Dodgers’ Japanese superstars are the result of decades of work

“I know that I could go everywhere I wanted to in Japan and never see another scout,” Ted Heid, the longtime Mariners Pacific Rim scout who helped the team land Ichiro Suzuki, told MLB.com recently.

“It was easy to see somebody who was not Japanese in the crowd behind home plate with a radar gun,” said Scott Akasaki, formerly an assistant in the Dodgers’ Asian Operations department in the late ’90s and early 2000s and now the team’s senior director of team travel.

That scenario, where scouts were few and far between in Japan and across Asia, seems impossible to imagine now. The Dodgers trio of Japanese superstars of Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Roki Sasaki have helped lead the team back to the World Series, while the Cubs relied upon Shota Imanaga and Seiya Suzuki to return to the playoffs. Ichiro became the first Japanese player to gain induction into Cooperstown’s National Baseball Hall of Fame this summer.

Forget just the players with Major League experience: The news that sluggers Munetaka Murakami and Kazuma Okamoto are set to be posted this offseason immediately became news despite the hot stove season still a few weeks away from being fired up.

At a time when there was little MLB attention in Asia, it was a stroke of luck that these two scouts even came to the forefront of the game’s changing landscape. Heid, a BYU graduate, was fluent in Japanese after doing his mission work in the country. When the Mariners were bought by Japanese ownership, he fell into this new role, where he “was pretty much carving up the league with reports from the day I landed over there.”

It took an even bigger roll of the dice for Akasaki. Long before he even had a job with a Major League club and while he was a senior in college, Akasaki created his own independent study of Japanese baseball.

“I thought, ‘Maybe if I went back to Japan and learned about Japanese baseball, improved upon my Japanese, I could help be this liaison between East and West,'” Akasaki said. “It was only a matter of time before the All-Star level players in Japan would want to come to the United States, and I was able to parlay that self-study to a job with the Dodgers in the Dodgers’ Asian operations department.”

While some may point to Hideo Nomo’s landmark move to the Dodgers as the beginning of the current connection between the Dodgers and Japanese baseball, that relationship actually began many decades earlier thanks to the vision of Akihiro “Ike” Ikuhara.

“Peter O’Malley had hired Ike Ikuhara about 60 years ago,” Dan Evans, the Dodgers GM from 2001-04, said. “He became a liaison from the Dodgers to Japan, and it was O’Malley seeing that Ike had a vision for down the line, but also being a baseball ambassador in the Pacific Rim. Ike Ikuhara’s role was to cultivate an awareness and really develop relationships in Japan before Nomo, in Korea before Chan Ho Park.”

Evans, now on the board of directors for SABR, has plenty of history in the Pacific Rim. He oversaw the signing of Kazuhisa Ishii and Nomo’s return to the Dodgers, and helped sign three of the first Taiwanese players to MLB contracts. He later went to work with Heid with the Mariners, was Kenshin Kawakami’s agent when he signed with the Braves and later led Pacific Rim operations for the Blue Jays. He’s intimately aware of just how different the baseball world was at the time and how important it was to establish a presence not just in Japan but across the region.

“My vision — supported by [Dodgers executives] Bob Daly and Bob Graziano — was, ‘Why should we be dependent only on the free-agent market and the draft? Let’s get into every area in the world that’s producing baseball, and let’s be aggressive about it again. This is the team of Jackie Robinson. It’s the team of Hideo Nomo.'”

Thanks to a staff led by Acey Kohrogi, now the director of Pacific Rim Operations for the Padres, the Dodgers put together a team that featured Akasaki covering Japan along with Curtis Jung, who handled Korea, and Vincent Lau, who was responsible for Taiwan and China.

“Every single day, when I came in, I had a breakdown of all the games that were played the night before in Japan,” Evans said. “I knew about the players. I had footage when it was available. I became really aware of Japanese baseball. I had awareness. I knew the players. I knew who was playing well, who was playing poorly.”

At a time when few teams beyond the Dodgers, Mariners, and maybe the Red Sox or Yankees had a consistent presence, the Dodgers had four full-time staff members.

“You were starting to see signs of them,” Heid said about the shift that occurred in the early 2000s, “but it was kind of like a reward trip for veteran scouts to go over there.”

Evans notes that it wasn’t just scouting of players that was important: You needed to show respect for the game and the people involved in it. He was in attendance when Ikuhara was posthumously inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame. When Korean or Japanese scouts came to Los Angeles, the Dodgers hosted them just as they would any representative from a big league organization.

“We treated them as one of our brethren. We thought there were 50 pro teams, not just 30,” Evans said. “And subsequently, we treated them well. We had documents that were bilingual. I knew their customs. I was always introduced in their native language.”

When the Dodgers signed Ishii before the 2002 season, the team didn’t make the announcement in Los Angeles. Instead, the brain trust flew over to host it in Japan.

“Our reasoning was he was one of the best pitchers over there,” Evans said. “He was an elite guy. Let’s honor him, and let’s continue to grow and, very honestly, re-establish our brand. So, we went over there for the announcement. We did a lot of the press conferences with the idea of catering toward the Japanese media. I’m thrilled we did because it was about respect.”

All of this work — whether it was watching as Chin-Feng Chen became the first player from Taiwan to make his big league debut or being in attendance at a baseball event in China to scout players, had an impact: Before the Dodgers eventually chose to sign Fred McGriff, they were in discussions to bring famed KBO slugger Seung-Yuop Lee to the Major Leagues.

“He was willing to come to us because of the infrastructure [that was in place],” Evans noted.

While the Dodgers may have an edge thanks to their location and financial might, Evans argues that there is a much more human role that goes into it.

“This game is all about relationships,” Evans said. “You spend 10 to 14 hours a day at the ballpark for eight and a half, nine months together. The game is a worldwide game. It is certainly not a North American game anymore. It’s played in more than 25 nations. The World Baseball Classic is evident. It’s not money. It’s cultivating and maintaining and nurturing relationships. You can’t buy relationships.”

“You hear [Yoshinobu] Yamamoto and Shohei [Ohtani] and Roki [Sasaki] talk about one of the reasons they chose the Dodgers is because of its history,” Akasaki said. “Obviously the proximity to Japan and the community that we have here helps, but we have a really unique infrastructure. We have Japanese-speaking trainers. We have Japanese-speaking staff in the front office. I’m bilingual. Will Ireton was Kenta Maeda’s interpreter — Kenta Maeda was [with the Dodgers] a long time ago, but he’s still on the support staff. You drop a Japanese player in our Dodgers clubhouse and that will be seamless.”

The impact of these early signings by the Dodgers, Mariners, Yankees and Red Sox had an enormous impact — both in America and around the globe. For fans in Japan, they now saw a steady diet of Major League Baseball on their TVs, and hopes of one day reaching those fields became realistic dreams.

“These young men in Japan — Ohtani, Yamamoto, Sasaki, all of them — grew up watching Mariners games because all of the Mariner games were broadcast live on TV,” Heid said. “They grew up being able to see Major League Baseball, and now all of a sudden, they didn’t grow up dreaming of being a Hanshin Tiger or a Chunichi Dragon or whatever. Now, they started wanting to be Dodgers, Mariners, Yankees.”

This didn’t just provide hope to players growing up in Japan, but to Asian-American children, who had yet to see people who looked like them starring in American sports.

“The Asian-American athlete or role model was not prevalent,” Akasaki said. “Nomo and Chan-Ho Park were really the pioneers, like Tiger Woods, Michael Chang, Yao Ming. There wasn’t really somebody though that you could turn on the TV and go, ‘Wow, that guy looks like me.'”

Despite helping lay the groundwork for what has come today, despite still working for the team that Shohei Ohtani plays for, Akasaki couldn’t have imagined the future that would unfold.

“My sons can turn on the TV and watch the best player in baseball and he looks like them,” Akasaki said. “It’s really something that I would never have thought about when I first started. Everybody’s an immigrant at one point in their lives, or everybody may feel like an outsider or may have felt like an outsider at a certain point in their lives. But having Yamamoto and Roki and Shohei not only is a tremendous pride for me, but it’s something that I can show my kids and say, ‘You can do anything.'”

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