The first time Tom Kissner went to Japan to scout baseball players was 2002. It was months after Ichiro Suzuki won the American League MVP in his rookie season, and American interest in Japanese baseball was skyrocketing, but Kissner, a scout with the Phillies, didn’t go to watch a Japanese player. He traveled to see a player named Roberto Petagine, a former major leaguer from Venezuela who had turned into a prolific slugger for the Yakult Swallows.
On the first night in Hiroshima, he and fellow scout Jim Fregosi Jr. purchased tickets to the game, found their seats, and then Kissner strolled into the press box, looking for rosters.
“People in the press box were looking at me like, ‘What are you doing? Who are you and what are you doing?’” Kissner said. “Like, we had just bought tickets, we didn’t even have credentials. You’re thinking you’re a Major League Baseball scout, you can go wherever you want. But I sit back down with Jimmy, and I’m like, ‘Everything is in Japanese.’ And he goes, ‘What do you expect?’ ”
Petagine never played for the Phillies, and the trip bore little fruit. Their cellphones didn’t work, so they bought calling cards to reach home. They couldn’t access their club’s computer system, so Kissner wrote out reports in Microsoft Word. They bumbled their way through the country, relying on hotel concierges and friendly strangers in airports.
“We flew to Japan and didn’t know where the Yakult Swallows were going to be playing when we got there,” Kissner said.
These were the prehistoric days of scouting in Japan, before the advent of Trackman and pitching data, before Shohei Ohtani was even in junior high, when major-league front offices were starting to understand the level of talent in Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball. Two decades later, Suzuki is poised to enter the Hall of Fame, Ohtani is a three-time MVP and generations of Japanese stars have come to Major League Baseball, shrinking the size of the baseball world and connecting two distinct cultures. And now comes the latest curio, 23-year-old starting pitcher Roki Sasaki, who is expected to make the leap to the United States in January, when the calendar for signing players classified as international amateurs begins anew.
Scouting in Japan does not come with the same hurdles that Kissner faced decades ago. As the star quotient has increased, the scouting investments from MLB teams have, too — leading to a far more streamlined process.
Still, the level of scouting has not ballooned to the extent one might expect. More access to video and analytical data makes the leagues of the Pacific Rim less of a black box, but also makes expensive in-person scouting trips less of a necessity. Strict rules regarding recruitment and entrenched cultural norms limit the ability of MLB teams to procure amateur talent and make the region a difficult place to actually sign players, and thus, not an area where most teams are inclined to spend significant resources. Twenty years after Ichiro, the elite players of Pacific Rim baseball are now more certain to find their way to the United States. But diamonds in the rough are rare, the amateur ranks remain largely walled-off, and most of the above-average professional players are content to remain on the western side of the Pacific.
“There’s some guys where that’s their dream, coming over and competing against the best,” said Matt Winters, a scout for the NPB’s Nippon-Ham Fighters, who spends his summers monitoring Triple A for players who could play in Japan. “But other guys are comfortable being a star in their own country. To me, there’s certain guys like Ohtani, (Yu) Darvish — they need to go to the States.”
Twenty years after Kissner stumbled around Japan, watching future major leaguer starter Hiroki Kuroda and young infielder Akinori Iwamura, at least 25 major-league teams have a regular on-the-ground scouting presence in Japan, according to a Japanese-speaking MLB scout, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Yet the presence and investment varies greatly from club to club. The factors are numerous. The process of scouting the Pacific Rim is expensive and demanding, requiring that scouts often stay in-country for weeks at a time, riding bullet trains to various ballparks to watch a contact-oriented brand of baseball that has limited leg room in the stands and no pitch clock on the field. But nowadays, their presence is a big deal, compared to the early days — and the arrival of MLB scouts (and particularly MLB executives) with the interest that demonstrates, becomes part of the long recruiting process of luring the bigger stars.
“They pay attention to who’s walking in,” said Gus Quattlebaum, the Red Sox vice president of scouting development and integration, “and then will tell the media which teams are there.”
The returns these teams get can be boom or bust, a costly fight for one or two impactful players every two to three years. The caliber of stars available in Japan and the Pacific Rim has grown in the last two decades, but the sheer volume of players who come to the United States has remained somewhat stable. According to an analysis by The Athletic, more Japanese-born players debuted in MLB in the 2000s, in the years after Ichiro, than in the 2010s — though the numbers have been ticking back upward in the 2020s, after the debut of Ohtani in 2018.
“If you hit big on Ichiro or Ohtani, that justifies whatever you spent, because they’re worth a fortune,” said a longtime AL executive. “But for the most part, that’s not going to happen.”
Ichiro Suzuki should coast into the Hall of Fame this winter, two decades after his landmark arrival in MLB. (Darren Yamashita / USA Today)
In recent years, a primary reason for clubs to scout the Pacific Rim has been the influx of talented American pitchers who have made the reverse journey to NPB, players such as Chris Martin, Miles Mikolas and Nick Martinez, who rebuilt his career in Japan and recently earned a qualifying offer from the Reds. Yet when it comes to Japanese players, it remains difficult for many clubs to unearth consistent value. The schedule, travel, style of play — even the ball itself — are different than in the United States, and scouts say the technology and related metrics for assessing players, though improving, are also behind what’s common in Major League Baseball.
Under the current posting system, the best Japanese players have often wound up in the sport’s biggest markets and on the West Coast, which offers closer proximity and cultural ties to home. And access to signing Japanese amateur talent remains almost entirely cut off, the market shrunk by stigmas against players who leave the country before playing in NPB and the cultural difficulties in acclimating Japanese teenagers to the United States.
The system has left many MLB teams weighing the level of resources to allocate to Japan. Some clubs, like the Dodgers, Padres, A’s, Pirates and Rangers, have been active for years. Some teams, like the Angels, just added a full-time scout. But the long-time AL executive compares the market to scouting Latin America, where some teams excel based on their history, cultural affinity and organizational infrastructure.
“You have to like it,” he said. “You have to have people that want to spend time there and want to invest and understand the challenges the players are going to have coming over. There’s some teams that still aren’t good with young Latin players. They’re just not. Their infrastructure is just not built for it. They don’t understand the culture. All these sorts of things. I think the same thing is true in Asia. You can probably identify talent. You can probably forecast what they’re capable of and scout their ability … but like all the other stuff — like hiring someone from a different culture. Are you prepared to support them? Do you understand what their challenges are going to be? That’s where I think a lot of clubs still are behind.”
Major League Baseball added a hurdle to the process last year, when it banned “working agreements” between MLB clubs and four formally recognized foreign leagues: the top circuits in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Mexico. The agreements, which had existed in many forms for decades, usually fostered the sharing of training methods, personnel and business and marketing ideas. The concern, according to MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, was regarding MLB teams gaining “priority access to players that are under control” in Japan or other countries.
“We’ve always been scrupulous about not allowing those (things),” he said in November.
At the same time, the proliferation of video and accessible pitch and batted-ball data has reduced the importance of on-the-ground pro scouting, much as it has in the United States. It’s allowed MLB teams to remain informed on possible players from thousands of miles away. In recent years, a parade of general managers and top baseball executives headed to Japan to see Sasaki in person. But the act, scouts say, is often more about respect than information, akin to a college football coach showing up to a possible recruit’s games.
“I’m pro-scouting. I want scouting to grow, not disappear,” said one longtime Pacific Rim scout, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak candidly. “But I think in Asia, it’s not necessary.
“I think the way teams do it, it’s fine. There are exceptions. There will continue to be exceptions where a team that really lays the groundwork over there, they’ll sign a good player from Japan, Korea or Taiwan. It’ll work out really well.”
When the Angels signed Ohtani in 2017, they did not have a scout based in the area full-time. They won his services anyway, stunning the industry. It wasn’t until before last season that the club hired a scout, Taisuke Sato, to cover the area.
“You’ve got to have a presence there,” said Angels international scouting director Brian Parker, who noted the importance of the club’s West Coast location. “You’ve got to dig into the backgrounds of makeup and that sort of thing. … More and more minor leaguers are signed every year from over there. So I think it’s something that has the potential to grow, and I think that’s why we want to get into it and make sure we’re part of it.”
For now, scouts view the equation as fairly straightforward: Japan’s star players, scouts say, will be recognized and courted, while other players who could help a 26-man roster would rather remain in NPB, where they maintain leading roles and make attractive salaries.
When he was a two-way player for the Nippon-Ham Fighters, scouts predicted great things in MLB for Shohei Ohtani. (Kyodo)
Ohtani famously considered signing with an MLB club after a prodigious career as a high school player. He didn’t, instead electing to play for the Fighters. The story allowed some in the industry to speculate that the Japanese amateur market might soon open up to MLB clubs. But those stories have been exceedingly rare. In 2018, the Royals signed Japanese amateur pitcher Kaito Yuki. At the time, the Royals saw themselves as a club that would struggle to convince established stars to come to Kansas City, a smaller market in the middle of the country, so they focused on another area. But Yuki did not progress, washing out of the system in a matter of years, and that may have actually set those efforts back further.
“I’m sure teams in Japan can use that example as a reason to convince kids to stay (in Japan),” a scout for an AL team said.
Efforts to penetrate the amateur ranks remain rare, but some clubs are still trying. One scout estimated that around six or seven clubs put resources into finding diamonds in the rough — actively scouting amateurs, lower-level professionals and American players who could be candidates to return to affiliated baseball. Industry sources cite the Dodgers, A’s, Pirates and Rangers as leaders. The A’s held an open tryout in Tokyo right before the COVID-19 pandemic, where they signed a pitcher named Shohei Tomioka, who remains in their system, having reached Triple A.
“We want to get a lay of the landscape,” A’s scout Adam Hislop said. “What talent there is under the surface. You’re scouting 12 NPB teams for the posting of free agents. That’s 12 rosters out of a whole country of people playing baseball. Certainly people fall through. There are totally different approaches that make sense.”
When Hislop first started scouting in Asia more than 15 years ago, he expected the resources teams spent in the area to go up exponentially. And while technology has streamlined the process, he made it clear that the evolution hasn’t happened in the way he expected. The players can be transcendent, but the pipeline has not quite burst. Sometimes the biggest reason to go to Japan, scouts say, is just to show the players that you care.
“I’ve heard that from Japanese players,” said the longtime executive. “It means something that you come over here and you can talk about things you’ve seen and experienced. It’s covered in the media, and it all goes toward building an infrastructure in your organization where you can support a player that’s going to need support.”
— The Athletic‘s Chad Jennings contributed to this report.
(Illustration by Meech Robinson, The Athletic; Photos: Otto Greule Jr, Chris Coduto, Getty Images; STR/JIJI PRESS/AFP via Getty Images; CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP via Getty Images; Mike Janes/Four Seam Images via AP Images; Chris Keane/Sports Illustrated/Getty Images)
