Written by Daniel Rapaport at SI.com
Japanese team Nippon-Ham Fighters announced they will post Shohei Ohtani this offseason, bringing him a step closer to a high-profile move to Major League Baseball.
Ohtani, 23, was named the MVP of Japan’s Pacific League in 2016 as he excelled as the ultra-rare two-way player: Ohtani was a dominant starting pitcher and plays the outfield on days he doesn’t pitch.
If the Fighters do indeed post Ohtani, MLB teams will have an opportunity to bid on his rights. On Wednesday, Joel Sherman of the New York Post reported that MLB and NPB, Japan’s top baseball league, had agreed one a one-year extension of the posting system in which Japanese teams receive a lump-sum of up to $20 million from the MLB team that signs their player. The two leagues had also been discussing a new posting system in which Japanese teams would receive a percentage—15–20%, per Sherman—of the player’s contract with an MLB team, but the Ham Fighters did not want to do that with Ohtani, as his next contract will be limited to only a few million dollars by MLB’s international signing rules.
Ohtani, at 23 years old, is too young to sign a free-agent contract in the open market. The rules guiding his signing are the same for signing a teenager out of, say, the Dominican Republic or Venezuela. Ohtani will have to sign a minor-league contract with a signing bonus limited by the amount of international bonus pool money a team has. The Rangers ($3.535 million) have the most to offer, according to the Associated Press, followed by the Yankees ($3.25 million). The extension allows the Fighters to receive a fee, which will almost certainly be the maximum $20 million, instead of a percentage of a minor-league contract.
Had Ohtani been 25 years old and allowed to hit the open market (as Masahiro Tanaka was when he made the move to the U.S. in 2013), he’d likely command in excess of $200 million. Under the new system, that deal would net the Fighters somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 million dollars.
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