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His favorite player is Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
He follows one major league team on Instagram: The Dodgers.
And while people familiar with his situation insist he hasn’t made a decision, the widespread expectation around the industry is that 18-year-old Shoki Oda of Japan will end up with the Dodgers.
If Oda sticks to the plan he unveiled earlier this month, the hard-throwing right-hander will do something no Japanese superstar before him has ever done by moving to the United States without first playing in Nippon Professional Baseball.
The Japanese establishment is viewing the potential development as an existential threat to its domestic league, as no prospect of Oda’s caliber has ever signed with a major league organization as an amateur.
What would NPB be without such players?
Daisuke Matsuzaka played in the league.
So did Yu Darvish.
And Shohei Ohtani.
And Roki Sasaki.
In the case of Ohtani, he was close to signing with the Dodgers out of high school as a pitcher, only to be drafted by the Nippon-Ham Fighters, who talked him into signing with them by offering him a chance to be a two-way player.
The Yomiuri Giants used their first-round selection in the recent NPB draft on Oda, perhaps thinking they could similarly change the mind of the Yokohama High product.
With 22 Japan Series titles, the Giants are the most successful team in NPB history. Their new manager is Hideki Matsui, one of the most popular players in Japanese baseball history.
But in reality, their efforts to convince Oda to stay in the country have the feel of a symbolic last stand.
Something like this was bound to happen.
The Dodgers have achieved their goal of “painting Japan blue,” as the triumphs of Ohtani, Sasaki and Yoshinobu Yamamoto have made them the country’s favorite major league team.
But this goes beyond that.
Over the last three decades, Japan has gone from treating Hideo Nomo as if he was a traitor for joining the Dodgers to wanting to see its best players compete in the world’s top league.
“I want to play in the No. 1 (league) in the world,” Oda told reporters. “I want to be No. 1 in the world.”
He isn’t alone.
Last month, the San Diego Padres signed right-hander Tatsuya Nogami directly out of Osaka Sangyo University.
This summer, Rintaro Sasaki chose to sign with the Miami Marlins instead of the SoftBank Hawks. The decision marked Sasaki’s second time rejecting NPB’s overtures. When Sasaki graduated from Hanamaki Higashi High – also the alma mater of Ohtani and the Angels’ Yusei Kikuchi – he skipped the NPB draft and enrolled at Stanford.
What distinguished Oda’s situation from theirs was that Oda was considered an entirely different class of prospect. Oda was part of the same powerhouse program that developed Matsuzaka. He threw a 97-mph fastball that was the fastest pitch ever recorded at Japan’s national high school baseball tournament, which earned him comparisons to Sasaki.
There are clear benefits to signing with a major league organization as an amateur.
In NPB, nine years of service time is required to become an international free agent. Players who aren’t international free agents have to be posted by their NPB teams to move to the major leagues. The SoftBank Hawks have a policy against posting their players. Other organizations, such as the Giants, very rarely make their players available to major league teams.
Finances are also a factor. Bonuses for NPB draft picks are capped at 100 million yen, or about $640,000.
Major league teams are assigned bonus pools to sign international amateurs, and they are free to allocate as much of that as they want to any one player. The Dodgers’ bonus pool was $7.2 million last year. One major league talent scout estimated that Oda could receive a signing bonus of anywhere from $3 million to $5 million.
Oda’s anticipated move to the U.S. will be complicated by baseball’s upcoming labor stoppage.
The international player acquisition system is collectively bargained, and baseball’s current collective-bargaining agreement will expire on Dec. 1, at which point franchise owners will lock out the players.
Oda would not be able to sign until a new CBA is ratified.
Perhaps that’s what the Yomiuri Giants are counting on. Perhaps they think an extended lockout will wear on Oda.
Long term, it won’t make a difference.
Because if Oda doesn’t sign with the Dodgers or some other major league team, the next Oda will.