Japan, Another Mexico?

By David Marasco

Last Saturday night I was at Comiskey Park, watching the the Seattle Mariners roll to their twentieth victory of the young season. I finally got to see Ichiro, and he lived up to the hype with three hits, speed and aggressiveness on the basepaths and a live arm in right. In the ninth Sasaki, their imported closer, came in and made the White Sox look like children swinging in the wrong batting cage. Say what you want about their high-talent losses in recent years, Mariners management has done its job when it comes to Japan.

But does this mean that the door has finally opened? Will the success of the Mariners combined with the comeback of Hideo Nomo bring the next great wave of immigration to Major League Baseball? The future is hard to see. First of all, a month does not the season make. In October we may be writing "Whatever happened to Ichiro" stories. Hopefully that's not the case. What then?

A week prior to seeing Ichiro I was on the border watching some Mexican League action. I saw names alien to 99% of the US. Yet we are now twenty years past Fernandomania. The youngsters out there might not remember, but early in the Reagan years the Dodgers mined Cy Young Award talent south of the border in the form Fernando Valenzuela. He set the league on fire and earned his place in baseball history. Yet compared to places like Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, the talent that has come from Mexico to the Majors has been but a trickle. What's the story?

Part of the explanation is that Mexico, unlike Japan or some of the other Latin American baseball powerhouses, is soccer-crazy. Still, Mexico does have a long and storied baseball tradition, and roughly ten times the population of the DR. Mexico's strong baseball tradition is in fact what is keeping the pipeline closed. Unlike other parts of the Caribbean, where seeing the hometown boys in the bigs is a source of pride, the Mexican baseball powers have decided to keep the product local. Instead of having scouts from the US signing every loose sixteen-year-old, the scouting in the country is handled by the Mexican League. The teams in the league own the players, and if a team from the US wants to have said player, it will cost a pretty peso. The same is true in Japan. The players are signed to long term contracts, and if US interests want the player, they have to pay his team for his services. How did the Mariners get Ichiro? They won an auction run by Ichiro's Japanese team for the right to negotiate with him.

Okay, so Japanese and Mexican players are more expensive than their counterparts from elsewhere in the worldwide talent pool. Why aren't teams out there bidding up a storm to get these players? Part of the problem is that the perceived risk is very high. A team could spend a lot of money and end up with a lemon. How's Irabu doing these days? Some of this is due to the barriers put up by Japan and Mexico to prevent their leagues from being overrun by foreigners. Only a few roster spots per team are availible for outsiders. This makes it hard to judge the talent level of the leagues. It becomes even harder when scrubs from the US come over and dominate. When I saw games in the Mexican Pacific League a few years back, Morgan Burkhart headed the leaderboards. This was a guy who climbed his way back into the minor leagues after playing independent ball, how good could he be, and by extension, how good could the league and its players be? Maybe some young men need to wake up in a foreign country to realize that they are down to their last chance, and only then do they work hard and live up to their potential. In any case, it is hard for a GM to see stats for a player in the Japanese League, compare them to a guy playing over there who washed out of AAA ball, and not decide that a AAA player in the States is a much cheaper and less risky option.

Perhaps this wave of Ichiromania will change things. Maybe the US will take Japanese baseball more seriously and will make a real effort to scout and mine Asian baseball talent. On the other hand, for the twenty years following Fernando, a another vein has been left untapped just south of the border.