Will Yu Darvish cross the Pacific to pitch?

Yu Darvish, in the words of a confidant, “wants to discount MLB jerseys change baseball in Japan.” In some senses, he already has. The 6-foot-5 right-hander doesn’t look like a normal player, with his rock-star haircut and emotional mound presence. He doesn’t throw like one, either, with an array of power pitches that contrast with the slop that passes for stuff in Nippon Professional Baseball.

Real change, of course, the sort that Darvish supposedly craves, necessitates more than a talented stylist or a blessed arm can affect. It is the sort of thing achieved through years of advocacy and fighting, through the sort of single-minded fortitude a generation of ballplayers before him forged.

In the sometimes-contentious, often-litigious relationship between Major League Baseball and NPB, professional cordiality remains a staple. Fifteen years ago, however, when attorney Jean Afterman was fighting for Hideki Irabu’s professional freedom, she sent a correspondence to the San Diego Padres jersey and Chiba Lotte Marines, the teams conspiring to control the pitcher’s career, and the last line of the letter skipped the usual pleasantries.

“You will have nothing,” she wrote.

Afterman was certain that she and agent Don Nomura, her partner in liberating Japanese players from the usurious contracts that tether them to their teams, would prevail in preventing Irabu’s team in Japan, Chiba Lotte, from sending him to its trading partner of choice, San Diego. And if that meant him sitting out until he reached free agency, Afterman promised that both teams would end up empty-handed.

Intimidation worked. Irabu went to the team he preferred, the cheap New York Yankees jersey . And the episode so peeved the Japanese baseball establishment that it insisted on a measure to ensure proper compensation were future stars to ply their trade in MLB.

So began the posting system, a solution that in its 13 years has grown evermore despised by major league teams and Japanese players. The only winners are NPB teams, who reap every dollar from the blind auction that entails the first part of the system. The team from MLB that bids the most has 30 days to negotiate with the player from Japan on a contract certain to undervalue what the market would bear because so much money already has gone to the Japanese team via posting. Until last year, every player who had posted and been bid on came to MLB. Oakland’s offer came in too low for pitcher Hisashi Iwakuma, and rather than accept it, he blamed the $19.1 million posting fee the Athletics paid and hightailed back to Japan. The Rakuten Eagles returned cheap MLB jerseys the money to Oakland.