"Closing nature of Japanese baseball"
It was only November 2, 2000 in a meeting, when the Japanese professional
baseball owners formerly accepted the representative negotiation through
agents by the player. However, this newly approved practice of contract
renewal negotiation accompanied by the representative is, to this day,
still yet to be a common practice. Mr.Watanabe, the owner of the Yomiuri
Giants, the No.1 popular professional baseball team in Japan, have previously
placed pressure on the players by saying, "probably, no one in our
team will take such a trivial idea of using a representative", "If
someone bring representative, I will cut his salary. If he expect salary
raise by 5~6 billion yen, that is big a mistake. I will cut his salary
by 2~3 billion yen instead, otherwise he is going to be a free agent".
In spite of the owner's declaration, pitchers of Yomiuri Giants, Uehara,
and Iriki requested representative negotiation. In the case of Uehara,
despite having performed substantial representative negotiation and having
reached agreement as a result, the president of Yomiuri Giants made a strange
comment that he did not accept this case as a representative negotiation
due to the reasons that there was a defect that the procedure lacked "a
notice by documents, of the name of the representative and a lawyer registration
number a week in advance" which was supposedly agreed at the above-mentioned
owner meeting. Moreover, in the case of Iriki, according to his representative,
though he said to his team that he wants to use a representative, and that
he was going to notify it by facsimile, his team was trying to persuade
him not to do so. Iriki refused the request and sent the facsimile to the
team nevertheless and eventually he was announced to be traded with the
Nippon Ham Fighters. As a matter of reality, it is difficult for a player
to perform a contract renewal negotiation with the professional assessors
of baseball team by himself on an equal basis. Furthermore, it is even
more difficult for Japanese, who takes modesty as a virtue and think attachment
to money as the dishonorable thing, to claim money for his own achievements
even if it is justified demand.
Understandably, it is very natural for a professional baseball players to be devoted to
the baseball while leaving negotiation to the professional agents. Changing
the subject, whenever Japanese baseball players declare to challenge for
Major Leagues, a description such as "betrayer" and the utterance
of "being ungrateful" are repeated from alumnus of a professional
baseball community etc. The narrow and close-minded nature of a Japanese
professional baseball community proves that sometimes, what seems to be
natural cannot be performed naturally. (End) |
