Roki Sasaki’s impending arrival in the MLB should be cause for complete and utter celebration. The 23-year-old Japanese phenom will immediately rank among the must-see players. Whichever team signs him will be a potential front-line starter for the next six seasons. And Sasaki, the most talented young thrower we’ve ever seen, will test his skills at the highest level.
Unfortunately, there is a much darker side to the story. And it has very little to do with Sasaki himself.
As a non-American, non-Canadian player under the age of 25, Sasaki will enter American Baseball as part of international amateur free agency. The international market is a complex, often unsavory world in which the vast majority of players involved are teenagers from Latin America. It’s also an incredibly fragile ecosystem built on handshake agreements and verbal promises. That said, Sasaki’s entry has the potential to upend much of the 2025 international signing class and leave a tornado of chaos in its wake.
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There is little chance that Sasaki will sign a contract within the 2024 international window, which ends on Dec. 15 — which would greatly simplify the process — but commissioner Rob Manfred told reporters on Wednesday that he expects Sasaki to sign in the new year. That’s because his Japanese team, the Chiba Lotte Marines, will get more money when he makes it available in 2025.
But to understand how Sasaki’s arrival in the MLB could throw the international amateur market into chaos, it’s essential to first understand how the system works.
Each year, all 30 MLB teams have a fixed amount of money to spend on signing bonuses for international amateur players, colloquially called the “bonus pool.” The vast majority of these players are teenagers from Latin America, but once in a blue moon a player like Sasaki or Shohei Ohtani — a respected foreign league pro who happens to be under 25 years old — makes the jump. system.
The size of each team’s annual budget depends on (1) the size of the club’s market and (2) whether the club signed an expensive free agent who received a qualifying offer the previous year. For the upcoming 2025 window, the Dodgers and Giants have the smallest bonus pool size, at $5,146,200, while the octet of teams share the largest amount, at $7,555,500.
While teams can’t officially sign players in the 2025 class until Jan. 15, most amateurs have had verbal deals in place for years, even though such “early deals” are technically against the rules. In other words, many MLB teams have already allocated their bonus budgets for the upcoming window.
Which makes Roki Sasaki — a valuable, windfall for the team that signed him — an agent of chaos.
Sasaki’s decision to come to MLB now rather than two years from now, when he will be a traditional free agent available to the highest bidder, suggests that maximizing his earnings is far from his top priority. The 23-year-old right-hander is expected to give up at least $100 million. But Sasaki won’t be signing for free, and there’s certainly a chance that the difference between $2.5 million and $5 million will matter in the end.
As a result, and because all offers for the 2025 amateur window are so far only verbal, a team interested in Sasaki is motivated to break or rework any big-ticket deals currently in place to free up bonus money for the Japanese flamethrower.
Here is a theoretical example. One of the consensus top players in the class is Dominican shortstop Elian Peña, who has a verbal agreement with the New York Mets for a bonus north of $4 million. If the Mets think they have a big shot in Sasaki and believe a few million extra in bonus money could make a difference, they could go to Peña and try to squeeze his negotiated bonus number.
Peña’s representatives, who have little leverage under the current system, could do one of two things: accept a reworked deal from the Mets or reopen negotiations with other teams. But while option no. 2 could get more money back, this money may not be available anywhere. Remember that most teams have already allocated most of their budget.
This is where things could get even more complicated and tangled, according to sources familiar with the international market.
Teams not seriously involved in the Sasaki sweepstakes, knowing that talented amateurs could come back on the market at the last minute, could try to negotiate their own verbal agreements to challenge these cut players. That could set off a disastrous domino effect in which clubs and players try to rework deals at the 11th hour in a tumultuous, frantic game of musical chairs — all because Sasaki, a pitcher with nearly 400 career innings in the world’s second-best league. , sort of falls into the same category as a 16-year-old still unpaid.
Others were skeptical that Sasaki’s arrival would create such a massive ripple effect, citing the importance of maintaining relationships with trainers and agents who work with most of Latin America’s top amateurs. A team that pulls out of the deal at the last minute could cause lasting friction with one or more of the region’s top brokers.
There’s also a chance that Sasaki, who has already left so much money on the table, won’t worry too much about his final bonus amount, but will favor the team he feels most comfortable with.
Sources indicated that the order of operations around Sasaki and any bonus cuts remain up in the air. It’s unclear whether the teams will preemptively renegotiate deals before Jan. 15, when the first-day signings can be completed, or wait for the fallout from the Sasaki signing. But regardless of the sequence, it’s almost certain that at least one unlucky amateur will end up with a smaller bonus due to Sasaki’s odd fit into the system.
The problem with the whole dynamic is that Sasaki and amateurs seven years younger are concentrated in the same structure. Sasaki will spend all of 2025 in the major leagues; his 2025 counterparts likely won’t debut until 2030 at the earliest. Sasaki could get Cy Young votes next year. Most international amateurs will spend 2025 in the Dominican Summer League, the lowest level of professional affiliate baseball.
The only other precedent is soon-to-be three-time MVP Shohei Ohtani, who made the leap across the Pacific after the 2017 season. However, Ohtani’s arrival did not create a flurry of chaos in Latin America because (1) his arrival was less of a surprise than Sasaki’s, and (2) the signing deadline at the time was in July, not January, meaning Ohtani appeared in the middle fiscal year. Still, Ohtani’s involvement in the international amateur system, a system designed for an entirely different type of player, didn’t make much sense at the time.
And since then, this problem has not been solved. In fact, it got worse. One source called the system “a mess.” Another called it “broken.”
Most teams negotiate with players as young as 12, although the player must be at least 16 on signing day. Some of the amateurs set to sign in the upcoming window have verbally agreed to trades as early as spring 2021, around the time Sasaki makes his NPB debut. However, due to current international bonus rules, Sasaki’s contract will take money out of someone else’s pocket – which is not his fault at all.
It’s like comparing apples and motorcycles. Any team would rather have Sasaki, especially at such a low price, than any other player available in the 2025 class, and it’s not even close. Sasaski is the only proven commodity on offer.
As one reviewer said: “I would much rather sign Sasaki than wait six years to find out if [a player from the 2025 international class] is good.”