Staring at the ticker running across the bottom of the TV screen can be rough for Dallas fans right now. I knew that as I sipped my beer and heard the thud of disappointment hit the bar to my left. I looked up, watched my friend from Allen stare at the words announcing Dak Prescott’s season-ending injury, then kept looking as the bottom line flipped to MLB news.
“Breaking: Star Japanese pitcher Roki Sasaki to be posted, will sign with MLB club for 2025.” I saw his gaze morph just a little, from resignation to idle curiosity.
“Would be pretty cool if the Rangers snagged this guy, huh?”
As another serious talent from Japan prepares to make the leap to Major League Baseball, I offered to get my friend up to speed. Thought it might be useful for you, too.
Who’s this Roki Sasaki?
Sasaki is a 23-year-old right-hander for the Chiba Lotte Marines in Japan’s NPB, probably the second-best baseball league in the world. The reports that he’s going to be “posted” are using industry lingo to say he’s going to leave Japan and sign with an MLB team this offseason.
That’s pretty big news, because there had been no guarantee he would come over this winter. And people have been waiting. He has been a phenom since his high school days in Japan: the biggest blip on the radar since Shohei Ohtani came to America. His nickname is “The Monster of the Reiwa Era,” a nod to the current emperor’s reign in the official Japanese calendar. It is, in essence, a badass way of saying he is viewed as a generational talent.
Sasaki went supernova in April 2022, when he threw a 19-strikeout perfect game, then threw eight more perfect innings in his next start before he was taken out to manage his workload.
So he’s a big deal. Is he even better than that Yamamoto guy?
Maybe. He could be.
Sasaki follows closely behind Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the right-hander who signed a 12-year, $325 million deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers last winter. But he’s viewed as more of a burgeoning raw talent where Yamamoto was a seasoned ace in Japan’s top league.
Having just turned 23, Sasaki only has four years under his belt as a professional, a total of 394 2/3 innings in NPB. His career ERA stands at 2.10. Yamamoto’s career ERA in NPB (across seven years and twice as many innings) was 1.82.
Sasaki works with a more limited—some might say more American—arsenal than most of the Japanese starting pitchers who have made waves in MLB. From a string bean frame that’s listed anywhere from 6-foot-2 through 6-foot-4 (there’s been some dispute), he whips out premium velocity, sitting in the upper 90s and touching 103 mph on his four-seam fastball. The star of the show, though, is his splitter.
That’s the deceptive, diving form of changeup that Kirby Yates and Nathan Eovaldi use so well. Long taboo in the States, the pitch is making a huge comeback, and some scouts believe Sasaki’s might already be the best in the world. He also dabbles with a slider, but MLB teams will probably consider altering his breaking ball usage.
The appeal is pretty primal: high-octane fastball, untouchable splitter. Pitchers with combos this good get front offices dreaming big. FanGraphs invoked Pirates rookie Paul Skenes, while noting Sasaki has poorer control. And The Athletic spoke to a source who uttered the magic words: “He reminds me of Jacob deGrom.”
Wow. Probably going to be really expensive, right?
So, about that. You remember the whole Shohei Ohtani sweepstakes? That he couldn’t sign a big-money free agent deal because he wanted to compete in MLB as early as possible? Sasaki is doing that. Because he didn’t wait until after his 25th birthday, as Yamamoto did, he will have to come over under MLB’s foreign amateur rules—the same process used to sign a teenager out of, say, the Dominican Republic.
The details get complicated, but every team is limited to a dollar amount per year in their international bonus pool. Even if he draws a team’s entire pool, Sasaki is probably going to sign for something like $9 million max, and then be on a minor-league deal, like a rookie taken in the MLB draft. Barring an extension, he’ll be under team control for six years of service, making the league minimum salary.
That means this won’t be a bidding war so much as a courtship, a subjective process like the one that drove the league into a frenzy over Ohtani.
So any team could afford Sasaki?
Yep. Even the Tampa Bay Rays.
All kidding aside, the Rays’ sterling reputation for player development is the sort of selling point that will pop up in anonymously sourced rumors, PowerPoints, and hype videos as Sasaki considers his options and the viewing public tries to read the tea leaves.
Sasaki is not a finished product. He will have to consider his development and, crucially, his health. Though he made headlines way back in high school for not taking on the heavy workloads common among many young pitchers in Japan, Sasaki has battled recent injuries that put a question mark on his durability.
His 129 1/3 innings in 2022 remain his career high, with an oblique injury limiting him to 91 frames in 2023, and a vague arm ailment, which The Athletic has reported was “shoulder fatigue” holding him to 111 innings in 2024, with somewhat compromised stuff.
Because he will cost almost nothing, teams are going to be all in, but Sasaki has to be considered a long-term investment. That’s just a fact of modern life for elite pitchers.
What about the Rangers? Do they look like contenders to sign him?
They have to be at least mentioned. Through their enduring connection to Yu Darvish, a hero to many of this generation’s Japanese hurlers, the Rangers can be sure they’re at least on Sasaki’s radar. They were one of seven finalists when Ohtani went through the process ahead of 2018, and one of only two not on the West Coast.
The truth is no one knows what Sasaki wants in an MLB club. No one who’s telling, anyway. He is represented by Joel Wolfe, agent to Darvish and Yamamoto, as well as more recent Japanese success story Kodai Senga of the New York Mets.
Speculation abounds that the Dodgers will add Sasaki to their rotation alongside Yamamoto and Ohtani as he returns to the mound. Or that Sasaki will join Darvish and former Rangers executive A.J. Preller in San Diego. But it’s just that: speculation. Chris Young, Texas’ president of baseball operations, has proven himself especially capable of relating to ambitious fellow pitchers, and he is one of the many, many baseball executives who made a trip to Japan to scout Sasaki.
When is Sasaki going to make a decision?
Remember the complicated bonus pool thing? It affects this, too. The 2024 international signing period ends Dec. 15, and the 2025 period—with reset pools—begins Jan. 15. If Sasaki and his Japanese club want to maximize their (still relatively minimal) payouts, they will wait until early December to start the clock on the 45-day negotiation period that comes with the posting process. That way, he can have access to the more flexible pots of money earmarked for 2025.
Long story short: don’t expect an answer before Christmas. Whenever Sasaki makes a decision, I can guarantee it’ll make the scroll in all caps again. Like Ohtani and Yamamoto, this kid is going to make a splash.
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