Two Ways About It

This week two heralded athletes will begin making their marks in U.S. sports: 7-foot center Wang Zhizhi, who will become the NBA's first Chinese player when he signs with the Mavericks, and Mariners outfielder Ichiro Suzuki, who on Monday became the first Japanese position player in the major leagues. Their paths to their U.S. clubs reflect two very different methods of allocating established foreign players.

Dallas picked Wang in the second round of the 1999 draft, but he joined the Mavs only after two years of protracted negotiations with his team, the Chinese Armyrun Bayi Rockets. Nevertheless, he was obtained through an essentially equitable system for distributing international talent. As with stars such as Toni Kukoc and Arvydas Sabonis before him, Wang was available to any team willing to risk a draft pick on him.

By contrast, major league baseball teams acquire elite foreign players through a bidding process that favors rich and powerful clubs. Suzuki, perhaps the most prized player in Japan, left the Orix BlueWave through so-called posting, a jerry-rigged arrangement between the majors and the Japanese Leagues that calls for big league clubs to submit sealed offers to the Japanese player's team for the right to negotiate with him. That all but guarantees that top talent from abroad will go to deep-pocketed organizations. Nintendo-backed Seattle won the right to negotiate with Suzuki by bidding $13.125 million. That figure, which didn't include Suzuki's salary, an additional $15 million to $18 million over three years, was only $2.7 million less than the Twins' payroll for 2000.

In baseball, pros and amateurs from outside Canada, Puerto Rico and the U.S. are unrestricted free agents, a status that gives the bargaining edge to foreign stars like Suzuki and the Yankees' Orlando Hernandez. That's fine for the athletes, but it exacerbates baseball's most nettlesome problem, competitive imbalance. Last winter owners suggested a partial fix, voting to modify the draft to include all amateur foreign players, a proposal the players' association vigorously opposes. But even that measure would not be enough; any meaningful change in the draft would have to cover all foreign players. Until every team has a real chance at players of the caliber of Suzuki and Hernandez, bidding free-for-alls will determine the distribution of foreign talent, a process that, while less complicated than the NBA's, is less fair, too.