Dark cloud over baseball

An investigative committee has found that the Seibu Lions, a Pacific League baseball club, paid from 100,000 yen to 10 million yen to 170 managers and others affiliated with amateur baseball teams for 27 years until 2005 as rewards for helping the pro baseball team acquire new players. The revelation of organized improper conduct of this nature over a long period is a huge blot on the worlds of both professional and amateur baseball.

The payments started in 1978 when the Seibu Lions were inaugurated and continued just prior to a pledge of ethical conduct by all 12 Nippon Professional Baseball clubs in June 2005. The declaration prohibits providing cash gifts to amateur baseball people in connection with scouting of amateur players. Seibu's payments came in cash or gift certificates.

The total value amounted to about 135 million yen. Ironically, all the payments, which would have been off the book, received official approval from team officials and were recorded, thus enabling the investigative committee to issue an interim report in a relatively short time.

The report cites a Seibu Lions official in charge of scouting as saying, "I feel that other clubs are doing similar things; therefore, we cannot afford to fall behind them." This is a grave statement that casts a dark cloud over Japan's professional and amateur baseball. A pro baseball scout is reported to have said that some people in amateur baseball teams demanded cash gifts. It goes without saying that those who made the payments are to blame. But those who received the payments should be blamed, too, for violating the Japan Students Baseball Association's charter, which forbids providing or receiving cash gifts.

The Seibu Lions is also found to have been engaged in other improper conduct, including payment of a combined 1.19 billion yen to 15 new players as contract money in excess of the maximum allowable amount. The least that a baseball club should do in this case is make public in detail all improper payments. The national organizations for amateur high school and university baseball should punish recipients of the payments.