In July, Tony Clark, executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, visited Japan to announce support for players in NPB. Japanese players are trying to take control of their name, image and likeness rights, or NIL — a fight familiar to college athletes in the United States. The Japanese clubs hold those rights and, therefore, the final say over the endorsement deals players make.
But NIL is not the only battle underway for the Japanese players association. It may not even be the most ambitious. Japanese players, who are not known for aggressive labor tactics, are pushing to become free agents earlier and want to be able to play in MLB sooner.
To get it done, the Japanese players association is preparing a legal challenge to the league’s reserve system on antitrust grounds.
Players in Japan have two forms of free agency: domestic and international. Domestic free agency — the freedom to switch to another Japanese team — is achieved after seven or eight years in the league, depending on whether the player was drafted out of college or high school.
But to leave as a free agent for a foreign league such as the MLB, the wait is nine years. Players can depart sooner, but only if their team posts them for bidding. Instead, Japanese players want what is in place in MLB: free agency after six years, regardless of entry or destination.
The two-pronged push for change is remarkable for a players association that does not have the same might as its U.S. counterpart. Club owners hold most of the power in NPB, in part because labor unions in Japan are generally not as strong as they are in the United States.
A players strike does not appear to be in the offing anytime soon. But the players association regards the body that oversees antitrust law, the Fair Trade Commission, as perhaps the best vehicle to attack the reserve system. That is a relatively new development: In 2019, the commission issued a report that gave the nation’s athletes newfound leverage.
"There was legal argument whether antitrust law is applied to sports matters,” said Tak Yamazaki, a lawyer for the players association. "They changed the interpretation, making it clear that the antitrust law will apply.” He added: "That has changed the whole landscape.”
A smaller test case in front of the commission went the players’ way, leading to the repeal of an unwritten rule in the Japanese league in 2020. The Tazawa rule was named for former major league pitcher Junichi Tazawa, who had been effectively barred from playing in NPB at the end of his time playing in the United States because he had skipped its amateur draft to pursue a major league career.
A person briefed on management’s thinking who was not authorized to speak publicly said that NPB has been preparing for this next challenge and that the league has proposed reducing the time to domestic free agency. The offer did not include a reduction for international free agency.
"Six and seven years was on the table at the end of January,” the person said. "If they were willing to negotiate several months ago, I think we would have been able to successfully come to an agreement before opening day.”
Yamazaki said the league’s offer was more complex than a straight reduction.
The other change Japanese players seek, to their NIL rights, creates a contrast to the United States, where NIL is a relatively settled matter in pro leagues. But it has been a dominant topic in college athletics, reshaping the NCAA.
The Japanese players association intends to continue to pursue player NIL rights via negotiations. Theoretically, though, the players could also take up an antitrust fight in that space, too. The topic is long-standing. The players sued over publicity rights on different grounds in 2002, and years later, the case wound up in the Supreme Court, where the league prevailed.
But that was before 2019. An antitrust case in the United States was notably at the center of vast change of NIL for college athletes, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the NCAA in 2021.
Japanese teams take a cut of player endorsements, and the clubs are protective of their own sponsors.
"For example, if a company that is offering an endorsement deal to the player is a competitor of club sponsors, it can be denied,” Yamazaki said. "Also, for example, setting up a YouTube channel: Some clubs allow it, but some clubs don’t.”
Clark believes players can unlock greater value in group licensing. International unions, he said, have rarely, if at all, taken advantage of or realized the value of their name, image and likeness rights.
"We believe there’s a better opportunity on the heels of Ohtani coming here, and on the heels of nearly a third of our membership at the major league level being international, to build on that in a way that hasn’t happened yet,” Clark said, referring to Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
The MLB players union is billing its involvement as a business opportunity, not just union camaraderie. When Clark traveled to Sapporo last month, he announced that the MLB players union and a licensing business it owns about 20% of, OneTeam Partners, would "support Japanese players in reclaiming their NIL rights from NPB and to manage these rights in the future through the creation of a commercial program, run by OneTeam International,” per a memo the MLB players union sent to its members.
Japanese players formed their union in 1985. That was almost two decades after the MLB players union created a group licensing program in 1966. Major leaguers at the time quickly began a boycott of Topps, an effort to force the trading card company to deal with the players en masse.
Today, that licensing program brings in huge dollars for players and the union. A financial statement the MLB players union filed with the Department of Labor lists $152 million in net licensing royalties for 2023, although that figure does not account for every stream. The income has ripple effects: The funds help players prepare for work stoppages, creating bargaining leverage.
Clark acknowledged the MLB players union’s support for the Japanese players comes with costs to its members, but also benefits.
"Someone may look at it from the outside in and suggest, ‘OK, well, that really doesn’t affect me,’ but the truth is, the global sports community is more connected than people think,” Clark said. "Yes, there is a financial investment. Yes, there is a sweat equity component of this.”
Per the MLB players union memo, OneTeam’s international division, which was started this year, is also in partnership talks with football and soccer unions across England, Italy and France, as well as the International Rugby Players Association and various unions across Australia and New Zealand. The memo did not touch upon the Japanese players union’s reserve-system battle, however, an omission perhaps made out of sensitivity to another union’s bargaining positions.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times © 2025 The New York Times Company
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