Yesterday, Trevor Bauer tweeted something.
This wasn’t especially notable. The tweeting of things by Bauer happens a lot. The desire to make a reality show of his own free agency is not surprising. But one thing in the tweet was notable:
I’ll consider offers from any MLB or NPB team
-Trevor Bauer, October 28th 2020
NPB.
As you may have heard, Major League Baseball is in a bit of a cash crunch right now. Or at least, the owners are presenting that narrative. A shortened season with empty ballparks has the greater baseball ecosystem bracing for a stingy free agency. Which is bad news for free agents, like Bauer.
The NPB—Japan’s professional baseball league—is likely dealing with a cash shortage of its own, though having had some level of attendance in 2020, and having a much more contained pandemic than the United States (Japan has fewer than three percent as many confirmed coronavirus deaths per capita as the United States), that shortage as well as the fear of decreased revenue in 2021 are both likely lower than those of the MLB, most practically in relative terms. In other words, business is more as usual for the NPB than it is for the MLB.
Now, the NPB doesn’t pay as much as the MLB. The highest-paid player in 2019 made fewer than seven million U.S. Dollars, compared to nearly forty million USD for the highest-paid player in the MLB. Still, with Bauer attempting to build his own Bauer-centric media enterprise, a year in Japan could open up a new market for his personal brand—a market in which baseball is more popular than it is in the United States, with the caveat that Japan’s population is less than forty percent that of the U.S.
We’ve seen isolated situations in past free agencies in which players took short-term deals in a buyer’s market, betting on themselves while waiting for fairer weather. A move to the NPB would be a risky bet on oneself. But it may not be as outlandish as it initially appears. Don’t rule it out.
