NPB News: Arbitration Hearings
You can sense the tension in the room as players and general managers arrive for a bruising day of NPB arbitration hearings. Independent arbitrators will rule on each player's case before the end of the day. The media coverage is thick. With free agency still a few days away, there is not much else to cover, so they hang around hoping for a surprising windfall. On this day, baseball is not played among the fans, but rather by a handful of lawyers shut up in a series of sterile offices.