By signing with A’s, a two-way prospect charts a rare path out of Japan

Eighteen-year-old Shotaro Morii is the most significant Japanese prospect ever to dive into Major League Baseball-affiliated play without first playing in the renowned Nippon Professional Baseball league. (Reddit via r/baseball)

By Chad Jennings and Cody Stavenhagen / The Athletic

Decades of precedent began to crumble with an Instagram post.

The post, which caught the eye of scouts for the Athletics, included video of a nimble teenager vacuuming up ground balls on a dirt field in Japan. The kid pitched from the stretch and fired a fastball at 92 mph. He planted his feet in the left side of the batter’s box and unleashed a smooth but violent swing.

His name: Shotaro Morii. The post advertised his aspirations of playing college baseball in the United States. The A’s, hopeful that Morii would consider the nearly unprecedented jump to an MLB organization instead, sent Toshiyuki Tomizuka, a Japanese area scout, to see Morii in person.

“This guy is bona fide,” Tomizuka reported back. “He’s a lot like the guys in the past that wanted to get out but couldn’t get out.”

Morii got out of Japan earlier this month, signing a minor league deal worth $1.5 million with the A’s that defies 30 years of cultural norms holding that Japanese players should first compete in the renowned Nippon Professional Baseball league, or NPB, before coming to Major League Baseball.

The 18-year-old Morii is the most significant Japanese prospect ever to dive into MLB-affiliated play without first playing in NPB.

Twenty years ago, a teenage Yu Darvish had the raw talent to sign directly with an MLB team, but he ultimately spent seven seasons in NPB before signing with the Texas Rangers. In 2012, Shohei Ohtani considered a direct path to MLB, but he, too, entered the NPB draft and played five seasons before beginning his star-studded MLB career. But Morii expressed clear interest in signing with an MLB club and desired to enter the professional ranks as quickly as possible — even if it meant defying 30 years of cultural norms.

“I did not want to regret my decision when I think about my whole life and whole career,” Morii said through Tomizuka shortly after the signing was official.

Morii is a two-way player who attended a small school in Japan and played most of his teenage career away from the tutelage of NPB academies, emerging late in his high school career as a projected first-round pick had he entered the NPB draft. His bonus, which comes out of the A’s 2025 international pool, is believed to be the largest ever for a Japanese player who did not play in NPB.

“I’m sure we’ve seen 100, if not 1,000, of those kinds of leads with a video of a player,” said Adam Hislop, the Athletics’ Pacific Rim scouting coordinator. “But this one turned out to be really good.”

Steve Sharpe, the Athletics’ scouting director, believes it’s becoming more common for amateur Japanese players to consider bypassing NPB, though few have, as of yet, taken that path.

“They just never had the opportunity,” Sharpe said. “So Shotaro could really be opening up a door here.”

Since Hideo Nomo in the 1990s, nearly all Japanese baseball stars became NPB greats before coming to MLB. There was never a written rule forcing Japanese standouts to play in NPB first, but there was an expectation understood both domestically and abroad. A few Japanese players went straight to MLB organizations after high school, but they typically were lesser prospects who, for one reason or another, were passed over by Japan’s best teams.

“It was viewed almost as something you do when your options are exhausted in Japan,” Japanese baseball writer Yuri Karasawa said.

The hard-throwing, 22-year-old Junichi Tazawa was one of the first to challenge the norm. Undrafted out of high school, Tazawa was playing in a second-tier Japanese league when his prospect status soared in 2008. He would have been eligible again for the NPB draft, but Tazawa made clear his preference to sign immediately with a major league team. No Japanese team drafted him, but opinions varied — even among MLB officials — about whether it was culturally acceptable for an MLB team to sign him without that NPB rite of passage.

“There has been an understanding,” New York Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said in 2008. “There’s been a reason that Japanese amateurs haven’t been signed in the past, so we consider him hands off.”

Tazawa ultimately signed with the Boston Red Sox and spent nine seasons in MLB. After his departure, the NPB typically prevented any Japanese amateur who skipped the NPB draft to play overseas from playing in NPB for at least two years upon returning to Japan.

That informal rule was scrapped under pressure from the Japan Fair Trade Commission in 2020, but the precedent remained.

The landscape, though, is changing.

Last February, Japanese standout Rintaro Sasaki skipped the NPB draft and signed a letter of intent to play college baseball at Stanford. Sasaki attended the same high school as Ohtani — Sasaki’s father is the school’s longtime coach — and hit a Japanese-record 140 home runs as a prep superstar. He almost certainly would have been a top pick in the NPB draft and, if he had signed, he would have been under NPB control for nine years.

Now on the Stanford roster, Sasaki will be eligible for the MLB draft in 2026, having never played a professional game in his home country.

For a player drafted and signed into NPB to leave before playing nine years in the league, he must first be posted — with his team’s consent — and even then, the player signs with a major league organization only if his Japanese team is paid a fee.

In the past year, the Japanese Professional Baseball Players Association has prepared a legal fight to push for a quicker route to unrestricted free agency. Roki Sasaki, the biggest NPB star coming to MLB this offseason, was posted after only five seasons, a shorter Japanese tenure than usual.

It was yet another sign that the norms are changing. Asked whether he encountered pushback for his decision, Morii said simply: “No, there was not.”

“With young fans, they’re very open to decisions like this,” Karasawa said. “In fact, I think they’re very supportive. You see a lot of young people saying on Twitter, ‘This is the kid’s dream, so we should all support him.’”

The frustration, he said, was “more from the NPB teams’ perspective and the older generation thinking, ‘You’re supposed to start your career here in NPB and take this path that everyone else has done.’”

MLB teams have noticed the shift. Their scouts in Japan still focus on the professional ranks, but they now scout Japanese amateurs as well — but it’s much more difficult to find and sign those players.

In Latin America, MLB scouts largely are given free rein. They can set up simulated games, watch showcases and visit local leagues. In Japan, Sharpe said, “it’s tough to see a practice.”