Kenta Case Summary

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In the end of 2015, Kenta Maeda who was a Japanese star baseball player tried to join the United States’ Major League Baseball (MLB) by using the posting system. The posting system is a baseball player transfer system that operates between Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) and MLB. Under this system, when an NPB player is "posted", his NPB team notifies the MLB Commissioner and sets a posting fee not exceeding $20 million. The player is then given 30 days to negotiate with any MLB team willing to pay the NPB team's set posting fee. If the player agrees on contract terms with a team before the 30-day period has expired, the NPB team receives the posting fee from the signing MLB team as a transfer fee, and the player is free to play in MLB. If no MLB team comes to a contract agreement with the posted player, then no fee is paid, and the player's rights revert to his NPB team [1]. …show more content…
Kenta's path to MLB had been complicated, as is often the case with Japanese players under contract to a team. A biggest issue for this negotiation was that the physical exam Kenta provided to interested clubs revealed "irregularities" in his right elbow with the strong suspicion that he would need Tommy John reconstruction at some point in his career. The Dodgers were one of a select few teams comfortable with dispensing of $20 million for the mere right of being able to place a call to Maeda's agent