After Major League Baseball withdrew their latest proposal, the league is resuming talks with Japan in an effort to come to an agreement on a new posting system, reports the Japan Times.
MLB and Japan to resume talks on new posting agreement
Japanese officials are expected to negotiate toward a similar agreement as the previous posting system.
Koji Watanabe
The current lack of a posting system has kept players such as Masahiro Tanaka from being put up for bid to MLB teams. If he were to be posted, Tanaka may be the best pitcher available this winter. The previous agreement expired near the end of the 2013 MLB season.
Representatives from the 12 Japanese teams met together on Monday and agreed to move toward a system that resembles the previous one. Atsushi Ihara, the general secretary of Nippon Professional Baseball, says they will “negotiate to try and keep what we have.”
Under the previous posting agreement, MLB teams place blind bids on and player posted by their Japanese team. Whoever submits the highest bid wins the rights to negotiate with the player. The price of the bid goes to the Japanese team. The MLB team then gets one month to work out a deal with the player. If no agreement is reached, the bid money and player are both returned to their original teams.
There had been talks of major changes to the posting system this time around. The latest report had been that the team with the highest bid would pay the average of the two highest bids. In addition, the winning club would be fined if they failed to sign the player. Now, however, it appears these changes may not come about, as the two sides couldn’t come to terms before talks broke down.
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