By Jim Allen, KYODO NEWS - Sep 15, 2017 - 21:06 | Sports, All

While Major League Baseball's 30 teams lick their collective chops at the thought of snaring 23-year-old slugging ace pitcher Shohei Otani this autumn, his mere existence poses a threat to MLB.

Because of his age and his established value in Nippon Professional Baseball, Otani is on every MLB team's wish list, giving him negotiating leverage no American amateur or professional at his age can match. That is why MLB would be happy if no Japanese team ever tries to do what the Nippon Ham Fighters have done with Otani.

MLB's new labor agreement puts harsh restrictions on young international signings out of NPB. At last year's baseball winter meetings, an MLB executive told Kyodo News that the new rules would likely lead more top Japanese top amateurs to skip NPB and head straight to the States -- as Otani nearly did five years ago.

In the autumn of 2012, despite telling NPB teams not to draft him because he was going to turn pro with a big league club, the Fighters still drafted Otani. Then, by promising him several things a major league team couldn't, they signed him.

One promise was a chance to both hit and pitch. The other promise, manager Hideki Kuriyama said last December, was the chance to use NPB as a shortcut to the majors and allow Otani to leave when he wanted.

Instead of living in squalid surroundings for little money and competing against inexperienced minor leaguers, NPB offered Otani a living wage, room and board and the chance to hit and pitch against some of the world's best players -- a chance to develop faster in a more secure environment.

It became clear last season -- when Otani was en route to being the PL's top pitcher and designated hitter -- that the Fighters' experiment was a huge success. MLB now seems bent on seeing that the experiment is never replicated.

But how could that be? How can a 23-year-old, who could conceivably be an all-star as both a hitter and a pitcher, be a problem?

The answer is money. Professional baseball's drafts, both in MLB and NPB, rob amateurs of their rights to negotiate freely. In 2012, MLB and its union agreed to limit the amount of spending on drafted players and instituted a similar system for international amateurs -- with professionals under the age of 23 being considered amateurs.

That agreement, however, tried to corral international spending through penalties, but failed. Inexperienced overseas pros -- especially those from Cuba -- were earning huge contracts that the same labor deal denied to Americans and Canadians.

This year's agreement ensures international signees are treated as badly as those from the U.S. or Canada. It ensures that experienced professionals such as Otani will not be treated fairly until they are 25 years old.

A year ago, estimates for an Otani contract for 2018, ranged from $200 million to $300 million. By treating him as an untried, inexperienced amateur, the new rule requires him to sign a minor league contract with a signing bonus that could only potentially exceed $10 million.

MLB insiders were adamant a year ago that the loss of $200 million would deter Otani from moving to the States this year. That's because MLB is obsessed with money and can't fathom those who aren't.

But if huge pay cuts can't dissuade the best amateurs from choosing NPB over MLB, then perhaps a harsher posting system will stop NPB teams from offering the same backdoor shortcut the Fighters did with Otani.

That specter appeared Wednesday, with the revelation that MLB's proposals for a new "fair" posting system will eliminate reasonable compensation to NPB teams posting young players such as Otani. Under the rules in place since MLB and 10 of NPB's 12 teams conspired to rob the Rakuten Eagles of a huge posting fee for Masahiro Tanaka in 2013, no Japanese club can ask for more than $20 million as a transfer fee.

The two current proposals, revealed by Yomiuri Giants owner Shoichi Oikawa, both essentially call for a 15 percent cap on money spent by a major league team on a posted player. If a player is over 25 and gets a contract in excess of $100 million, then there will be little change.

However, these proposals dovetail perfectly with the rule that labels Otani an amateur. By severely limiting the money MLB teams can spend on him, MLB wants to exchange the $20 million the Fighters would have received for roughly $1 million.

On Thursday, MLB's commissioner Rob Manfred expressed displeasure that those unattractive proposals had been leaked.

"I think it's unfortunate that either party would be talking about proposals that were made," Manfred said according to the Associated Press. "If he said it, he said it. I'm not going to confirm or say anything about it."

An informed source in July said Manfred had told his NPB counterpart, Katsuhiko Kumazaki, that the posting system was "bad for Japanese Baseball." When Kumazaki reported this to a board of directors' meeting, one team executive pointed out that MLB was clearly more interested in signing Japanese amateurs cheaply than in looking after NPB's well being.

Wednesday's revelations back up that assertion.

If one of the two proposals are ratified -- and NPB's history of bending over and giving in to every MLB demand suggests one will be -- then what NPB team will make the next Otani the same offer with no chance of any compensation?

Without such an offer from a Japanese team and without an early free agent payoff, the temptation of signing for peanuts with an MLB club may seem like a reasonable alternative for a young Japanese star who dreams of playing in the majors.

By proposing that NPB teams not set their own transfer fees, MLB is re-enacting the first stages of the process by which it neutered America's proud independent minor league teams and turned them into the sterile farm systems that MLB now lords over.