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The story
Nippon Ham has reached agreement on a four-year, $40 million (roughly ¥6.3 billion) contract extension with infielder Franmil Reyes, a U.S. media source reported on November 1. Reyes was the team’s offensive anchor this season, batting .313 with 32 home runs to win the batting title. His salary now tops ¥1.5 billion a year, putting the deal among the largest in NPB history. On the 5ch “Geisoku Sokuho+” (entertainment/sports news) board, posters traded worries about his defense and baserunning and the risk of decline on a multi-year deal against arguments that the club’s deep pockets and Reyes’ production make the price fair, with the conversation spilling over into the posting system and the weak yen’s effect on contract costs.
Nippon Ham to Extend Reyes for 4 Years, ¥6.3 Billion — Staying Put on a “Historic” Mega Deal… Foreign Reporter Says
Nippon Ham has reached an agreement on a contract extension worth up to $40 million (roughly ¥6.3 billion) over four years with infielder Franmil Reyes, according to sources cited by reporter Mike Rodriguez — a former Spanish-language broadcaster for the Cubs’ local network, Marquee Sports Network, now working as an MLB insider — in a report filed November 1 (November 2 Japan time).
In his third season with the club, Reyes hit 32 home runs and won the batting title with a .313 average.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Can't run, can't field
Legs are a walking time bomb
Fine on a one-year deal, but on a multi-year contract he's gonna slack off hard
Other way around — they absolutely need posting money to fund stuff like this.
They've got to keep posting players aggressively to bring in revenue, and their team culture doesn't lean on veterans much anyway.
It's good that different teams have different styles.
Given US inflation and the weak yen, it's actually a reasonable price…
Even SoftBank wouldn't pay this much.
About a fifth of what Chris Tucker makes, lol
Reyes~ (riffing on a well-known J-pop ballad lyric, swapping in Reyes' name)
Without any hesitatiooon~ (continuing the song-lyric gag)
Even if he keeps up 30 HR/100 RBI for all four years, it's still overpriced.
Articles saying he'd likely stay with Nippon Ham were out early on.
Only this board (Geisoku) was saying the Giants, Tigers, or SoftBank would sign him.
A four-year deal? He'll probably only hold up for a year or two of it.
Pay the Japanese guys more too.
That's exactly why they all keep leaving for MLB.
He's basically an Obando. (a boom-or-bust former NPB import slugger)
Weak-yen hell.
They're the company that pulled that beef-fraud scandal. (Shauessen is a popular Nippon Ham sausage brand)
If the Tigers had given Satoteru a ¥1 billion salary,
he might've dropped his posting request… (Satoteru: nickname for Hanshin's Teruaki Sato)
No chance.
Maybe ¥1 billion would've worked two years ago,
but now he can easily get over ¥2 billion, and his heart's set on trying MLB anyway.
If so, wouldn't it make more sense to pay their first-round draft picks more instead of foreign players?
There's a cap on draft signing bonuses, so they can't pay more there.
Probably means more players holding out at contract renewal time though.
He actually did land on the injured list a few times this season.
Also, how can they even afford this?
Weren't they supposed to be one of the poorer teams?
They're basically a big-money club like SoftBank now.
And this is the same company that committed beef mislabeling
and defrauded the government, no less.
It's the posting-fee money from Ito.
Their business is worth over ¥30 billion.
They can easily afford it.
Even Ohtani broke down in his third year.
He is. For us, he's absolutely worth it.
He's got by far the best numbers and the most popularity of any foreign position player in Nippon Ham history.
Nippon Ham, the parent company behind the team, is the #1 meat distributor in Japan and ranks near the top globally too.
It's honestly hard to find a corner of Japan's meat and meat-processing industry that Nippon Ham isn't involved in.
If they're really paying this much, the Japanese players are gonna revolt.
Well, it'd be fun to watch that happen, lol
Comparing to the old days doesn't mean much — prices and currency values are totally different now.
The weak yen and MLB's rising minimum salary make it harder to land good imports these days,
and with NPB pitching having improved overall, there are fewer foreign hitters who can put up numbers like they used to.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
Unlike MLB, NPB doesn’t have massive broadcast-rights revenue, so team budgets depend heavily on the parent company’s business earnings. For Nippon Ham, the parent meat business is one of the largest in the country, and as posters noted in the thread, its business scale — reportedly over ¥30 billion — underpins contracts of this size. Transfer fees earned from posting players to MLB are also folded into team operating funds, and some point out that the club’s aggressive posting policy and its willingness to hand out big contracts are two sides of the same coin. The “beef mislabeling” scandal that came up in the thread was an actual incident involving the Nippon Ham Group in the early 2000s — not baseless mudslinging but a reference to real past events — though it’s easy for readers to conflate that history with how the team is run today. It’s also worth keeping in mind that when a salary is contracted in dollars, a weaker yen inflates the yen-denominated cost, which helps explain some of the reaction in the thread.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Geisoku Sokuho+) thread “[Baseball] Nippon Ham to Extend Reyes for 4 Years, ¥6.3 Billion — Staying on a “Historic” Mega Deal… Possibly the Biggest in NPB History.”
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