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“I could easily go on forever if you ask me to talk about Mr. Matsubara, but above all else, he was a passionate man, with a great sense of justice, and someone who just absolutely loved baseball.”

Atsuya Furuta, 5th President of JPBPA and NPB Hall of Famer

As the secretary general who oversaw one of the most turbulent periods in the history of the Japanese Professional Baseball Players Association (JPBPA), Toru Matsubara, who passed away on September 20, 2015 aged 58, was a giant who stood out amongst professional sports players association members in Japan, as well as an inspiration to all those blessed with the opportunity to get to know him.

Born on May 22, 1957, Toru joined the then Lotte Orions (known today as the Chiba Lotte Marines) professional baseball club in 1981, at age 24 and straight from university, as a staff member charged with looking after team affairs. Within two years, he was promoted to the position of first team manager, being the youngest ever promotion to such a position at that time, and spent four years diligently serving the everyday needs of the first team players. He then spent a further two years working with the reserve and youth teams, before leaving to join up with JPBPA in December 1988, where he would spend the rest of his 27 years fighting for the rights of professional baseball players in Japan, firstly as part of the Secretary Office, before assuming the role of secretary general from April 2000, a position he held until his passing.

Like any professional sport, the playing career of a Japanese professional baseball player can be extremely short and Toru, in line with all great union leaders, fought relentlessly for equality in bargaining between the clubs and the players, while educating the players themselves on those basic union principles and rights available to them, with the sole purpose of creating a better environment for the players to concentrate on their playing careers. One of Toru’s first tasks upon becoming secretary general was to convince the clubs that players have the natural right to be duly represented by competent agents working solely for the players’ interests during contractual negotiations with clubs, which led to the allowance of players’ agents from 2000 and was an extremely important step in working towards equality in bargaining between players and clubs. During the subsequent year, in 2001, he oversaw fundamental changes in tryout rules which introduced a single unified tryout applicable to all 12 clubs, in order to promote fair and equal tryout opportunities for released players.

Perhaps the most memorable achievement during Toru’s reign as secretary general, and an illustrious example of his leadership skills and negotiating prowess, was the events in 2004 which cumulated in the first, and as of today still the only, players’ strike action carried out in the history of Japanese professional sports, striking off all scheduled first team and reserve team games over the weekend of September 18 and 19. This momentous event was triggered by the arbitrary decision of the corporate owners of two franchises in the Kansai region, Orix BlueWave and Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes, to merge into a single team for economic reasons, and was widely considered as a precursor by the Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB), the organization running professional baseball in Japan and substantially controlled by the owners of the major clubs, to reorganize the existing structure of Japanese professional baseball from the current format of “Twelve Teams, Two Leagues” into a single league of 10 teams or less. Apart from being met with derision from fans, this intended reorganization was a real threat to the livelihood of players, especially those of the two merging clubs, as well as having little transparency on the justification behind the change and its overall effect on the professional game. Along with the then President of JPBPA, legendary catcher and NPB Hall of Famer Atsuya Furuta, and dedicated advisors including Takuya Yamazaki, general counsel to JPBPA and an alternate executive member of UNI World Athletes, as well as the backing and expectation of baseball fans across Japan, Toru literally worked around the clock against all odds, organizing the players across all 12 teams to vote in favor of a historical strike action and using it as a powerful platform to engage in tough, and often heated, dialogue with NPB and the club owners, which ultimately led to the expedited formation of a new franchise, the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, to fulfill the twelfth team criteria and maintain the status quo league structure. This single event can be considered a turning point and a game-changer in the history of professional baseball players union; no longer can the clubs act in such an arbitrary manner without prior consultation with the players and their representative, the JPBPA.

Another outstanding achievement of Toru which is somewhat less publicly highlighted, but equally if not more important for both players and the game itself, was his instrumental role in the thawing of relations between professional and amateur baseball. Ties between the professional and amateur game in Japan had been completely severed from 1961, as a result of an incident involving mid-season poaching of an amateur player by a professional club. For the best part of 40 years, the regulations laid down by the amateur game’s governing bodies, which only acted to protect the interests of the people running the amateur game and had zero regard for those actually playing the game themselves, effectively denied an important opportunity for professional players to remain in and around the sport after the end of their playing careers by entering the amateur game as either players or coaches, and also meant that amateur players, including students aspiring to become professionals, were denied the valuable guidance and experience of those very people that they should be learning from. Due in no small part to the tireless and persistent engagement of Toru with the various governing bodies – including the initiation of the “Beyond the Dream” project, which began as a simple message book from professional players to amateur players but which expanded into full-scale technical guidance symposiums held by professional players for high-school players with the full approval of the high-school baseball governing bodies – there has been a gradual relaxation in these restrictions surrounding interaction between the professional and amateur game, with professional players now allowed to enter the amateur game and vice versa under certain conditions, and further deregulation in rules governing former professional players becoming coaches at schools and universities, where the majority of them started out their baseball lives. Such thawing of relations, which had been in place for almost four decades, was remarkable even from the viewpoint of players and other parties involved in the game alike, and was a glowing testament to the personal and communicative skills of Toru in mediating between delicate, and sometime abrasive, egos.

In addition to the foregoing, Toru oversaw the implementation of many significant new programs as well as changes and amendments to existing programs, primarily to give players a platform to play and compete at the highest level without undue worry, but often also for the benefit of the game in general, which would then end up also benefiting the players. For example, in an area particularly dominated by domestic traditions and customs, Toru had the foresight to keenly embrace the international game, and led sustained discussions and negotiations with overseas governing bodies including the Major League Baseball (MLB) in order to achieve fairness and parity between participant nations in international tournaments, as well as fighting for better conditions being provided to those selected players under the enormous pressure of representing Japan and putting their immediate careers at risk to injuries from international games. To this end, he was active in exchanging ideas and information with overseas players associations, and had a close relationship with the Major League Baseball Players Association as well as being an executive member of UNI World Athletes, acting as the sole representative from Asia on the executive committee. He also pushed for and obtained concessions from NPB with regard to free agency regulations, with important amendments in 2008 giving players more opportunities to move on their own accord. Further, he was active in the promotion of the game in general, organizing players-and-fans events to keep baseball as a sport in touch with the public, as well as charity events contributing to the ongoing reconstruction of those areas adversely affected by the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Fukushima Nuclear Accident. On a more individual level, he oversaw important changes in pension and welfare for the benefit of the players, and recently was making progress in the area of providing assistance on player development and dual career advice.

Above all, Toru was a man of honor, integrity and honesty, and of drive and determination; someone who led from the front with his heart and soul right up until the very last minute, but who had complete trust in his staff and colleagues – who, in turn, revered him for who he was and what he stood for. He had a warmth and personality which reassured and inspired those around him in equal measure, and which transcended borders and positions in garnering admiration and respect both from those who sided with him and those who, more often than not, battled against him. More than anything else, he unconditionally loved baseball and those who play it. He treated every single player as if they were part of his family, and literally spent his life championing their causes.

He was, without doubt, a superb leader of men, and an even better leader of sports players associations, and his loss will be deeply felt both by JPBPA, by UNI World Athletes, and by the baseball community as a whole. It is my honor, both as a friend and a close comrade, to prepare this tribute to him on behalf of the executive committee of UNI World Athletes. Toru will be dearly missed by all of us, but his legacy will live on in JPBPA.

September 24, 2015

Takuya Yamazaki,

JPBPA General Counsel / UNI World Athletes Alternate Executive Member