The imminent arrival of Roki Sasaki to the MLB should be cause for complete and total celebration. The 23-year-old Japanese phenom will immediately become one of the essential players in the game. Whichever team hires him will have a potential front-line starter for the next six seasons. And Sasaki, the most talented young pitcher we’ve ever seen, will be able to test his skills at the highest level.
Unfortunately, there is also a much darker side to the story. And it has very little to do with Sasaki himself.
Sasaki, as a non-U.S., non-Canadian player under the age of 25, will enter American baseball as part of international amateur free agency. The international market is an intricate and often unpleasant world in which the overwhelming majority of the actors involved are Latin American teenagers. It is also an incredibly fragile ecosystem, built on handshake agreements and verbal promises. That means Sasaki’s entry into the market has the potential to upend much of the 2025 international signing class, leaving a tornado of chaos in its wake.
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There remains a small chance that Sasaki will sign within the 2024 international window, which ends on December 15, which would greatly simplify this process, but commissioner Rob Manfred told reporters on Wednesday that he expects Sasaki to sign in the new anus. This is because his Japanese team, the Chiba Lotte Marines, will receive more money by making him available in 2025.
But to understand how Sasaki’s arrival in MLB could disrupt the international amateur market, it’s vital to first understand how the system works.
Each year, the 30 MLB teams have a set amount of money they can spend on signing bonuses for international amateur players, known colloquially as a “common bonus.” The overwhelming majority of those players are Latin American teenagers, but every once in a while, a player like Sasaki or Shohei Ohtani (an established pro from a foreign league who happens to be under 25 years old) steps up and surprises the team. system.
The size of each team’s annual budget depends on (1) the size of the club’s market and (2) whether the club signed a high-priced free agent who received a qualifying offer the previous year. For the upcoming 2025 window, the Dodgers and Giants have the smallest bonus pool size of $5,146,200, while an octet of teams share the largest sum of $7,555,500.
But while teams can’t officially sign players in the 2025 class until Jan. 15, most fans have had verbal agreements for years, even though those “early agreements” are technically against the rules. In other words, many MLB teams have already allocated their bonus budgets for the upcoming window.
Which makes Roki Sasaki (an unexpected and worthwhile cost for the team that hires him) an agent of chaos.
Sasaki’s decision to come to MLB now and not two years from now, when he would be a traditional free agent available to the highest bidder, suggests that maximizing his earnings is far from his top priority. The 23-year-old right-hander will give up at least $100 million. However, Sasaki isn’t signing for free, and there’s certainly a chance that the difference between $2.5 million and $5 million will matter in the end.
As a result, and because all agreements for the 2025 amateur window are, for now, only verbal, a team interested in Sasaki is incentivized to renege on or rework any major deals currently in place to free up bonus money for the Japanese flamethrower.
Here is a theoretical example. One of the best players in his class is a Dominican shortstop named Elián Peña, who has a verbal agreement with the New York Mets for a bonus of more than $4 million. If the Mets believe they have a strong chance of landing Sasaki and believe that a few extra million in bonus money could make a difference, they could go to Pena’s representation and try to lower his agreed-upon bonus number.
Pena’s representatives, who have little influence under the current system, could do one of two things: accept a reworked deal from the Mets or reopen negotiations with other teams. But while option number 2 might recover more money, that money might not be available anywhere. Remember, most teams have already allocated most of their budget.
This is where things, according to sources familiar with the international market, could become even more complicated and chaotic.
Teams not seriously involved in Sasaki’s draft, knowing that talented amateurs could re-enter the market at the last minute, could try to renegotiate their own verbal agreements to target discarded players. That could create a disastrous domino effect in which clubs and players try to rework deals at the last minute in a tumultuous, frantic game of musical chairs, all because Sasaki, a pitcher with nearly 400 career innings pitched in the second-best league of the world. , somehow falls into the same category as a 16-year-old who has not yet received his salary.
Others were skeptical that Sasaki’s arrival would create such a massive domino effect, citing the importance of maintaining relationships with the coaches and agents who work with most of Latin America’s top amateurs. A team backing out of a deal at the last minute could create lasting discord with one or more of the region’s top power brokers.
There’s also a chance that Sasaki, having left so much money on the table, won’t worry too much about his final bonus amount and instead prioritizes the team he’s most comfortable with.
Sources indicated that the order of operations around Sasaki and any reduction in bonuses remain up in the air. It’s unclear whether teams will preemptively renegotiate deals before Jan. 15, the first day signings can be finalized, or wait until the fallout from Sasaki’s signing. But no matter the sequence, at least one unlucky fan will almost certainly end up with a minor bonus due to Sasaki’s strange tweak within the system.
The problem with the whole dynamic is that Sasaki and the fans seven years younger than him are grouped into the same structure. Sasaki will spend all of 2025 in the major leagues; his fellow 2025 signees likely won’t debut until 2030 at the earliest. Sasaki could receive Cy Young votes next year. Most international fans will spend 2025 in the Dominican Summer League, the lowest level of professional affiliated baseball.
The only other precedent here involves future three-time MVP Shohei Ohtani, who made the jump across the Pacific after the 2017 season. But Ohtani’s entry into the market didn’t create a whirlwind of chaos in Latin America because (1) his arrival was less of a surprise than Sasaki’s and (2) the signing deadline at the time was July, not January, meaning Ohtani showed up. in the middle of the fiscal year. Still, Ohtani’s involvement in the international amateur system, a system intended for players of an entirely different type, didn’t make much sense at the time.
And since then that problem has not been solved. In fact, it has gotten worse. One source called the system “a disaster.” Another called it “broken.”
Most teams are dealing with players as young as 12, although a player must be at least 16 on signing day. Some of the fans who will sign in the next window verbally agreed to deals as early as spring 2021, around the time Sasaki debuted in NPB. However, due to current international bonus rules, Sasaki’s contract will take money out of someone else’s pocket, which is absolutely not his fault.
It’s like comparing apples and motorcycles. Every team would rather have Sasaki, especially at such a low price, than any other player available in the 2025 class, and it’s not even remotely close. Sasaski is the only proven product offered.
As one evaluator put it: “I’d rather sign Sasaki than wait six years to determine if (a player in the 2025 international class) is any good.”