The is a baseball player transfer system that operates between Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) and Major League Baseball (MLB). Despite the drafting of the United States – Japanese Player Contract Agreement, unveiled in 1967 to regulate NPB players moving to MLB, problems began to arise in the late 1990s. Some NPB teams lost star players without compensation, an issue highlighted when NPB stars Hideo Nomo and Alfonso Soriano left to play in MLB after using loopholes to void their existing contracts. A further problem was that NPB players had very little negotiating power if their teams decided to deal them to MLB, as when pitcher Hideki Irabu was traded to an MLB team for which he had no desire to play. In 1998, the Agreement was rewritten to address both problems; the result was dubbed the "posting system".
Under this system, when an NPB player is "posted", his NPB team notifies the MLB Commissioner, with the posting fee based on the type of contract a player signs and its value. The fee is a flat 25% of the value of a minor-league contract; for MLB contracts, the fee is based on the value of the contract that the posted player eventually signs. The player is then given 30 days to negotiate with any MLB team willing to pay the NPB team's posting fee. If the player agrees on contract terms with a team before the 30-day period has expired, the NPB team receives the posting fee from the signing MLB team as a transfer fee, and the player is free to play in MLB. If no MLB team comes to a contract agreement with the posted player, then no fee is paid, and the player's rights revert to his NPB team. The current process replaced one in which MLB held a silent auction during which MLB teams submitted sealed, uncapped bids in an attempt to win the exclusive negotiating rights with the posted player for a period of 30 days. Once the highest bidding MLB team was determined, the player could then only negotiate with that team.
Up to the end of the 2017–18 posting period, 23 NPB players had been posted using the system. Of these, 12 signed Major League contracts, four signed minor-league contracts, five were unsuccessful in attracting any MLB interest, and two could not come to a contract agreement during the 30-day negotiation period. The five highest-profile players that have been acquired by MLB teams through the posting system are Ichiro Suzuki, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Yu Darvish, Masahiro Tanaka, and Shohei Ohtani. The first three attracted high bids of $13.125 million, $51.1 million, and $51.7 million respectively. Tanaka was the first player posted under a revised procedure that was in place from 2013 to 2017; he was posted for the maximum $20 million allowed under the new rules. Ohtani was the first player posted under the current procedure; his posting fee of $20 million was grandfathered in under the previous agreement. However, since its implementation the posting system has been criticized by the media and baseball insiders from both countries.
History
The first instance of a Japanese-born player playing in Major League Baseball was in 1964, when the Nankai Hawks, an NPB team, sent three exchange prospects to the United States to gain experience in MLB's minor league system. One of the players, pitcher Masanori Murakami, was named the California League Rookie of the Year while playing for the Fresno Giants (the San Francisco Giants' Class-A team). Giants executives were impressed with his talent and on September 1, 1964 Murakami was promoted, thus becoming the first Japanese player to play in MLB. After Murakami put up good pitching statistics as a reliever, Giants executives sought to exercise a clause in their contract with the Hawks that, they claimed, allowed them to buy up an exchange prospect's contract. NPB officials objected, stating that they had no intention of selling Murakami's contract to the Giants and telling them that Murakami was merely on loan for the 1964 season. After a two-month stalemate the Giants eventually agreed to send Murakami back to the Hawks after the 1965 season. Thus, after pitching one more season for the Giants, Murakami returned to Japan to play for the Hawks. This affair led to the 1967 United States – Japanese Player Contract Agreement, also known as the "working agreement", between MLB and NPB, which was basically a hands-off policy.