Roki Sasaki is joining the Los Angeles Dodgers!
After the Chiba Lotte Mariners of Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball announced they planned to post their 23-year-old star pitcher in November, he immediately became the No. 2 free agent in my offseason rankings (behind only Juan Soto) with almost every team in baseball hoping to land him. One of the most notable pitchers on the planet since he was a teenager, Sasaki has dominated in Japan’s best league — and on the big stage of the World Baseball Classic — since 2021 and now he is headed to Los Angeles.
Just how good is Sasaki and why was he so coveted as a free agent? Let’s dig in as a budding ace joins the World Series champs.
How good is Sasaki?
He’s really, really good — and he isn’t even a finished product. Sasaki became famous for throwing 101 mph in high school and then breaking the Japan NPB record with 19 strikeouts in a perfect game when he was 20.
From a stuff perspective, Sasaki ranks near the top of the scale. In the 2023 NPB regular season, his fastball averaged 99 mph with above-average ride/lift and run/tail. His best off-speed pitch is a devastating splitter that is one of the best in the world. Because his splitter doesn’t have the heavy arm-side run of most, he can use it effectively against both right- and left-handed hitters. Sasaki’s third-best pitch is his slider, a plus offering in 2023 that he used almost exclusively against right-handed hitters. He also probably has room to add a new pitch or two to his three existing offerings, be it a splinker like Paul Skenes picked up in the minors or something softer like a curveball for early in a count — or maybe both.
That’s three plus to plus-plus pitches, and Sasaki’s walk rate suggests above-average control (though his command is a bit behind that). But one important note: Those numbers were all from 2023. Sasaki’s stuff was down this year (2 mph of fastball velocity and less movement, roughly 4 mph of slider velocity) and it’s not totally clear why. He sat out a couple months because of an unspecified pitching arm injury, so natural speculation among international scouts is that he might have been limited by whatever the issue was. Given Sasaki’s heavy workload in high school and top-of-the-scale velocity, you can imagine why MLB teams would like some clarity on this situation.
It could also be that Sasaki was tweaking his delivery/release to get more sweep on his slider (he did end up cutting his fastball a bit more), or it could be because he was battling some minor discomfort and overcompensating mechanically, and he might just need a full offseason to get right and some coaching next spring on how to dial things back to return to that top form. If that’s the case, he would once again be one of the best pitchers on the planet — and he just turned 23 earlier this month. That would put him head-to-head with Skenes as the best young pitcher in MLB and among the best young arms in recent memory.
Sasaki will be on my top 100 prospects list, though, both because he’s signed as part of the international bonus pools, but he’s also still a prospect who needs development the same way Skenes did when he was in the upper minors and learned a new knockout pitch.
What’s his contract situation?
Beyond his ability, Sasaki’s contract made him even more attractive to MLB suitors since the terms were affordable for just about every team in the majors — with at least 20 reaching out to express interest after he posted, according to Sasaki’s agent Joel Wolfe.
According to NPB posting rules, any player who comes to MLB before he turns 25 is limited to a minor league deal with a signing bonus coming from a team’s remaining international bonus pool (capped at just over $7.5 million). Shohei Ohtani went through a similar process in the 2017-18 offseason and signed for $2.315 million with the Angels in December 2017.
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If he waited until he turned 25 (for Sasaki, that would have been after the 2026 season), he would have become eligible for a major league free agent contract like the 12-year, $325 million deal Yoshinobu Yamamoto got from the Los Angeles Dodgers last winter.
From the outside it might have seemed like an easy decision to wait two seasons and get a Yamamoto-sized deal, but there are reasons that arriving in the majors sooner could be appealing: the possibility for substantial endorsement earnings and the hope of getting an Ohtani-esque payday by hitting free agency at a younger age in seven years.
Sasaki timed his posting for when the 2025 international signing period began on Jan. 15 and team bonus pools reset for the new year. The totals for this round of pools started at $7,555,500 and ended at $5,146,200. Every team has verbal deals of varying bonus sizes in place with international prospects for the next period, but Sasaki is such a singular talent that the expectation was any interested team would break many, or even all, of their verbal deals to give Sasaki as much of their pool as possible. This would come at a cost: angering the trainer/agents of those players they have deals in place with and even the possibility of drawing lawsuits to that end, but that would be the price of getting a $200-plus million-dollar value in signing Sasaki for the next six seasons.
The timing of his posting also affects his Japanese club. Yamamoto’s NPB team Orix received a $50.6 million posting fee from the Dodgers, a total derived from the $325 million contract figure. Sasaki’s NPB club Chiba Lotte would get a 25% fee from the MLB team that signs him this offseason, which would increase if he waits until January to sign for the larger deal (it still couldn’t be more than $1,888,875).
So why would Chiba Lotte post him? We don’t know for sure in this instance, but it is somewhat common for players to have handshake deals with their NPB club about when they will be allowed to be posted. That kind of arrangement is even more common with top high school prospects who had leverage when they signed their first pro contract. Sasaki certainly had that, as the most celebrated Japanese high school prospect in a long time. It’s unknown if Sasaki had a handshake deal with Chiba Lotte, but we do know that he also asked to be posted last year (the team declined his request).
Now after months of buildup, Sasak is joining the Dodgers — who already have arguable the best roster in baseball — at a fraction of the price other top free agent starting pitchers have received this offseason. It’s a huge pick-up for the defending World Series champions: If Sasaki can regain his 2023 form, it would put him head-to-head with Paul Skenes as the best young pitcher in MLB — and among the best young arms in recent memory.
