On March 15, the Asahi Shimbun reported that the Yomiuri Giants baseball team paid huge amounts of money in contract-signing bonuses to several rookies, in violation of an agreement signed by all 12 Japan Professional Baseball teams. The payouts took place from 1997 to 2004, and involved six players who were given between ¥250 million and ¥1 billion. The agreement, which accompanied a new baseball draft system initiated in 1993, limited such bonuses to ¥100 million — ¥150 million each. In principle, baseball teams select new players who have just graduated from high school or university by lot, but each year they can also acquire up to two new players by what is referred to as a "reverse indication" (gyaku-shimei) system, which says the players can preselect which team they want to play for.
Yomiuri responded immediately, complaining that the Asahi story was old news and the Giants organization had done nothing wrong. Tsuneo Watanabe, Yomiuri Shimbun Holdings' chairman and editor in chief of the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's biggest newspaper in terms of circulation, said that the Asahi obviously got this information from Hidetoshi Kiyotake, the former general manager of the Giants who once referred to Watanabe as a dictator and is suing his old employer, but not before his old employer sued him. Hardly coincidentally, Kiyotake's new tell-all book was published March 16, the day after the Asahi report appeared.
Though the tabloids and weeklies have been covering this dustup, major media have mostly avoided it, in particular television news shows and wide shows, which usually take to sports-related scandals like ants to sugar. Consequently, the average person may have no idea what all the excitement is about, or whether the situation even warrants excitement.