The Story to Date: The powers of Japanese baseball persisted in their attempt to maintain control of the game and eliminate at least one team due to the financial problems of the owners. Yet, when a potential owner stepped forward with an offer to buy the team, they didn’t bother to listen to his proposal. In an unprecedented backlash, 1.2 million fans signed petitions against the change, and the league’s players themselves helped collect the signatures. Public opinion polls were in favor of the strike by a margin of 78% to 12%. In an incident that smacked of internecine warfare and which has never been fully explained, several owners were forced to resign over a scandal involving illegal payments to a college player, including the man deemed the biggest obstacle to reform, Yomiuri Giants’ owner Tsuneo Watanabe. Yet, the owners would not back down from their original intention to contract and refused to allow a new team for another year, despite the absence of support from any quarter and the presence of two new potential owners.. The Japanese players’ union threatened a strike, unheard of in Japanese sports. After working tirelessly to resolve the situation, the players finally went on strike for all games during the second weekend of September.

Those who have seen sumo matches know that the preliminary rituals take longer than the match itself. The wrestlers slap their belts, stride into the center of the ring, stare each other down, break off the stare, slap their belts again, throw salt in to the ring (to purify it, and glare at each other again. This entire process goes on for five minutes or more.

The match itself, on the other hand, can be over in a matter of seconds and seldom lasts even one minute. That’s just what happened with the Japanese baseball strike. After more than three months of preliminaries, charges, countercharges, threats of a strike, negotiations, and unnecessary turmoil caused by the owner intransigence, the weekend strike by the players caused the owners to rapidly focus on the problem. It didn’t take them long to figure out that they held a losing hand no matter how they tried to play it.

Thus, only a day or two into the negotiations following the strike, the owners quickly caved in to the players’ demands and agreed to allow a new team to be established to take the place of the one being eliminated through the Kintetsu and Orix merger.

Two potential owners were immediately prepared to take steps to form the new team—Takafumi Horie, president of the Internet service provider Livedoor, and Hiroshi Mikitani, president of the Internet mall company Rakuten. A public hearing was held in the beginning of October to allow both men to present their qualifications and visions for the new team. Both teams had selected their managers and general managers, and their selections suggested changes ahead for Japanese baseball. Livedoor selected as its managerial candidate former major leaguer and Japan League star Tom O’Malley, while Rakuten chose sports commentator Marty Kuehnert (photo, right) as general manager. Kuehnert has lived in Japan since 1968, speaks fluent Japanese, and had already held several baseball jobs.

At a news conference after his selection, Kuehnert said, “The Japanese baseball world is at a turning point. I’m looking forward to playing my part in the new changes. I promise to make things exciting.”

Kuehnert had a checkered career before his selection. In 1972, he became the general manager of the Japanese-owned Lodi Orions in the California League. The next year he returned to Japan and worked as director of sales and promotions of the Taiheiyo Club Lions, the forerunners of the Pacific League’s Seibu Lions. In 1990, he served as president and minority owner of the Double-A Birmingham Barons, a farm team of the Chicago White Sox.

In addition to running a sports management and consulting company, he also has worked as a sports commentator and wrote a sports column for The Japan Times. Kuehnert had served as the Japan representative of such former major league players as Don Buford and Frank Howard. In a different ill-fated enterprise, he operated a chain of sports bars in Japan that went bankrupt.

“Things can be done amazingly fast if people are willing to work overtime,” said Kuehnert. “We may have to be prepared for 100 losses but we’ll have a great ballpark that will be more fun than any other ballpark in Japan.”

Meanwhile, Kuehnert’s boss, Hiroshi Mikitani, had big plans to reform Japanese baseball if his proposal was accepted. ”If we have new blood with innovative ideas, we will be able to turn around the Japanese baseball industry,” said Mikitani at the
Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan. One of his proposed changes was providing transparency to salary negotiations. ”We need to disclose financial information to the public and players. Let the players understand the financial condition of the team. This helps them understand what is reasonable compensation,” Mikitani said.

The Sendai fans said in a survey that they wanted Livedoor instead of Rakuten to run the new franchise there, though Rakuten was thought to have more business stability. In fact, that’s why they were ultimately selected. A new team will incur losses early on, and Rakuten had the edge in in pretax profit as well as total assets and sales. The new team became known as the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, or the Rakuten Eagles for short.

In fact, Rakuten hit the jackpot in more ways than one. Collegiate pitcher Yasuhiro Ichiba, who took money from under the table in a scandal that brought down officials from three teams, including the Yomiuri Giants, accepted their offer to acquire him in a pre-draft arrangement. (The strike may have been resolved, but the drafting system in Japanese baseball stayed the same.)

Finally, the last glaring problem with Japanese baseball ownership was rectified when the league approved the purchase of the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks by Softbank Corp., an Internet service provider headed by President Masayoshi Son, an ethnic Korean. Unlike the troubled Kintetsu Buffaloes, who could not draw a million fans, the Hawks drew three million and were recent winners of the Japan Series. “My task is to make a team loved by a huge number of fans into a more decent one,” Son said at a press conference in Fukuoka.

Son, at right in the photo with manager and Japanese home run champ Sadaharu Oh on the left, has ambitious ideas for changing the baseball business, including Internet broadcasting, the use of electronic tickets, and a radio local area network system for fan services.

Thus, four months after the crisis began, the hidebound element of Japanese baseball was gone in disgrace, the Kintetsu Buffaloes had merged with another team, bailing out the troubled ownership, another financially troubled owner had found a purchaser with deep pockets, and a new team was created with a young, ambitious owner.

In an unprecedented challenge to the ruling powers of the sport, the fans and the players took on the owners and won.

Team ownership was relinquished by old-fashioned, old-line businesses with no ideas how to get Japanese baseball out of its downward spiral and placed in the hands of bright, young, energetic entrepreneurs from the Internet industry brimming with new ideas for the sport.

At the end of the year, what had seemed to be a dismal future for Japanese baseball looked unexpectedly bright.

On deck for tomorrow: Two steps forward, one step back