Heard the Dodgers are the favs.

I was under the impression that MLB and NPB had a sort of gentleman's agreement that the majors wouldn't poach Japanese amateurs until after the NPB clubs had a chance to draft or sign them. Was I wrong?

That agreement doesn't apply to the players themselves. For instance, if an American player wanted to play in Japan, MLB couldn't stop them.

Edit: If Japan wants this to stop happening, they need to do the one thing that will likely staunch it. Offer more money to their draftees.

He throws 110 mph, has a wipeout slider, a splitter, a 12-6 hammer curve and is working on a knuckleball. And poise. He will easily be worth $250 million. Compare him conservatively to Walter Johnson. Just so I beat Scott Boras to it.

@2:

Yeah, they do, but as Tripon said, that doesn't apply to the players themselves. However, NPB does have a rule where if a player decides to skip the draft and go straight to America they aren't allowed to come back for a certain amount of time. So if Otani were to sign with, say, the Dodgers, and then quickly flame out for one reason or another, he'd basically be screwed, as no NPB team would be signing him for a few years.

#4 -- All of that still doesn't add up to the simple genius of Matsuzaka and the gyroball. Diasuke was going to own the world due to his mastery of a pitch he didn't throw and which may or may not exist.

The greatest trick the demon mystery pitch ever played was convincing the world it didn't exist...

Double post.

Too bad for Otani that he falls under the new int'l spending caps

If you run "Shohei Otani" through Google Translate, you get "Sidd Finch."

The article doesn't say exactly how he accomplishes this. Does he apply for free agency like the Dominican players do? Can anyone apply for free agency in MLB? How does one do this? I couldn't find a form to download on mlb.com. They do have the locations and dates of tryout camps, however.

The only recent somewhat comparable situation was Tazawa, who asked that NPB teams not draft him, then spent a couple of years in industrial leagues. I don't understand why NPB teams would be willing to simply skip on a player who's good enough for MLB to draft. Isn't the whole point of a draft to make the players go where you want them to?

...Tazawa, who asked that NPB teams not draft him, then spent a couple of years in industrial leagues. I don't understand why NPB teams would be willing to simply skip on a player...

High school and college players are not eligible unless submit letters of intent to their respective governing organizations. Players who go to the industrial leagues out of high school aren't eligible for the draft until they've played three years. I guess there's nothing that stops a player from leaving the industrial leagues for MLB.

Many other aspects of the NPB draft system seem downright bizarre to me. It's nothing at all like the drafts that we're familiar with for major North American sports.

However, NPB does have a rule where if a player decides to skip the draft and go straight to America they aren't allowed to come back for a certain amount of time. So if Otani were to sign with, say, the Dodgers, and then quickly flame out for one reason or another, he'd basically be screwed, as no NPB team would be signing him for a few years.

Therefore, Ichiro should not be in the Hall of Fame.

Too bad for Otani that he falls under the new int'l spending caps

The Mariners have somehow had a separate line item for signing foreign players - The Ichiro Fund, I think they call it. Now that its namesake is gone, maybe they'll want to spend some big money on another Japanese player.

MLB really needs to get these kinds of international free agents into the draft pool. Some of them could probably get more of a signing bonus now since the IFA rules have changed. Teams now get up to like $3.2MM to spend total on IFAs, but the top seven picks in the last MLB Draft all signed for $3MM or more (with Giolito who slipped to #16 due to an injury getting just shy of that).

I hear he's got a hell of a bridging dragon suplex!