem to matter. Nero says he received cold, formal responses from all of the executives.

“I have never been so disappointed in my life,” he says.

A month later, Nero got his first break. Nakajima called to say he was coming to Chicago on a business trip. Nero offered to put him up in his home for 10 days. After two more years of phone calls, dinners and ballgames, the agent placed his first player with the Swallows.

Courting Taguchi

“A typical American will go into the business meeting and say, I want to do business with you because my product is better,” Nero says. “I learned that would not work. You go in and try to build relationships. Once the relationship is built, the business will never stop.”

Nero hired Mack Hayashi, a former construction company executive who was born in Japan and raised in the U.S., to help recruit Japanese players. In 2001, Hayashi contacted five-time Gold Glove-winning outfielder So Taguchi of the BlueWave.

“I was skeptical at first,” says Taguchi, 39, a seven- year MLB veteran who now plays for the Philadelphia Phillies. “Japanese people think about agents as being dirty and only caring about money.”

Hayashi met Taguchi about 10 times during the course of almost seven months to dispel Taguchi’s assumptions about agents. The agent also explained that he would help Taguchi open a bank account and turn on the electricity at the player’s apartment. Hayashi prevailed. In January 2002, Taguchi signed a three-year, $3 million contract with the St. Louis Cardinals.

U.S. clubs have also been stymied by cultural practices in Japan. In 2002, then Mets General Manager Steve Phillips thought he had plucked his new starting third baseman from the Buffaloes.

Nakamura Shaves Head

He hammered out a two-year, $7 million contract for Norihiro Nakamura, the Gold Glove infielder who played 11 years with the Japanese club. Nakamura backed out of the deal days later when news of his defection broke in Japan and the U.S. before he had told the Buffaloes of his plans.

Phillips says Nakamura disrespected his team by not informing them himself. Nakamura atoned for his misstep by shaving his head -- an act in Japanese culture that signifies a person is starting over after making a mistake.

“Being half a world away -- the language barrier and cultural differences -- it does make it more difficult,” Phillips says.

The clubs that have successfully recruited Japanese players don’t always get a return on the investment. The Yankees spent $46 million to sign pitcher Kei Igawa of the Hanshin Tigers after paying a $26 million posting fee.

Igawa’s Adjustment

In his debut U.S. season last year, the left-hander who throws a sweeping curve was demoted after six starts to the minor leagues, where he languished for most of the season until starting for the Yankees in May. Igawa says he had trouble adjusting to the U.S. on and off the field.

In Japan, he could throw as much as he wanted in spring training, while the Yankees restricted his pitch count. Igawa also struggled with American customs such as tipping for service, and he couldn’t find food he liked to eat while on the road.

“Everything is different living in the U.S.,” Igawa says.

Valentine, the Marines manager, has brought American-style marketing to Japan to revive baseball and keep more players from departing. He first arrived in 1994 to manage the Marines after the Rangers fired him and he couldn’t find work with another major-league club.

Valentine Dances

He clashed with coaches and executives by ending spring- training practices in the early afternoon and managing games more aggressively, according to Robert Whiting in his book “The Meaning of Ichiro.” Valentine let players hit rather than bunt with runners on base in the early innings and encouraged base stealing.

At the end of the 1995 season, though the team had its first winning record in 10 years, Valentine was dismissed by the club’s general manager. He returned to the U.S. and managed the Mets for seven seasons before beginning his second assignment with the Marines in 2003.

“When I got back, I think there was an openness to receive my ideas,” says Valentine, 58, who speaks and reads some Japanese.

To lure fans, Valentine cut a big hole in the protective netting between the stands and the field at Chiba Marine Stadium so players could sign autographs. After Saturday-night games, Valentine, a ballroom dance champion in high school, gave cha- cha lessons to female fans.

Money Losing Teams

The moves paid off. Attendance rose 38 percent in Valentine’s first year back as manager, and the team finished with a 65-65-3 record, the franchise’s first non-losing year since he was fired.

In 2005, the Marines won the Japan Series championship for the first time in 31 years and Valentine was awarded the prestigious Shoriki Award, named after the Yomiuri owner, which honors the player or manager who contributes the most to Japanese baseball.

He’s a celebrity off the field too, peddling his own brand of beer, BoBeer, made by Sapporo Holdings Ltd. Valentine’s heroics are showcased in “The Zen of Bobby V,” a documentary that was made by three New York University students and featured at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York in April.

The marines are still a money-losing team. Of the eight Japanese clubs that disclose financial results, five lost money in their latest reporting year. MLB says 26 of its 30 franchises were profitable in 2007.

Television Revenue

Japanese teams are suffering partly because of a drop-off in broadcast revenue. After the Giants lost three-time MVP Matsui to the Yankees in 2002, the team’s television ratings plunged 40 percent during the next four years and profits sank too. The ratings decline for the Giants -- the only team that televises games nationally -- hurt broadcast revenue for all of the clubs.

The Marines say a game against the Giants last year brought in about $300,000 in broadcast revenue compared with almost $1 million in 2005.

“We don’t get the kind of money from television that is necessary to fill the tank with gas and keep the engine running,” Valentine says. “TV runs the game in the States.”

Toru Shimada, president of the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, says NPB has to bring clubs together to boost their clout and revenue. Today, teams cut their own deals for regional broadcasts, which limits their potential to make more money. MLB, on the other hand, flexes its muscle by negotiating joint national television and sponsorship deals and distributes income equally to all 30 teams.

‘NPB Needs to be Stronger’

“NPB is not making any consolidated efforts to make professional baseball more attractive,” Shimada says. “Unless a dramatic structural change is made, Japanese baseball teams will not be profitable or the market won’t grow.”

Jim Small, who negotiates sponsorship and television deals for MLB in Japan, says NPB also should take down the protective netting at stadiums that separates fans from players and allow more than four players born outside of Japan on each team.

“Instead of looking internally at why these players are leaving, it’s easier just to blame the foreigners, blame MLB,” Small says. “NPB needs to be stronger. It starts and ends with the way they market the product, the way they sell.”

Nobuhisa Ito, NPB’s director of baseball operations, says his group isn’t as aggressive as MLB in promoting its game.