Another interesting Asian baseball quandary has been posed in the online Out of the Park Baseball Japanese league I play in. It concerns naturalizing the citizenship of foreign players so that they don’t count against the league’s foreign player limit. In the League of the Rising Sun teams are currently allowed six foreign “mercenaries” (as they are called in both the Japanese and Korean languages), three pitchers and three batters. Next year that limit will be cut to four, and it won’t matter if the players are pitchers or hitters.

The reason for the increased foreign player limit had to do with the financial situation the league was and is facing. A number of the teams began play in the red, since, as the storyline goes, the league was falling apart and purchased by the America-based league known as PEBA.

In order to fill their rosters, the Japanese teams had to sign more (albeit less talented) foreigners, who were willing to play for the salaries some of the teams could offer. The league has become healthier financially, hence there’s less of a need for cheap foreign labor.

One of the LRS owners, who I suspect has some solid foreign talent he doesn’t want going to waste, has been campaigning to keep the foreign player limit at six. Most people, including the commissioner of the league, are against the idea. But doesn’t stop the owner from trying, and he recently came up with a well-conceived idea to naturalize the citizenship of certain players, thus rendering them special status citizens in Japan. To support his argument he posted a FAQ from japanesebaseball.com titled Foreign Player Restrictions.

I recommend reading the FAQ, which gives a history of the foreign player restrictions in the NPB. It also discusses naturalized citizenship, and cites the example of Yasuaki Taiho (Chen Tai-feng).

Taiho signed with the Dragons under the rule that states if a player lives and studies in Japan for five years or more, they are treated as Japanese players. After graduating from college in Japan, Taiho worked for one year at Chunichi as a trainee, and thus was able to sign with Chunichi without using a foreign player spot.

The answer goes on to address the other naturalization questions…

Currently, the rules for foreign players to be treated as Japanese players is as follows:
Live in Japan for five or more years, attending junior high, senior high, a two-year college, and/or vocational school for three years.
Live in Japan for four or more years, continuously attending a Japanese university for four or more years.
Live in Japan for five or more years, playing on a team in the Japanese Amateur Baseball Association (industrial leagues) for 3 or more years.

Unfortunately, that’s where I more or less stopped reading before I started arguing against the idea. I contacted the proprietor of japanesebaseball.com, the esteemed Michael Westbay, to get his take. We had an interesting chat over Skype about the foreign player restrictions in both Japanese and Korean baseball. More on Korean baseball in a minute.

Westbay pointed out that foreign players who reach free agent status no longer count as foreign players. Normally, the service time requirement for both the Japanese and Korean baseball leagues is nine years. Well, likewise, at lest in Japanese baseball, once foreign players reach this milestone, they may become naturalized citizens of Japan.

I’m actually not sure if that would be the case in Korea. It probably would be, but no player is even close. Cliff Braumbagh has five years of KBO service time, but the seasons aren’t consecutive, and at any rate, I don’t think his body can stand another four years.

But according to Westbay-san, this is one area the NPB has shown signs of becoming more foreigner friendly, now telling mercenaries they will be granted naturalization after just eight seasons in the league. So it would appear, the owner in my league (Kevin Vail), has a point, although he’s looking for a trimmed down three year service time requirement.

According to the japanesebaseball.com FAQ, since 1997, only two foreign players have qualified for free agency and longer count as foreign players — Taigen Kaku (Kuo Tai-yuan) and Tuffy Rhodes.