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The story
A thread on 5ch’s “Nandemo Jikkyo G” board asking why Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks star Yuki Yanagita never took a shot at Major League Baseball drew a lot of traction.
Opinions flew back and forth — some said the team simply never approved a posting and that Yanagita himself was fully willing to move, others argued he missed his window and gave up on the idea himself — and the discussion expanded into comparisons of his ability with other teams’ star hitters like Seiya Suzuki and Teruaki Sato.
What people said
He himself was totally ready to go.
Then his prime passed and he gave up on it himself.
He clearly had no intention of going once he signed that 7-year contract.
So he had no ambition, huh?
He looked pretty bitter about it.
It's a contract — there's no such thing as being "boxed in."
What, did they take his family hostage or something?
The year he'd have qualified for international free agency, he got hurt, was out long-term, and gave that tearful press conference.
That's when he gave up on the majors.
SoftBank's the kind of team that steals people's dreams.
But if it weren't for "the Toilet" (a 5ch nickname for SoftBank), he probably wouldn't have grown into a player who could put up numbers like that.
Also he's surprisingly a low-launch-angle guy, so once pitchers exploited that, he'd have ended up serving up homers instead of hitting them.
Yeah, I think he was easily better than that tier.
He definitely would've done well though.
On top of being a college guy, he didn't even lock down a starting job smoothly either.
That contract was just forced on him by the team.
He himself wanted to go.
What do you mean, "forced into" signing a contract?
Kondo, on the other hand, flat-out ran away.
As for Kondo, he's become the best hitter around since moving to SoftBank.
Back in his Nippon-Ham days he lacked power — he barely ever even cleared a qualified .900 OPS — so he never had a real shot at going overseas anyway.
And the Central League's a low level to begin with.
He's not that different from Yoshida, so no way.
Compare them at the same age and Suzuki's clearly better.
The Central League's low-level though.
Can you still say that after watching Yoshida?
The Central League's level was so low it was funny.
Yeah, the Central League's level is way too low.
Yoshida and Yanagita aren't in the same category lol
We're talking about the Pacific League here?
Background and Key Points
Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks operate under Nippon Professional Baseball’s posting system, which lets a team-controlled player negotiate with MLB clubs only once his team consents — nine years of NPB service otherwise grants unrestricted international free agency. Yanagita, a 2011 college draftee who debuted in 2012, would have hit that nine-year mark around 2020-2021, precisely when he suffered the long-term knee injury that produced his tearful press conference. SoftBank, unlike Orix with Yoshinobu Yamamoto or the Fighters with Shohei Ohtani, has a reputation on 5ch as an organization that rarely posts its stars, and Yanagita signed a lucrative long-term deal with the club rather than pushing for a transfer.
The thread’s actual fault line isn’t whether Yanagita was good enough — most posters agree he was, several ranking him above Seiya Suzuki — but whether his MLB dream died by team veto or by his own choice. One camp insists SoftBank blocked a posting he wanted; another counters that a “forced” seven-year contract isn’t forced at all, since he could have simply not signed it, and that his real turning point was the injury-hit free-agent year, not front-office obstruction.
What the thread glosses over is the mechanics of NPB free agency itself: international FA eligibility (nine years) is separate from domestic FA (typically eight), and a player can be a de facto MLB candidate without ever needing team “permission” once he reaches it — posting is only relevant before that threshold. Readers unfamiliar with NPB may also not realize the Central-versus-Pacific League rivalry embedded in the later replies, where “the Central League is low-level” is a long-running Pacific League fan trope, not a neutral scouting assessment, coloring the Suzuki/Yoshida/Sato comparisons far more than any real stat.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “Why did SoftBank Hawks’ Yanagita run away from the majors?”.
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