Tony DeMarco

It has been almost a year since Japan beat Cuba before a packed Petco Park and an international television audience to win the inaugural World Baseball Classic.

And if it hasn’t sunk in yet, maybe five more players, including superstar right-hander Daisuke Matsuzaka, crossing over the Pacific Ocean will drive home the fact: There’s no stopping Major League Baseball’s latest talent pipeline, and that is causing ripples in two parts of the baseball globe.

For 30 years, Masanori Murakami was the one and only. A left-handed reliever, he debuted with the San Francisco Giants in 1964 as a 20-year-old and pitched in 54 games over two seasons. The biggest impact of his short big-league stay may have been in his lone start, which came on Masanori Murakami Day in Candlestick Park — Aug. 15, 1965 — when his status as the game’s only Japanese-born player was celebrated.

A generation later, Hideo Nomo’s impact was far more notable. Nomo — whirling-dervish windup, stone face and all — took the National League by storm in 1995, winning the Rookie of the Year Award and striking out 236, and then settled into a durable, workmanlike 11-year career that included 123 victories.

And in the dozen years since Nomo’s arrival, the numbers flowing from Japan in particular and the Pacific Rim in general continue to increase. Including this year’s newcomers, the number is 30 and counting just from Japan.

The results have been mixed — everything from Mac Suzuki to Ichiro Suzuki, Kaz Matsui to Hideki Matsui, Hideki Irabu to Matsuzaka, almost unanimously regarded as the best Japanese pitcher to make the move.

But picking Japanese major leaguers to make the cultural, language and on-field adjustments it takes to play here can be an easier call than forecasting futures for the more-conventional draftees from high school and college, and Latin American signees. So nearly every organization in the game is making a concerted scouting push in Asia.

Recent rule changes also have eased the transition process for Japanese big-leaguers. Murakami arrived on an exchange program between the Giants and Nankei Hawks. But after his initial success in September of 1964, the Hawks wanted Murakami back. A dispute was settled with the compromise of him pitching one more year for the Giants, and then he returned home, where he had a long career.

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Japanese players don’t attain free agency until after 10 years, but that stipulation has been sidestepped by the creation of a posting system that allows teams to sell the rights of a player to an American major-league team at any point in a player’s career.

And the process is being used more and more, due to the combination of  players’ desires to play in the U.S., Japanese ownerships realizing the revenue stream a posted player can generate — an eye-popping $51 million, in Matsuzaka’s case — and in a grander sense, a nation’s desire to see its best play in the best league in the world (although the difference is narrowing).

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There is no better explanation of the latter than its media coverage of those who make the jump — the American equivalent of paparazzi in terms of numbers and fervor. In their case, there is cheering in the press box. And the attention is not just for the superstars.

After Kazuo Matsui’s Mets experiment ended in failure, he spent two months at Triple-A Colorado Springs last summer following his acquisition by the Rockies, and two Japanese writers never left his trail.

In the Pirates camp this spring, there is enough of a Japanese press core following Masumi Kawata, a fading 39-year-old former star, that he holds daily press conferences in a large tent structure that has been coined ‘Hotel Nico’, after his nickname.

There is a growing fear that the Nippon Professional League — Japan’s MLB — eventually will lose its luster, and become more of a feeding ground for the American major leagues. But if that time ever comes, it is a long way off; the game is too ingrained in the culture at this point.

And Japan is only part of the Asian picture. The Korean team also made an impressive run in the World Baseball Classic, reaching the semifinals in Petco Park, and a pipeline has begun for their talent playing in Japan’s major leagues. Chinese Taipei has produced Chein-Ming Wang and a handful of others.

And then there is China, where Jim Lefebvre and Bruce Hurst are part of the Chinese National Team as manager and pitching coach, and Major League Baseball is spreading its tentacles in growing the game from the ground up. In a generation or so, a nation of 1.3 billion-and-growing could produce a Yao Ming on the diamond.

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