Integration of North and South American Players in Japan's Professional Baseball Leagues

Abstract

Teams in Japan's two professional baseball leagues began to add foreign players to their rosters in the early 1950s, with the average number of foreign players per team reaching 5.79 in 2004. One reason for their increased use of foreign players was that foreign hitters substantially outperformed Japanese hitters. We show that the pace of team integration with African-American, Latino, and Caucasian players varied substantially across teams, a pattern also observed in North American professional baseball leagues. Using team data for the 1958-2004 seasons, econometric analysis shows that good teams that experienced a poor season played foreign players more frequently in the next season's games.

Desperately Seeking a Japanese Yokozuna

“…Overall, the literature suggests that racial discrimination in professional sports does exist, but its importance is declining (Hassen 1998;Goff et al 2002;Kawaura and La Croix, 2016). We contribute to this literature by investigating whether foreign wrestlers in Sumo have been treated less favorably than Japanese wrestlers, especially after the 2010 reform that substantially restricted access to non-Japanese players.…”

“…Research has pointed out that poor performance by a team can trigger the employment of foreign players (Goff et al 2002, Hansen andMeehan 2009). For instance, in Japanese Professional Baseball, losing teams are more inclined to use foreign players in the following season (Kawaura and La Croix, 2016).…”