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It’s now been over two months since the Chiba Lotte Marines announced they would post Roki Sasaki, but thankfully the waiting game is now over as he announced that he has chosen to sign with the Los Angeles Dodgers.
The Dodgers had $5,146,200 in international bonus pool money for the 2025 period and have understandably chosen to dump all of it on Sasaki. It’s money equivalent to about the 13th to 14th pick in the 2024 MLB Draft.
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Oh man, this should be a fun time online.
Many baseball fans are so primed to hate on the Dodgers they were even melting down about the Hyeseong Kim signing. Now the Dodgers have won the sweepstakes for arguably one of the best young pitchers in baseball, who will now play for the league minimum and be under team control for six years.
As for the reason he’s so hyped, the best read on Roki I’ve found anywhere is still Brim’s primer, so citing it liberally is the best way to provide you with a profile on the new Dodger starter.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course, Sasaki doesn’t come without potential downside as well.
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.
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.
So basically, Sasaki has one of the highest ceilings in all of baseball due to having a crazy amount of arm talent, but also comes with injury red flags that make it a concern as to whether he can ever reach that ceiling or even stay healthy for a whole season. In short, a perfect Dodgers pitcher.
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In terms of fit on the roster, while it’s not fair to the starting options of the Dodgers to say that the team needed him, Roki undoubtedly makes the team more fearsome in both the short and long term.
As it stands, literally every single one of rotation options going into next year either missed significant time last year due to injury, performed poorly, or is something of an unproven prospect.
- Yoshinobu Yamamoto
- Blake Snell
- Tyler Glasnow
- Shohei Ohtani
- Roki Sasaki
- Clayton Kershaw*
- Tony Gonsolin
- Dustin May
- Landon Knack
- Ben Casparius
- Justin Wrobleski
- Bobby Miller
- Jackson Ferris
- Nick Frasso
*I mean, not technically yet, but IYKYK.
Roki isn’t an exception to the question marks, but he does add another arm to the mix, which is especially important with the six-man rotation coming to the team. More importantly, he’s another arm with playoff rotation type of upside, which helps the apparent Dodger plan of just desperately hoping they can get 3-4 of those guys right by October.
Additionally, with the price of pitching skyrocketing in free agency, the Dodgers likely hope that Roki’s addition will basically lock down their rotation for at least a few years thanks to Yamamoto, Snell, Glasnow, Ohtani, and him all being under contract. Aside from inevitable injuries, that alignment would still leave at least one space open in the rotation for anybody to step up and claim it, a spot that they don’t really need to fill in free agency. When it comes to any future pitching plans, there’s always valid concern, but it’s hard not to be optimistic about the Dodgers’ situation in this moment.
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The bottom line here is the Dodgers were already going to be perennial World Series contenders, but now they’re adding one of the highest upside pitchers in Roki Sasaki for what amounts to like Miguel Rojas money because Roki’s (unfairly) treated as an amateur prospect due to his age. Quite frankly, it’s hard to contain one’s excitement.
It’s definitely a situation of the rich continuing to get richer, but to be fair, this kind of stuff (like Ohtani’s choice) is the reward for what the Dodgers have built as an organization from the top down under Mark Walter, Stan Kasten, and Andrew Friedman. The future looks almost comically bright right now, and while it’s crazy to think about given the lengthy and storied history of this team, I hope fans can take a step back and appreciate the best era any Dodger fan has ever seen.
