MLB’s International Treasures Are Commanding More Cash Than Ever

Teams always have been interested in top players from Japan and Korea. The Dodgers’ roots run deep in this regard. Los Angeles signed both Hideo Nomo, the first MLB star from Japan, and Chan Ho Park, the first MLB star from South Korea. Many other prominent Japanese players have played for the Dodgers through the years, including NPB veterans Darvish, Hiroki Kuroda and Kenta Maeda. So too did lefthander Hyun-Jin Ryu, the first player to star in MLB following a career in the Korea Baseball Organization.  

Recent offseasons have seen MLB teams turn more and more to the Pacific Rim for roster upgrades. In 2021, teams spent $34 million on Japanese and Korean imports, highlighted by a four-year, $28 million deal the Padres gave to KBO shortstop Ha-Seong Kim. A year later, Japanese outfielder Seiya Suzuki landed five years and $85 million from the Cubs, and prior to the 2023 season, nearly $165 million was guaranteed to Red Sox outfielder Masataka Yoshida and Mets righthander Kodai Senga.

This winter has blown all past Pacific Rim spending sprees out of the water.

Yamamoto topped $300 million, and the Giants spent $113 million on 25-year-old Korean outfielder Jung-Hoo Lee, a record contract for any player coming from the KBO. Those deals rank as the second- and fourth-richest contracts signed this winter.

In total, five foreign professionals from Japan or Korea signed MLB deals—six if you count 26-year-old Cuban righthander Yariel Rodriguez, who signed with the Blue Jays after pitching in NPB from 2020 to 2022—with a combined value of nearly $524 million.

That market has exploded not necessarily because Japanese and Korean players are better than they’ve ever been relative to major league talent—though they might well be—but because they are in many ways more accessible. They now hit the market at younger ages and through a streamlined posting system, and with a host of advanced data to bolster their résumés.

More than at any point in history, including the very recent past, MLB teams can much more confidently predict how NPB and KBO players will fare against major league competition, and each player to successfully make the transition only increases that certainty.

“We just know more about how their performance might translate than we ever have,” Mariners GM Justin Hollander said, “and that gives us more confidence about how quickly they might translate.”

The confidence is so strong that the best players from Japan and Korea are now among the most highly sought-after free agents, even as elite domestic talents like Cody Bellinger and Blake Snell stagnate on the market for months. The gold rush in the Pacific Rim is in full swing, and it’s not likely to die down anytime soon.

This offseason showed that major league teams are more than comfortable making nine-figure commitments to players with zero MLB experience. This indicates that the overall talent level in NPB and KBO has caught up significantly to MLB. While that may be true, it’s not the likeliest explanation.

To illustrate the point, multiple evaluators invoked Darvish. When he jumped to the majors for the 2012 season, his hype mirrored Yamamoto’s buzz. But the posting system was different back then. Before negotiating with a posted player, MLB teams bid blindly just for the right to talk to him. The Rangers paid more than $50 million to the Nippon-Ham Fighters to court Darvish, but they won an exclusive negotiating window in the process. Texas didn’t have to elbow out other MLB clubs to sign Darvish to a contract. Thus, Darvish was not truly a free agent and signed for just six years and $60 million.

The posting system has since changed to ensure players a more open market. Posting fees are paid not on the front end but on the back, calculated as a percentage of the guaranteed money in a player’s eventual MLB contract. Yamamoto enjoyed much more robust competition for his services, choosing the Dodgers over the Mets, Giants and others. He’s not necessarily a better talent than Darvish was—just more available to every team.

“If you flipped it around and Darvish was coming out this year and Yamamoto came out back then,” said an executive from one MLB team, “Darvish would probably be getting something similar.”

Still, that’s a lot to guarantee to a player with no MLB track record. Yamamoto received more than Gerrit Cole did from the Yankees, and the Giants spent more on Lee than the Twins did on Carlos Correa during his first free agent foray two years ago. No one would claim with any certainty that Yamamoto will be better than Cole or that Lee’s production will surpass Correa’s, but teams can refer to a data point in which both imported players are clearly superior:

They both hit free agency at just 25 years old.

“Age is a really big number in our game,” said Hollander, and elite domestic players almost never hit the open market that young.

Once upon a time, Alex Rodriguez hit free agency at age 25. Bryce Harper and Manny Machado were free agents at 26, as Juan Soto is on track to be after this season. Most teams heavily factor age into their projection models, and the more of a player’s prime a team is likely to receive, the more that team will be willing to spend. Lee and Yamamoto both had immediate success in their respective leagues as 18-year-olds, hitting the market younger than most free agents and more proven than most amateurs.

“It’s definitely a pretty rare combo,” Giants GM Pete Putila said.

That standouts like Yamamoto are available so young also marks a shift in Japanese baseball culture. Japanese-born players must spend nine years in the NPB before becoming international free agents who are available to sign with any MLB team. To leave earlier than that, they must be posted by their NPB clubs. Some teams, like the SoftBank Hawks and the Yomiuri Giants, rarely post players, preferring to keep their top talents at home for as long as possible. And while players like Darvish and Ohtani have explored signing with MLB clubs out of high school, it has long been taboo in Japan to bypass its domestic leagues.

That may be changing. Five years ago, righthander Shumpei Yoshikawa became just the second Japanese amateur in a decade to bypass the NPB when he signed a minor league pact with the Diamondbacks. Earlier this year, top Japanese high schooler Rintaro Sasaki, a first baseman, committed to play college baseball at Stanford, paving a road for Japanese talents to eventually be taken in the MLB draft. Ohtani was so eager to jump to MLB that he left Japan when he was technically considered an amateur, thus limiting his immediate earning potential, and there’s persistent buzz that 22-year-old Chiba Lotte Marines ace Roki Sasaki may soon attempt the same.

That’s indicative of the mindset of many young players, according to 28-year-old Padres reliever Yuki Matsui, a lefthander who signed this winter for five years and $28 million. “Even from the first year of their professional career in Japan, they start thinking about going to the States to play baseball,” Matsui said through an interpreter. “Compared to when I was a first-year, the number of those people is getting larger.”

The list of Korean players who have advanced to the majors, much less become stars, is much shorter. Kim in San Diego is the greatest recent example, but San Diego signed the shortstop for just $28 million over four years. Perhaps his success the last three seasons contributed in some way to the Giants’ confidence in signing Lee, although Kim doesn’t claim that credit.

“Jung Hoo Lee is a talented, talented player,” Kim said through an interpreter, “and he deserves all the money he got.”

Kim thinks Korea’s talent pool and the country’s baseball infrastructure is still catching up to Japan and the United States, but MLB evaluators say Korea was ahead of Japan in another crucial area: data. For years, MLB clubs essentially have received the same granular information about Korean players as they do the prospects in their own systems, though NPB teams have begun to close that gap more recently. If any one factor has led most to the increased interest in players from those leagues, it’s the quality of the information.

“Obviously, there’s been really good players coming over from Japan for a while,” said Cubs GM Carter Hawkins, whose team inked Japanese lefthander Shota Imanaga to a four-year, $53 million deal this winter. “But it feels like over the last five to seven years, it’s picked up steam in terms of the amount of information we’re able to get.”

There are differences with the baseball used in both leagues, but MLB front offices are increasingly able to account for them in their projections. They can see the movement profiles for every pitch in a pitcher’s arsenal and do an apples-to-apples comparison to MLB equivalents, including to NPB and KBO alums in the majors. They know how well MLB hitters do against certain types of pitches and can be reasonably sure how any given Japanese or Korean pitcher might perform. There is less certainty when projecting hitters. Teams can see metrics like hitters’ exit velocity and launch angle, but they aren’t always seeing that same hitter face MLB-caliber stuff—but even those projections are only becoming more precise.

For the same reason, MLB teams are more comfortable than ever quickly promoting their best young talent through the minor leagues and calling them up to the majors. If the Giants can say more definitively that catcher Patrick Bailey is ready for the big leagues, they can do the same with Lee; the data undergirding those conclusions is essentially the same. The best comparisons for Yamamoto and Lee might not be slightly older star free agents at similar positions, but the slightly younger prospects—such as Jackson Chourio or Corbin Carroll—both of whom earned long-term extensions from their clubs.

“Those players come over as free agents at much younger ages than traditional major league free agents,” Hollander said of the top NPB and KBO talents. “Now you have a chance to sign with more certainty a younger player than may be available on the major league free-agent market, and that’s led to fairly aggressive bidding over the last few seasons.”

The Pacific Rim gold rush is likely to continue, though it’s not likely to ever progress to a full bonanza. NPB and KBO teams still retain rights to their players for nine seasons, and there’s no guarantee that Roki Sasaki or any other player will be allowed to leave early. Even a stud who makes his NPB debut at 18 may not achieve international free agency until age 27. But if that stud does—and especially if he is posted at an even younger age—teams are more prepared and more willing to pay that player near the top of the market.

“Definitely teams are getting more comfortable,” said Padres GM A.J. Preller, whose team is likely to feature Darvish, Kim, Matsui and Korean reliever Woo-Suk Go this season. “When you get more comfortable, it gives you the ability to be more aggressive.”

Zach Buchanan is a freelance writer based in Phoenix