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After several years of speculation, the dream scenario for MLB and the nightmare scenario for NPB has come to pass: The Chiba Lotte Marines have announced that they will post pitching phenom Roki Sasaki this winter. There are a lot of implications and extra details which make this situation terrifying for other NPB teams, weird for Sasaki, and extremely impactful for whichever MLB team acquires him. The things to cover include the convoluted story of how Sasaki has become available for MLB teams to sign, his current scouting report, and what happens next. Let’s dive in.
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How Sasaki got here
It is important to try to make sense of why Sasaki is being posted right now, because the objective case for it is very confusing. Sasaki turned 23 days after completion of his most recent pitching season, which means MLB (ridiculously) classifies him as an “international amateur.” This makes him subject to the international free agent spending caps set annually by MLB, which limits his bonus to low seven figures and sets him up to make the MLB minimum salary for the next three seasons. These caps do not apply once international professional players turn 25, so by not waiting Sasaki is potentially losing hundreds of millions of dollars, and his team is losing tens of millions in their posting fee.
This scenario is new. Shohei Ohtani is the only other NPB player who was posted at such a young age, but MLB’s rules were different at the time. Ohtani’s transfer happened right as MLB scrambled re-classify under-25 players as “amateurs,” which limited Ohtani’s signing bonus to just over $2 million. However, MLB allowed the Fighters to receive a posting fee of $20 million, decoupling it from Ohtani’s bonus due to the timing of the rule changes. Such an exception will not be made for the Marines; their posting fee received will likely be somewhere in the mid-six figures.
The question then becomes, “Why are the Marines doing this?” The main theory is that Sasaki’s contract potentially contains a clause which allows him to force a posting at any time. The Dodgers internally speculated that this clause existed last season, speculation which deepened when Sasaki held out until nearly the start of spring camp before renewing his contract in 2024. The Marines may have been forced to agree to such a damaging clause due to the tremendous leverage Sasaki held when drafted. NPB teams do not receive additional compensation if a drafted player elects not to sign, so offering such a clause may have been the difference between having a star player for a few seasons or never having him at all. Jim Allen, one of the best resources for English-language information on NPB, went into an incredible amount of detail about how Sasaki’s contract situation developed on his blog here.
The Marines have since denied that such a clause was present in Sasaki’s contract. This raises three possibilities:
- They are telling the truth, and really are posting Sasaki and forfeiting so much money out of the goodness of their hearts.
- Their relationship with Sasaki (and the parties surrounding him) has been so poisoned since the initial agreement that they feel he is no longer worth dealing with.
- They are lying.
The Marines are incentivized to make people believe No. 1, but on its face that seems unlikely. It’s probably a mixture of points two and three.
If Sasaki is forcing the issue, the timing is odd from his perspective as well. Why not pitch in Japan for two more seasons, get paid more than MLB’s league minimum for those years, then get a nine-figure payday barring some sort of career-altering injury?
The first clue comes from the Allen piece linked above, in which he details Sasaki’s connection to the Japanese marketing firm Dentsu. There is speculation that Sasaki received an up-front payment when signing a contract with Dentsu, which may have allowed him more flexibility and leverage in his initial negotiations with the Marines. Sasaki’s relationship with Dentsu also potentially incentivizes him to operate in ways which increase his marketability worldwide. A marketing firm knows that Sasaki stands to make a substantial amount of money beyond an MLB salary through endorsements and sponsorships if he plays in the US. Sasaki would also reach free agency again at age 29, which is still younger than most pitchers who come through the MLB-affiliated minor leagues. Being a free agent at that age obviously worked out for Ohtani.
Since most MLB teams will be on a relatively even financial playing field in these upcoming negotiations, Sasaki will have more leverage for non-financial considerations. We saw this previously with Ohtani’s posting: Instead of being pigeon-holed into a huge-market team, the fact that all teams could not financially distinguish themselves allowed him to find the playing situation which fit his requirements best. Sasaki will have a similar amount of agency when finding an MLB home.
It’s also possible that Sasaki simply does not care about the salary difference because he dreams of playing in MLB. Two extra years is a significant amount of extra player development time, and coaching changes can be easier to integrate at 23 than at 25. While the Marines played a major part in getting Sasaki to where he is now, MLB’s player development apparatus around pitch science is more advanced than what NPB teams can offer (this gap is closing, but it is not closed yet). If Sasaki’s dream is to be the best pitcher in the world, two additional years of exposure to that tech and the minds behind it could help him reach his true potential.
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Regardless, this is a dark time for NPB fans. The league has its own identity, one which is extremely important to distinguish from just being an MLB feeder league. The Sasaki situation weakens that distinction. Additionally, when other NPB players were posted at such a young age, they frequently gave their team and their fans several years of being at the apex of their league before departing. Ohtani won an MVP award and the Japan Series. Yamamoto won three MVPs while carrying his team to three straight pennants and one Japan Series win. Many posted pitchers won Sawamura awards. Sasaki never got one.
In the end, Sasaki had four good pitching years in NPB, none of which were wire-to-wire healthy, and the Marines had several shallow postseason runs with him in their rotation. The memories of him at the absolute peak of what a pitcher can do will remain, but it’s going to feel empty to Marines fans now that he’s leaving prematurely — partially because he doesn’t want to be there. It also sets a dangerous precedent for other young NPB stars in the future.
As an MLB fan, it’s hard to know how much to weigh these factors. The two issues at the core of this situation — that the NPB draft system is broken and that NPB teams don’t offer the same type of compensation as MLB — are not MLB’s fault. If MLB team recruitment meddling contributed to this situation, particularly if it escalated to the point of tampering, that’s obviously a bigger problem. We’ll likely never know if that’s the case with Sasaki.
So, after all that drama, Sasaki will now be available for MLB teams to sign. Who exactly will every team be clamoring to acquire?
The scouting report
It’s more or less an annual Dodgers Digest tradition to post a roundup of players from NPB who might move over to the US each offseason. In last year’s post, which focused on Yoshinobu Yamamoto, I stated that Sasaki had “the best raw stuff in the world.” At that point, even though Paul Skenes exists, it was a tough claim to argue.
While MLB scouts have been trying to sign Sasaki since high school, he burst into wider fan view two years later. On April 10th, 2022, Sasaki threw the greatest game ever pitched by a professional baseball player. He was just 20 years old, every bit the definition of the word “phenom.” Sasaki’s perfect game against the Buffaloes, the reigning and eventually-repeating Pacific League champions, created new definitions of how dominant a pitcher can be. Sasaki struck out 19 of the 27 batters he faced, at one point fanning 13 in a row (the MLB record for consecutive strikeouts is 10). In a contact-oriented league like NPB, those numbers were particularly outrageous. In Sasaki’s next start, he threw eight more perfect frames, only removed due to pitch count concerns.
Between his age-20 season in 2022 and the follow-up campaign the next year, Sasaki posted some absolutely obscene numbers when he was on the field. In 2022, Sasaki posted a 2.02 ERA while striking out 35% of the batters he faced and walking just under 5%. Those numbers improved in 2023, when he struck out an absolutely ridiculous 39% of the batters he faced. In that 2023 campaign, Sasaki improved his ERA to 1.78, thanks in part to the fact that he allowed just one home run in 91 innings.
For most of Sasaki’s NPB career, he has relied upon a three pitch mix of four-seam fastballs, splitters, and sliders. He will very rarely mix in a curveball as well. He throws these pitches from a three-quarters arm slot. Sasaki has a somewhat wiry build — he is roughly the same height and weight as Walker Buehler — so his velocity comes more from elite arm speed than his size alone. An MLB team may benefit from trying to further bulk up Sasaki’s lower half in an effort to get him to generate more strength from his legs and offload some of the tremendous strain on his pitching arm created by throwing this hard.
Sasaki’s foundational pitch is his four-seam fastball, and between 2022 and 2023 it was about as elite as a fastball can get. In the latter season, Sasaki’s fastball averaged 99 miles per hour and topped out at 103. Additionally, the pitch has a good amount of movement. During Sasaki’s World Baseball Classic games in Miami (which were pitched in front of Statcast with an MLB-style ball), his fastballs averaged 100 MPH with a shape similar to Gerrit Cole’s four-seamer. Sasaki has previously shown advanced feel for the pitch, throwing it high more often than most pitchers in NPB, though his command took a step back this year.
Through his young career, Sasaki’s splitter has been his primary out pitch. When batters swung at Sasaki’s splitter in 2024, they missed 57% of the time. That is a similar whiff rate to what Kodai Senga generated with his famous “ghost fork” in his final NPB season. Sasaki’s splitter doesn’t really move west-to-east like Senga’s or Yamamoto’s, instead diving almost straight downwards. This decreases the typical platoon split you’d see against an elite splitter, in turn increasing its utility against right-handed batters. This has also prevented damage when put in play; the ground ball rate against Sasaki’s splitter has ranged as high as 73% in previous seasons.
Sasaki’s third pitch is his slider, which is an odd offering. It would be natural to expect Sasaki’s slider to be more of a power pitch given his elite fastball velocity, but in 2024 the pitch averaged just under 84 MPH. With such a big slider to fastball speed variance, one might assume the pitch would be more slurvy or sweeper-ish, but it isn’t. Sasaki’s slider is more dependent on gyro spin, the deception coming more from the speed differential than the shape alone. The pitch worked well for him as his other stuff took steps back in 2024, but the shape is such that it may be hard to tunnel to both sides of the plate with his splitter. The good news is that Sasaki has shown ability to manipulate said slider shape and speed, which might indicate that he could be able to change it based on his MLB team’s feedback.
Sasaki has also thrown curveballs in NPB, but the use rate is so low that it’s hard to gather any information other than “he throws it sometimes.” Sasaki doesn’t have any extremely high-spin pitches, so the low use may be due to not liking the raw ingredients. However, if MLB teams do try to make the slider more firm, Sasaki might need an extra tool to keep all of his pitches from existing in too narrow of a velocity band. The curve may be the answer to that challenge. A curve might also become more necessary if teams tweak Sasaki’s slider into more of a sweeper, since that would take it more out of play against left-handed batters.
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Despite the superlatives on Sasaki’s three main pitches, there is one particularly large elephant in the room: Sasaki’s 2024 season and how it relates to his long and vague injury history. While Sasaki was quite good in 2024, his numbers and stuff declined slightly. Instead of an ERA at or below 2, he posted a 2.35. His strikeout rate fell below 30%, while his walk rate increased to 7%. These numbers don’t quite live up to what he’s done before.
As you’d expect given the strikeout rate drop, Sasaki’s stuff took a significant step backwards in 2024, which was most evident with the fastball. The following data are gathered from the NPB pitch profiling app created by Twitter user bouno05. It shows how Sasaki’s fastball declined this year.
| 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | |
| FF Velocity | 98.4 | 98.9 | 96.9 |
| FF Whiff% | 18.5% | 24.0% | 13.1% |
| FF Stuff+ | 151 | 159 | 120 |
Sasaki’s fastball lost 2 MPH of velocity between 2023 and 2024, and as Lance Brozdowski profiled on YouTube, this was also accompanied by a reduction in movement. As Brozdowski notes, Sasaki’s release extension increased in 2024, so there is some indication that some of these changes may be related to mechanics rather than health. There are some questions on the validity of that extension data, however.
No matter the cause, the reduction in fastball whiff rate is a concern. While their fastball shapes and usage patterns are different, the same pitch profiling app shows that Yamamoto’s four-seam fastball had a 141 Stuff+ and a 20.8% whiff rate during his final season in Japan. That fastball has been Yamamoto’s biggest weak spot so far in the US, and Sasaki’s fastball had worse results in his final NPB season.
Still, it’s worth noting that low fastball whiff rate alone can be partially explained by the approach of some NPB batters. While the top end of NPB rosters are very close to MLB-quality, they lack depth. Against elite velocities, back-of-roster NPB hitters have to cheat on the fastball, which reduces fastball whiff rates but lowers their ability to adjust to off-speed offerings. However, this tactic worked better against Sasaki’s diminished velocity in 2024. He had stretches this year where things would snowball with runners on base. Sasaki only allowed two home runs in 2024 (not surprising given an extremely suppressed home run environment in NPB), but he would sometimes struggle to get final outs to escape jams and get papercut to death. Contact was louder, balls in play turned into outs less often, and innings extended. Sasaki combatted this by reducing fastball use in favor of more sliders, something MLB scouts wanted to see anyways, but it was not enough to bring him to the same heights he experienced before.
Sasaki’s NPB career has also been marred by a series of injuries, and 2024 featured the most concerning of the bunch. Sasaki’s career high in innings pitched is just 129-1/3 in 2022. In 2023, he only threw 91 frames, missing more than half the season due to an oblique injury. Sasaki threw 111 innings in 2024, missing more time due to a vague “right arm injury.” NPB teams don’t provide as much detail about specific ailments as MLB teams, so that’s really all we know right now. Teams will happily pay Sasaki’s bonus even if he requires major surgery the day after he signs, but it could impact how teams plan around his presence.
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The bottom line with Sasaki’s profile is that he has as much arm talent as any player currently in MLB. His ceiling is a top-5 pitcher in all of baseball. However, he lacks the polish which might let him slot into that type of position immediately. Despite the hype which has surrounded him for the last three years, he is not necessarily instantly an ace, but the talent which may allow him to get there one day is undeniable.
There’s a world in which Sasaki immediately finds his 2023 form and strikes out 200 MLB hitters despite being on a ~150 inning limit in his first season. There’s also a world in which he needs to develop a fourth pitch to change speeds and eye-lines. and struggles to do so due to lack of raw spin in his current offerings. He has adjustments to make with respect to fastball location and shape, and he will certainly give up home runs at a higher rate than he did in Japan. There’s also the possibility that last year’s injury was more serious than we know and Sasaki needs to miss significant time.
Regardless, MLB teams are in a position where they will have to pay Sasaki about 2% of what he would have made on the open market. The risk of Sasaki’s profile is high, but the rewards are much, much higher. Even if he does end up as an oft-injured type, that’s a risk all 30 teams would be happy to live with at many times the cost.
What happens next?
Sasaki’s timeline now depends on interplay between the NPB posting system and MLB’s international free agent bonus pooling system, which are not designed to work together. Like many of the details in this situation, things are annoyingly complicated.
First, Sasaki has to be officially posted, a process which is not instantaneous. NPB dictates that players must be posted no later than Dec. 15 and that players have 45 days to negotiate with MLB teams before their window closes. Since Sasaki is classified as an “amateur” and subject to international bonus pools, there is another calendar at play. If Sasaki signs before December 15th, he will be subject to 2024’s pools, which are mostly depleted (the Dodgers are notable exceptions with over $2 million remaining).
Between Dec. 15 and Jan. 15, Sasaki will be ineligible to sign with MLB teams at all, since that is a “closed period” used to provide separation between international signing years. Starting the morning of Jan. 15, Sasaki would be eligible to sign once more, this time under 2025’s bonus pools. The very last day of his signing eligibility, if he was posted right at the NPB deadline, would be Jan. 29. The bonus pools available to sign Sasaki will depend entirely on when his posting becomes official and teams do not currently know which bonus year he will fall under. This situation did not apply to Ohtani since the international free agency calendar dates have been changed since 2017.
Sasaki straddling the two bonus pool years creates a tricky situation for everybody involved. Some MLB teams, the Dodgers included, would prefer Sasaki to be posted as quickly as possible, strengthening their negotiation position as the teams with the most money to use. Other teams would not be able to sign Sasaki with the bonus pool money they have remaining (barring a trade for additional money from another team) unless Sasaki is posted in the final days before NPB’s deadline and becomes eligible to sign in 2025. Sasaki’s camp would likely prefer the posting to occur at the last possible moment, since signing in 2025 would allow for more suitors to bid against each other. This would also work in the Marines’ favor since their posting fee will be paid in proportion to Sasaki’s final bonus. The Marines likely have final say on the posting date, but they may also want to get this mess behind them sooner rather than later.
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The Dodgers are widely viewed by people within baseball as heavy favorites to sign Sasaki. They have numerous advantages in their favor, beyond having the most bonus pool money remaining in 2024. The most obvious is that they offer the ability to play with Ohtani and Yamamoto, both of whom played with Sasaki in 2023’s World Baseball Classic. Ohtani in particular will bring many more Japanese viewers to Sasaki’s starts, which may be of interest to Sasaki’s marketing connections.
Since Ohtani and Yamamoto are already Dodgers, the team offers also advantages with respect to infrastructure being in place, including translation and nutrition. Sasaki is represented by Wasserman; Wasserman Vice President Joel Wolfe represents Yamamoto, so Wolfe might be able to detail this information even before the Dodgers are allowed to negotiate with Sasaki directly (Wasserman also represents Yu Darvish). If Sasaki was to sign with the Dodgers, he would also gain access to their player development staff, which is among the highest-regarded in the league, playing into potential motivations for the early posting. Obviously, they also offer the best opportunity to compete for a championship every year. Finally, the Dodgers are planning on running a six-man rotation next season, which would both ease some of the adjustment between MLB and NPB and make Sasaki’s inevitable innings cap easier to manage.
However, those hoping it is fait accompli that Sasaki will sign with the Dodgers may ultimately be disappointed. The Padres in particular are viewed as another possible destination, particularly due to his connection with Darvish. Barring a trade, the Padres do not have significant bonus money remaining in 2024, but they could elect to use a large portion of their 2025 pool if Sasaki is posted later.
It’s also very possible that Sasaki wants to chart his own path. Maybe he wants to be the center of attention in Japan during his starts, which wouldn’t ever fully happen when playing on the same team as Ohtani. Maybe he wants to play in a smaller city. Maybe he falls in love with a different team during negotiations. Maybe he’ll be scared off by the Dodgers’ seeming inability to keep young pitchers healthy. Since MLB teams are not currently allowed to negotiate with Sasaki, the only people who truly know what he wants and values are Sasaki himself and his representation. The baseball insiders who are so convinced he will be a Dodger are speculating.
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So, there we have it, the story of how Sasaki got here, who he is as a pitcher, and how complicated the next couple months could be. Sasaki may ultimately be a Dodger, which would be an absolute fantastic development for their 2025 and seasons to come, but it’s not safe to assume that he will be in blue yet. Given the calendars at play, this could be a very drawn-out process, but for one lucky team this will be more than worth it in the end. The opportunity to acquire this type of established talent at this young an age (and for pennies on the dollar) does not happen very often.
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Update 11/14: The first published version of this story incorrectly stated that Sasaki was represented directly by Joel Wolfe. Sasaki is represented by Wasserman, at which Wolfe is Vice President, but he is not necessarily represented by Wolfe directly. We regret the error.
