Until this weekend, MLB free agency was the Juan Soto show. The 26-year-old outfielder was not only by far the best player available but also by far the youngest. He’s still by far the best—and about to be by far the most richly remunerated—but he’s no longer even close to the youngest. Move over, Childish Bambino: There’s a new free agent phenom on the market. Roki Sasaki is coming to MLB.
Sasaki, a right-handed pitcher who turned 23 this past Sunday, is the sport’s top international prospect. For years, scouts (and Ringer writers) have salivated over the prospect of Sasaki coming stateside, and MLB GMs and POBOs have made pilgrimages to Japan to see Sasaki pitch in person—and, just as importantly, signal their interest in hopes of persuading Sasaki to sign with their team down the road. The question about Sasaki wasn’t whether he would succeed in the U.S. but when he would have the chance. After a false alarm last year, that question was answered on Saturday, when Sasaki’s Nippon Professional Baseball team, the Chiba Lotte Marines, announced that the 6-foot-2 righty—who’s recorded a career 2.10 ERA in fewer than 400 NPB innings—would be made available to MLB teams this winter via the Japanese league’s posting system.
“From the time he initially joined the team, we had heard from him that his dream is to play in America,” the Marines said, according to a translation by The Japan Times. “Taking the last five years into consideration, we have decided to respect his wishes.” In the same statement released by the Marines, Sasaki said, “Since I joined the team, the club has continuously listened to me about my future MLB challenge. I have nothing but gratitude for the team for officially allowing me to be posted at this time.”
Sasaki is younger, bigger, and harder-throwing than Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the then-25-year-old NPB ace who signed a 12-year, $325 million deal with the Dodgers last offseason and helped them win a World Series. But Sasaki won’t make Yamamoto money, because in keeping with international signing rules instituted in 2016, any player who’s posted before he turns 25, with fewer than six previous seasons in a foreign professional league, faces severely limited earning power. Sasaki must sign a minor league deal and start from the bottom of the big league pay scale, and his signing bonus is constrained by the size of teams’ international bonus pools, which are capped at just north of $7 million. As an added perk, he could even nab his new employer an extra draft pick that would be worth more than that signing bonus if he wins the Rookie of the Year award or finishes in the top three in MVP or Cy Young voting.
Thus, the two most coveted players in MLB free agency sit at opposite extremes in salary potential. Soto will likely sign the largest contract in MLB history, in terms of present-day value. (Shohei Ohtani’s $700 million contract from last winter was heavily deferred.) After earning $31 million in his final year of arbitration, he may be in line for as much as a 50 percent raise in annual average, depending on how many years the total sum he receives—expected to be in the vicinity of $600 million—is distributed over.
Sasaki, by contrast, will make the major league minimum in 2025, putting him within even the most miserly owner’s price range. Whereas Soto’s list of suitors is effectively limited to the teams that typically dive into the deep end of the salary pool, any club could theoretically sign Sasaki. And whereas convincing Soto to sign will, in large part, depend on showing him the money, convincing Sasaki to sign may be more about soft factors, as it was with Ohtani when the then-23-year-old two-way-player left NPB after the 2017 season. MLB front offices, start crafting your PowerPoint presentations and video montages now.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about the how, why, and when of Sasaki’s posting process. For starters, there’s the mystery surrounding Sasaki’s successful extrication from the Marines’ control. It takes nine years for NPB players to qualify for international free agency, but they can request to be posted before then. Most teams accommodate such requests, provided the player in question has excelled for several seasons—and, of course, assuming the player is old enough to maximize the team’s return. In exchange for parting with a posted player, NPB clubs receive a release fee that’s based on the size of the contract that the departing player inks. Yamamoto, for instance, spent seven seasons with the Orix Blue Wave, who in accordance with league regulations received $50.6 million from the Dodgers as compensation for freeing their top pitcher—a record under the current system.
The Marines might have been in line for a similar payday had Sasaki waited two more years to make this leap. Instead, they stand to make a pittance. So why are both Sasaki and the Marines passing up a potential windfall?
For his part, Sasaki seems eager to test himself against baseball’s best competition as soon as possible, saying, “I will do my best to climb up from a minor league contract and become the best player in the world so I have no regrets about my one and only baseball career and can live up to the expectations of everyone who has supported me so far.” He’s taking a real risk: If he suffers a serious injury before reaching MLB free agency after the 2030 season (when he’ll be 29), he may never cash in. However, if his health holds up and he pitches well, the bet he’s placing on himself could eventually pay off financially, as it did for Ohtani.
The Marines will reap no rewards from Sasaki’s future earnings, which makes it more curious that they gave the green light now. For some time, informed observers have speculated that Sasaki, a huge high school prospect who was drafted first overall in 2019, may have used his leverage as the highest-profile Japanese amateur star since Ohtani to secure a written or verbal commitment from the Marines to post him on his request (as Ohtani reportedly did from the Fighters). On Saturday, the team insisted that this wasn’t the case, with executive Naoki Matsumoto saying, “We’ve been talking to him without being conscious of that [financial issue]. He’s a representative of Japan and Lotte, so I want him to do his best on the world stage.” Suspicions persist that the Marines aren’t acting quite so altruistically and that they may be trying to save face and dissuade future draftees from seeking similar concessions, which could endanger not only individual clubs’ competitive aspirations but also NPB’s capacity to keep its stars.
However this exit was worked out, Sasaki is MLB-bound, though it’s not yet known precisely when he’ll be posted. The timing matters not only in terms of how the Sasaki sweepstakes will affect the temperature of the hot stove but also in terms of the, well, terms. Most teams have already spent a high percentage of their 2024 bonus pool allotments, which cover the signing period from January 15 to December 15. However, if the Marines wait until the posting deadline of December 15 to open the 45-day negotiation window, teams could draw from their 2025 bonus pools, which max out at $7.5 million. Of course, most teams have already made verbal commitments to Latin American teens who’ll be eligible to sign during that period, but they could renege on those deals—which is rare, but not unheard of—or try to trade for pool space in the interim in order to up their bids.
Whatever they can offer, they gladly will. There’s only one Ohtani, but when it comes to players on the open market who won’t break the bank, Sasaki is the next best thing.
Sasaki gained fame in his home country during his high school career, by virtue of his 101 mph heat (which broke a record set by Ohtani), his sweet nickname (“The Monster of the Reiwa Era”), and his sympathy-inducing backstory (he lost his father, his grandparents, and his house to the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami). But many North American fans learned what he could do in 2022, when as a 20-year-old he performed more or less like peak Pedro Martínez.
That April, he pitched a perfect game that featured a 102 mph fastball, a record 13 consecutive strikeouts, and a record-tying 19 Ks overall. He followed that up by hurling eight more flawless innings in his next start—he was removed before the ninth because of concerns about his workload—en route to another record of 52 consecutive batters retired. On the whole, he managed a 2.02 ERA with 173 strikeouts in 129 1/3 innings, against only 23 walks and seven home runs. As an MLB scouting director told me that September, “Sasaki is just absurd. … For him to develop command of a full arsenal of wipeout pitches as quickly as he did … What if he keeps getting better? I don’t know what the limit is, but I can’t wait to see how far it goes.”
In 2023, Sasaki did get better, turning in a 1.88 ERA and fanning 135 batters in 91 innings, versus 17 walks and one homer. At that point, his skill seemed limitless, at least on an inning-per-inning basis. However, there are a few reasons to temper the hype.
First, Japanese baseball is in the midst of a pronounced pitcher’s era. Even in the Pacific League, the higher-scoring of NPB’s two circuits and the home of the Marines, scoring has declined for five straight seasons, plunging almost a full run per team per game across that span, from 4.31 in 2019 to 3.35 in 2024. Second, although Sasaki’s 2024 stats are superlative, it was his worst season, by both stuff and stats, since his rookie year. And third, he just hasn’t pitched that much, a shortcoming that stems both from physical ailments and from the Marines’ attempts to preserve him.
The two tables below, based on data from DeltaGraphs, show Sasaki’s advanced stats from his four seasons with the Marines. The first table shows recent erosion in his park- and league-adjusted peripherals, his strikeout rate, and his velocity. (His fastball lost two ticks, on average; his slider, four.) The second table, which compiles his plate discipline stats, indicates that he induced fewer chases, missed fewer bats, and had more trouble getting ahead of hitters, putting them away, and staying in the strike zone in 2024.
Roki Sasaki’s NPB Peripherals
Roki Sasaki’s NPB Plate-Discipline Stats
NPB journalist Jim Allen cautions that some of that decline could have stemmed from Sasaki experimenting in preparation for his move to MLB; Sasaki did ramp up his slider usage and, according to Allen, worked on making it more sweeper-like. (DeltaGraphs’ stats say the slider was his best pitch this year.) Regardless, his fastball, splitter, and slider are all plus or plus-plus pitches, and the off-speed pitches make his play heat up. His stuff is still nasty, if a little less dominant than it was when it was tracked by Statcast at the 2023 WBC.
The bigger unknown is how often that stuff will be on display. Sasaki was worked hard at times in high school: At Japan’s storied Koshien tournament, the amateur standout threw 435 pitches over eight days, including a 12-inning, 21-strikeout, 194-pitch complete game. However, his teams have long sought to safeguard him, starting with his high school manager’s controversial decision not to work him harder at Koshien. (The manager, Yohei Kokubo, was spooked by the 18-year-old Sasaki’s low bone density.) The Marines have handled Sasaki with care: He spent the entirety of 2020 throwing batting practice, bullpen sessions, and simulated games, without being used in any real ones.
Perhaps that caution will pay dividends down the line, but Sasaki hasn’t yet demonstrated that he can sustain a starter’s workload for a full season, which may be what he was alluding to on Saturday when he said, “There were many things that didn’t go well during my five years with the club.” This year, Sasaki made only 18 regular-season starts thanks to arm soreness and an oblique tear, though he returned late in the season and threw eight shutout innings with nine strikeouts in the Marines’ lone playoff win.
“His main problem has been the time it takes to recover from each start,” says Allen, who adds that “his lack of innings has left him short of experience, so he still has many situations he needs to learn how to adjust to.” (Marines manager Masato Yoshii, a former NPB and MLB player, acknowledged as much on Saturday, saying, “To be honest, there are some areas where he is incomplete.”) In 2024, Sasaki worked exclusively on six or more days of rest, and he also worked slowly in his pitch-clock-less league: Among 75 NPB pitchers with at least 60 innings pitched, he took the fifth-longest time between pitches, on average, when the bases were empty (though he did pick up the pace with runners on).
Every pitcher is an injury risk, and even the top free agent pitcher with MLB experience, Corbin Burnes, comes with caveats, such as signs of decline in his strikeout rate, pitch speed, and cutter movement. But the 30-year-old Burnes has been durable, by the standards of an era when innings eating is relative. Sasaki may be a bargain compared to Burnes, who could command a contract of $200 million or more, but the youngster is also something of a hothouse flower. In the worst-case scenario, he gets hurt and has surgery; in the best-case scenario, he stays intact, refines his repertoire and command, and makes a splash as a rookie that rivals Paul Skenes’s this past season. If he can recapture his form from 2022-23, he could do a decent impression of Jacob deGrom even if he has trouble staying on the mound.
Every MLB team is hoping to be the hothouse where he blooms, but no one knows where he’ll want to play. As usual, the Dodgers are the favorites, for a variety of reasons: the presence of Sasaki’s Samurai Japan teammates Ohtani and Yamamoto and the fame of the franchise in Japan; the team’s track record of player improvement, perennial playoff appearances, and 2024 title; geographic proximity to Japan; the potential for endorsement dollars in a big market; plans for a six-man rotation; ample 2024 pool space (but relatively little in 2025). During the World Series, Dodgers POBO Andrew Friedman shot down a question about his team’s remaining pool space, but it’s very relevant now.
But it’s possible that Sasaki wouldn’t want to be overshadowed by superstar teammates or would want to help take a team to the top rather than joining one that’s already there or would be wary of the Dodgers’ problems with pitcher injuries or would be attracted to a smaller market or would simply respond to an in-person pitch from another team. Ohtani, after all, went with the Angels in 2017, for reasons that are still somewhat mysterious.
Much as any lineup would look better with Soto, any rotation would be stronger with Sasaki—and any payroll would easily support him. Last year, an otherwise weak free agent market was bolstered by Asian stars, such as Ohtani, Yamamoto, Shota Imanaga, Yuki Matsui, and Jung Hoo Lee. Now, another elite talent from across the Pacific has made a market that formerly revolved around a single star into a binary system. Soon, Sasaki will narrow his choices down to one team. For now, all 30 can dream.
