Japanese right-hander Roki Sasaki will reportedly be posted during next week’s MLB Winter Meetings, according to ESPN’s Jeff Passan.
Once posted, this will open a 45-day window, expected to begin Tuesday, during which MLB teams can persuade the 23-year-old talent to sign for them when the International Amateur Signing Period opens on January 15.
Because Sasaki is under 23, he is not eligible for the kind of deal that fellow countryman Yoshinobu Yamamoto signed last year. Instead, he limits himself to the international bonus pools, which are typically used to sign Latin American amateurs.
Many teams have already cleared those pools with purchases from earlier this year. The Tampa Bay Rays and Texas Rangers have literally zero dollars left through 2024, while the San Diego Padres, who are seen as leading contenders for Sasaki, have a total of $2,200. The Los Angeles Dodgers are favored to land Sasaki and have the most remaining money through 2024 at $2.5 million, but Sasaki more than doubles his earning power by waiting a few weeks.
The international bonus pools will reset when the new signing period begins in 2025, with each team having between $5 million and $8 million. Sasaki will get more money for waiting, and that’s important for the Marines because the post fee they get is 20% of his signing bonus.
Who is Roki Sasaki?
Sasaki has been a known commodity since his amateur days, when he threw a 100 mph fastball, breaking Shohei Ohtani’s record for the hardest fastball ever thrown by a Japanese high school student. Despite interest from high school MLB teams, Sasaki opted to play in NPB for the Chiba Lotte Marines, who drafted him first overall in 2019.
The highly touted pitcher rested his young arm for the 2020 season at the insistence of his team. In 2021, he broke out as one of the best pitchers in Japan’s top flight. The following season, Sasaki cemented 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 against Mexico, dominating 3 2/3 innings before a pair of soft hits and a three-run explosion tarnished his line.
Back in NPB, Sasaki continued his stellar performances in 2023 and 2024, but struggled to stay healthy, throwing a combined 202 innings in the two seasons.
Although Sasaki logged 111 innings last season and pitched a 2.35 ERA, his performance was inevitably low. Most 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 problem, a condition that almost certainly played a role in his reduced velocity. But Sasaki was nails when it mattered, throwing eight shutout frames in his final outing of the year, a masterful nine strikeout that was on display in the playoffs.
Sasaki throws three pitches: a four-seam fastball, a splitter and a slider. He always threw a curveball, but dropped the offer in recent seasons.
In 2024, Sasaki threw the heater a little less than half the time, the splitter about 28% and the slider 25%. That represented by far the highest slider usage of his NPB career. During his dominant 2022, Sasaki was a fastball/splitter about 90% of the time. Once it comes to the United States, the slider threatens to become an even more important weapon against right-handed hitters. Yet there are very few major league pitchers who throw a splitter that often.
