Japanese right-hander Roki Sasaki will reportedly appear during next week’s MLB Winter Meetings. according to ESPN’s Jeff Passan.
Once released, this will open a 45-day window, expected to begin Tuesday, for MLB teams to convince the 23-year-old talent to sign when the international amateur signing period opens on January 15.
Because Sasaki is under 23 years old, he is not eligible for the type of deal his compatriot, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, signed last year. Instead, it is limited to international bonus pools, which are typically used to sign Latin American fans.
Many teams have already exhausted those reserves with signings from the beginning of the year. The Tampa Bay Rays and the Texas Rangers We literally have zero dollars left. for 2024, while the San Diego Padres, who are seen as top contenders for Sasaki, have a total of $2,200. The Los Angeles Dodgers are the favorites to land Sasaki and have the most money left for 2024, at $2.5 million, but Sasaki more than doubles his earning power by waiting a few weeks.
International bonus pools reset when the new signing period begins in 2025, with each team has between $5 million and $8 million. Sasaki will get more money if he waits, and that’s important for his team, the Chiba Lotte Marines, because the posting fee they will receive will be 20% of your signing bonus.
Who is Roki Sasaki?
Sasaki has been a household name since his amateur days, when he threw a fastball at 101 mph, breaking Shohei Ohtani’s record for the hardest fastball ever thrown by a Japanese high school student. Despite drawing interest from MLB teams out of high school, Sasaki opted to play in the NPB for the Chiba Lotte Marines, who drafted him first overall in 2019.
The highly touted pitcher missed the 2020 season to rest his young arm, at the urging of his team. In 2021, he stood out as one of the best pitchers in Japan’s top league. The following season, Sasaki solidified himself as a game-changing force, pitching 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 team’s semifinal game against Mexico, in which he dominated for 3 2/3 innings before some soft hits and a three-run explosion tainted his line.
Returning to the NPB, Sasaki continued his excellence in 2023 and 2024, but struggled to stay healthy, pitching a combined 202 innings over the two seasons.
Although Sasaki logged 111 innings last season and had a 2.35 ERA, his stuff was inevitably down. Notably, his fastball averaged 1.9 mph slower than it did in 2023. He also missed a number of starts due to an unspecified arm issue, an ailment that almost certainly played a role in his decline in velocity. But Sasaki was excellent when it mattered, throwing eight scoreless innings in his final outing of the year, a masterful nine-strikeout performance in the playoffs.
Sasaki throws three pitches: a four-seam fastball, a splitter and a slider. He used to throw a curveball but abandoned that offering in recent seasons.
In 2024, Sasaki turned on the heater just under half the time, the splitter about 28%, and the slider 25%. That represented by far the most usage of the slider in his NPB career. During his dominant 2022, Sasaki was a fastball/cutter about 90% of the time. Once he arrives in the United States, the slider projects to become an even more important weapon against right-handed hitters. Still, there are very few major league pitchers who throw a splitter that frequently.