INTEGRATION OF NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICAN PLAYERS IN JAPAN'S PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL LEAGUES

• Author: Akihiko Kawaura,Sumner Croix
• Date: 01 August 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/iere.12187
• Published date: 01 August 2016

INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC REVIEW

Vol. 57, No. 3, August 2016

INTEGRATION OF NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICAN PLAYERS IN JAPAN’S

PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL LEAGUES∗

BYAKIHIKO KAWAURA AND SUMNER LACROIX1

Doshisha University, Japan; University of Hawaii, U.S.A.

Teams in Japan’s two professional baseball leagues began to add foreign players in the early 1950s, with the average

number per team reaching 5.79 in 2004. This was primarily because foreign hitters outperformed Japanese hitters.

Hazard analysis shows that a poorly performing team was more likely to hire its first Caucasian and African American

players earlier than a successful team. Econometric analysis of team use of foreign players over 45 seasons (1960–2004)

shows that losing Central League teams used foreign players more often in following season(s), whereas past success

of Pacific League teams did not affect their use of foreign players.

1. INTRODUCTION

From the 1940s through the 1970s, professional baseball teams in North America integrated

with minority players, and professional baseball teams in Japan integrated with foreign players.

In North America, this meant adding Latino players born in North and South America (from

1933),2African American players (from 1947), and players born in Asia (from 1995)3to team

rosters. In Japan, this meant signing Japanese American players who grew up in Hawaii, subse-

quently Caucasian, African American, and Latino players from North and South America, and

finally players from other Asian countries. Economists, social scientists, and popular writers

have intensively studied the history of racial and ethnic integration by MLB teams but have

generally ignored the parallel history of racial integration by Nippon Professional Baseball

(NPB) teams.4The lack of attention paid to integration of NPB teams with foreign players is

unfortunate, as the process and outcomes of integration are in many respects very similar in

MLB and NPB.

The integration of Caucasian, Latino, and African American players from North and South

American countries into the professional sport teams of an Asian country that, just a few years

earlier, had been defeated and occupied by American military forces is an interesting story in its

own right. An empirical study of racial integration in Japanese baseball also allows us to place

studies of Northern American baseball in comparative perspective. This is because professional

∗Manuscript received March 2012; revised February 2015.

1We thank staff at the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Tokyo, Japan, for their assistance in locating information

on foreign players and the history of rules limiting foreign players on team rosters. We also thank Inna Cintina, Robert

Fitts, Peter Fuleky, Tim Halliday, Andy Hanssen, Sang-Hyop Lee, and participants in a seminar at the University of

Hawaii and the 2012 World Economic History Congress for helpful comments.

Please address correspondence to: Sumner La Croix, Department of Economics, 2424 Maile Way, University of

Hawaii, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA. Phone: +808-956-8730. Fax: +808-956-4347. E-mail: lacroix@hawaii.edu

2Fifty-five mostly light skin tone Latinos from the Spanish-speaking Americas played for Major League Baseball

(MLB) teams prior to 1947 (Burgos, 2007, ch. 9). See Burgos (2007) for a history of the integration of Latino players in

Major League Baseball.

3Masanori Murakami was the first Japan-born Japanese player in MLB, pitching successfully for the San Francisco

Giants during the 1964 and 1965 seasons. Thirty years elapsed before an MLB team would sign a second player from

Japan, star pitcher Hideo Nomo.

4A notable exception is Robert Fitts’s book, Remembering JapaneseBaseball. The addition of a veteran U.S. baseball

player to an NPB team was the subject of a popular 1992 movie, Mr.Baseball, featuring Tom Selleck as the U.S. baseball

player.

1107

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(2016) by the Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social

and Economic Research Association

1108 KAWAURA AND LA CROIX

baseball leagues on both sides of the Pacific Ocean share a common institution: The Rules of

Play of the Game of Baseball. It is three strikes and you are out wherever baseball is played.

The MLB and NPB rules of play have been almost identical in every post-WWII season, with

rule changes initiated by MLB quickly adopted by NPB.5The common institution of the “Game

of Baseball” provides an ideal setting for comparative analysis, as it allows researchers to focus

on how differences in markets for players, competition among league teams, league rules, and

national cultures affected choices of NPB and MLB teams and players.

There are several substantial differences in the economic and social environments in Japan

and the United States that could have affected both the timing of a team’s initial integration of

foreign players and its decisions to play them in games in subsequent seasons. First, the United

States had a long history of racial animus against African Americans and Latinos whereas Japan

did not. Second, African American and Latino players on MLB teams were usually paid less

than Caucasian players, whereas foreign players on NPB teams were paid more than Japanese

players. Third, in Japan, NPB rules limited the number of foreign players per team, whereas

MLB rules did not explicitly constrain the number of African American or Latino players per

team after Jackie Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Finally, NPB teams are

typically owned by large Japanese corporations, whereas MLB teams are typically owned by

wealthy individuals and families.6In spite of these differences, the multiple empirical analyses

conducted of NPB integration in this article find remarkable similarities between the process

and outcomes of integration in NPB and MLB.

We begin our analysis with a discussion of the player and team data used in our empirical

analysis, setting forth the procedures used to classify a player’s ethnicity and national origin

and presenting a unified measure of team utilization of offensive players (hitters) and defensive

players (pitchers). We follow with a short history of NPB team integration and briefly compare

experiences of NPB and MLB teams. Our empirical analysis focuses on four main questions:

(i) When did NPB teams initially add players from North and South America to their rosters

and what factors affected team decisions? (ii) How did NPB teams change their use of foreign

players over time? (iii) How well did foreign players perform compared to Japanese players,

and how did their presence on an NPB team roster affect team performances? And (iv), did past

team performance affect a team’s decision to change its use of foreign players over time? We

conclude with a discussion comparing the similar paths taken by MLB teams to add minority

players and NPB teams to add foreign players.

2. FOREIGN PLAYERS IN THE NPB LEAGUES

The rosters of NPB teams were predominately filled by Japanese players from the beginning

of professional baseball in Japan in 1936 but foreign players were an accepted part of Japanese

professional baseball from its inception.7Fitts (2009, p. 80) reported that “[p]rior to World

War II, sixteen Nisei [Japanese American players born in Hawaii], two Caucasians and an

African American [Jimmy Bonna] had joined the league.” The first foreign players to play for

a professional baseball team in Japan were Harris McGaillard, a U.S. catcher who played for

Nagoya in 1936, Yoshi Takahashi, a second-generation Japanese American from Hawaii, and

Herb North, another Nisei from Hawaii. Two foreign pitchers were particularly outstanding:

5Consider, for example, the parallel resolution in Japan and North America of the early 1970s controversies over the

designated hitter rule, which allows a designated player to bat for the pitcher. In MLB, the American League adopted

the rule, whereas the National League balked. Two years later, the same debate went on in the NPB, and the outcome

was amazingly the same: The Pacific League adopted the rule and the Central League declined.

6Three MLB teams are owned by corporations: The Seattle Mariners by the American subsidiary of a Japanese

corporation, Nintendo, the Toronto Blue Jays by Rogers Communications, and the Atlanta Braves by Liberty Media.

7Material for this section draws from Fitts (2005, 2009). We also used data from a Web site providing lists of foreign

players on team rosters in the 1950s and 1960s: http://www.geocities.co.jp/Athlete/3206/gaijinn.htm (last accessed on

July 10, 2015).