Good morning and welcome to episode 350 of Effectively Filed, the daily podcast from

Baseball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindbergh, joined as always by Sam Miller. And today we have a guest.

He is Jason Cosgrey from the Japan Times and is joining us to talk about the changes to the

posting system. And he is in a cafe in Tokyo. What are you being served anything at the moment?

I've got a nice soy latte and a cookie. Exotic.

By the way, how did you end up as a baseball writer for the Japan Times,

as you are originally from Detroit?

Yeah, I was in school and then I did the internship at the Birmingham News in Alabama.

And while I was doing my internship, also I worked for the Birmingham Bay and the board

with the Birmingham Bay and the PR department for a while. So that like one summer in 2005 and then

got a job out of paper, got a job at the Marrietta Daily Journal, saw a job after the Japan Times

applied knowing that there was no way I was going to get it and they called me so I kind of just

got on the plane. And did you have any, I mean, had you been to Japan before? Did you speak Japanese?

Did you have any preparation for that job?

Um, I had never been to Japan before. I had never known anyone who had been to Japan before.

I took like a class in college. That was about it. Like I thought, you know, took a class in college.

And I know this, I've got this little, this part of the language down and then I got off the

plane and nothing makes sense at all. So yeah, it was an experience. Wow. I thought I was adventurous

when I went to a college that I had not visited before. This is more adventurous.

Okay, so as we, as we enjoy the atmosphere of the Tokyo Cafe, there was an agreement that was

ratified on Monday between basically baseball and on professional baseball that has

pretty significantly revamped the posting system that we've all become familiar with.

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