Japanese right-hander Roki Sasaki will reportedly be released during next week’s MLB Winter Meetings, according to ESPN’s Jeff Passan.
The release opens a 45-day window, set to begin Tuesday, for MLB teams to entice the 23-year-old talent to sign when the international amateur signing period begins on Jan. 15.
As Sasaki is under 23 years old, he is not eligible for the deal that his compatriot Yoshinobu Yamamoto signed last year. Instead, it is limited to international bonus pools, which are typically used to sign amateurs from Latin America.
Many teams have already exhausted these pools with early-year signings. The Tampa Bay Rays and Texas Rangers have literally zero cap space for 2024, while the San Diego Padres, who are seen as major candidates for Sasaki, have a total of $2,200. The Los Angeles Dodgers are favored to land Sasaki and have the most money remaining through 2024, at $2.5 million, but Sasaki more than doubles his earning power by waiting a few weeks.
The international bonus pools reset when the new signing period begins in 2025, with each team having between $5 million and $8 million. Sasaki will get more money by waiting, and this is important to his team, the Chiba Lotte Marines, because the broadcast fee they will receive will be 20% of his signing bonus.
Who is Roki Sasaki?
Sasaki has been a known commodity since his amateur days when he threw a 101 mph fastball, breaking Shohei Ohtani’s record for the hardest fastball ever thrown by a Japanese high schooler. Despite interest from MLB teams out of high school, Sasaki chose to play in the NPB for the Chiba Lotte Marines, who drafted him first overall in 2019.
The highly touted pitcher sat out the 2020 season to rest his young arm at the behest of his team. In 2021, he established himself as one of the best pitchers in Japan’s top league. The following season, Sasaki established 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 made two starts for Japan in the 2023 World Baseball Classic, starting the team’s semifinal game against Mexico, where he dominated for 3 2/3 innings before his line was marred by some soft hits and a three-run blast.
Back in NPB, Sasaki continued his excellence in 2023 and 2024, but struggled to stay healthy and threw a combined 202 innings over two seasons.
Although Sasaki pitched 111 innings last season and had a 2.35 ERA, his performances were inevitably down. Most notably, his fastball averaged 1.9 miles per hour slower than it did in 2023. He also missed a string of starts with an unspecified arm problem, an ailment that almost certainly played a role in his reduced velocity. But Sasaki was the stud when it mattered, throwing eight shutouts in his final outing of the year, a career-high ninth in the playoffs.
Sasaki throws three pitches: a four-seam fastball, a splitter and a slider. He used to throw a curveball, but has abandoned that offering in recent seasons.
In 2024, Sasaki threw the heater just under half the time, the splitter around 28%, and the slider 25%. This represented by far the highest slider usage of his NPB career. During his dominant year in 2022, Sasaki was a fast bowler 90% of the time. When he comes stateside, the slider will become an even more important weapon against right-handed hitters. Still, there are very few big league pitchers who throw the splitter that often.