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I had two reasons to dip into the past this week in my freelance writing. At Baseball Prospectus, I wrote about how the present-day Red Sox and Dodgers, at the least, seem open to the idea of Rob Manfred’s centralized broadcast revenue and TV rights plan, which would allow MLB’s revenue-sharing to look more like that of the NFL’s — albeit without a salary cap, since, as has been discussed before, that’s just not likely at least during this round of bargaining, not if the owners want 2028’s broadcast negotiations to pay off as they hope and need them to.
This stands in contrast to when former commissioner Bud Selig — Manfred’s predecessor and the one who handpicked him as his successor — introduced the idea of revenue-sharing to the league’s owners back in 1993, the year before the strike that ended the 1994 season and caused the World Series to be canceled, because Selig and said owners demanded a salary cap in addition to the revenue-sharing plan, and did things like, oh, unilaterally and illegally abolish free agency from the collective bargaining agreement.
It’s a small step, but that it could signal some larger ones coming means it’s worth noting. Especially when working on this relatively short timeline that Manfred has to deal with — bargaining begins in 2026, and the existing agreement expires next December.
Over at Endless Mode, I combined baseball and video games writing together to discuss Nintendo’s history with the sport, and their ownership of the Seattle Mariners. One thing that didn’t quite fit where I was going with that piece was an expansion on MLB’s resistance to allowing a Japanese company — and Japanese money — into the league. Here’s some background from the feature:
Major League Baseball didn’t mind the Mariners staying in Seattle instead of relocating—they were sued the previous time the team that became the Milwaukee Brewers, the Pilots, left Seattle after one season, which is how the Mariners came to be in the first place—but they did not appreciate that a Japanese businessman and Japanese company were coming to their rescue. Listen, 1992 wasn’t that far removed from a decade in which any Japanese-looking art on video game boxes was replaced by something with more western flavor, in order to hide its origins from a public voting Ronald Reagan into office on purpose not once, but twice. So of course there was pushback to a company from Japan opening their wallets for a piece of America’s pastime. You don’t need me to tell you that there was panic over whether or not Japan was going to buy up everything American and make it theirs because one company wanted to buy an MLB team, unless it’s your first day learning about America.
While Yamauchi had initially offered to put up the entire $100 million necessary to buy the team (even back in 1992 his net worth was thought to be north of $1 billion, and he had plenty of stock in Nintendo to sell, too) he was instead forced to continually drop his stake and add more and more other local business people—more local than he was in MLB’s eyes, if you catch my drift—until the stake that a Japanese company had in the club was under 50 percent. Meaning, not a controlling interest. This despite the fact that Yamauchi was going to have Nintendo of America’s president, Minoru Arakawa, as the point person running the team. Arakawa had lived in Washington for 15 years already at that point, per reporting at the time, and had co-founded Nintendo of America in 1980.
Conservative pundits like George F. Will were staunchly against the introduction of Japanese cash into MLB, with the idea being — presented more or less subtly depending on the author of the editorial — that this intrusion of foreign capital would dilute the American pastime. This was in 1992; American corporate interests and imperialists were terrified of Japan gaining a larger economic foothold both in the world at large and in America, because it was supposed to be the latter that was the clear cultural and economic hegemon. Japan might have been an ally and living under a constitution rewritten by America itself after World War II — George H.W. Bush’s then-recent vomiting on Japan’s prime minister Kiichi Miyazawa notwithstanding — but the United States basically lived in fear of them coming out of their shadow even a little bit.
So, a company like Nintendo being able to nonchalantly buy-in to MLB just because their president felt like doing so in order to keep the Mariners local was terrifying to them, just like it would have been if Sony had been the one to make the offer, or any other enormous Japanese company that could pull $100 million out of the couch cushions in ‘92 and not miss it. What if American business could not keep up? What if most or all of MLB was eventually owned by wealthy foreign interests? Would it still be America’s pastime then, or would something be lost to them, even if it meant that, you know, fans of teams in places like Seattle that were at risk of losing their second team in under two decades due to owners who didn’t put in the work or the cash no longer had to worry about that happening?
Part of the reason for this revulsion is because America simply didn’t see Japan like that. They were supposed to be more like a vassal state, part of the imperial project, a forced ally abroad. Baseball might have been America’s pastime, but it was also used to spread the American empire culturally — it was a tool of imperialism, used liberally. There’s a reason that Zack Moser was able to write a three-part series on baseball in Venezuela and America’s imperialism, and then follow it up with a four-part series on the same in the Dominican Republic — American interests are at the forefront in both countries when it comes to baseball, as they are naught but feeder states for the game, and MLB’s interest in them and their care at this point mostly has to do with limiting what little leverage the prospects from there hold, in the name of safety and protection of them from conditions brought about, in no small part, by MLB and America themselves.
Baseball was introduced to Japan by America in the late-19th century, and became a major sport post-World War II, as the first professional team hadn’t been formed until 1934. That Nippon Professional Baseball was as organized and successful as it showed, both in terms of the players it produces and its own cultural and economic impact, was concerning to the kind of people who worry over America being No. 1 in all things. The success of Japanese companies like Nintendo and Sony in permeating an international market and America itself, and of Japanese baseball, threatened the idea of American exceptionalism — the fear was that this country could be a better America than America itself. That is the purity the George F. Wills of the world were concerned with losing; a sense of self for themselves and America, lost to the truth of things, which is that there was nothing particularly exceptional about them at all.
Consider the very idea of the posting system: it is, simply by existing, recognition that Japan and NPB can’t be pushed around like other countries and leagues. A negotiation had to take place in order to allow for players to move from one league to another — there was still a power imbalance between MLB and NPB, sure, but not so great that the latter’s demands for compensation could simply be ignored, like they would be if literally any other league made similar demands.
Nintendo ended up with a 49 percent share of the Mariners, and the sky did not fall. Weird, that. Who knows what would have happened if some foreigners snagged that extra percentage point of ownership, though! Good thing MLB panicked in public about all of this while xenophobia ran rampant in the nation’s editorial sections about it.
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