Roki Sasaki, the Japanese right hander, will reportedly be posted during next week’s MLB Winter Meetings, according to ESPN’s Jeff Passan.
Once posted, that will open a 45-day window, which is expected to begin on Tuesday, for MLB teams to sway the 23-year-old talent to sign for them when the international amateur signing period opens Jan. 15.
Because Sasaki is younger than 23, he is not eligible for the kind of deal his countryman Yoshinobu Yamamoto signed for last year. Instead, he is limited to the international bonus pools, which are typically used to sign Latin American amateurs.
Many teams have already drained those pools with signings from earlier in the year. The Tampa Bay Rays and Texas Rangers have literally zero dollars left for 2024, while the San Diego Padres, who are seen as significant contenders for Sasaki, have a grand total of $2,200. The Los Angeles Dodgers are favored to land Sasaki and have the most remaining 2024 money, with $2.5 million, but Sasaki more than doubles his earning power by waiting a few weeks.
The international bonus pools reset when the new signing period starts in 2025, with every team having between $5 million and $8 million. Sasaki will get more money by waiting, and that matters to the Marines because the posting fee they get will be 20% of his signing bonus.
Sasaki has been a known commodity since his amateur days, when he threw a fastball 101 mph, breaking Shohei Ohtanis record for the hardest fastball ever thrown by a Japanese high schooler. Despite drawing interest from MLB teams out of high school, Sasaki opted to play in NPB for the Chiba Lotte Marines, who drafted him first overall in 2019.
The highly touted hurler sat out the 2020 season to rest his young arm, at his teams behest. In 2021, he broke out as one of the best pitchers in Japans top league. The next season, Sasaki solidified himself as a game-changing force, tossing a perfect game and, at one point, retiring 52 consecutive batters. Then he turned 21 years old. He pitched twice for Japan in the 2023 World Baseball Classic, starting the teams semifinal game against Mexico, in which he dominated for 3 2/3 innings before a few soft knocks and a three-run blast sullied his line.
Back in NPB, Sasaki continued his excellence in 2023 and 2024 but struggled to stay healthy, throwing 202 innings combined across the two seasons.
Although Sasaki logged 111 innings this past season and pitched to a 2.35 ERA, his stuff was unavoidably down. Most notably, his fastball clocked in at 1.9 mph slower on average than in 2023. He also missed a batch of starts due to an unspecified arm issue, an ailment that almost certainly played a role in his diminished velocity. But Sasaki was nails when it mattered, tossing eight shutout frames in his last outing of the year, a masterful, nine-strikeout showing in the playoffs.
Sasaki throws three pitches: a four-seam fastball, a splitter and a slider. He used to throw a curveball but abandoned the offering in recent seasons.
In 2024, Sasaki threw the heater just under half the time, the splitter around 28% and the slider 25%. That represented by far the highest slider usage of his NPB career. During his dominant 2022, Sasaki was fastball/splitter about 90% of the time. Once he comes stateside, the slider projects to become an even more important weapon against right-handed hitters. Still, there are precious few big-league pitchers who throw a splitter this frequently.