Happy Roki Sasaki Week: The MLB’s Most Coveted Pitcher
Happy Roki Sasaki Week! The baseball world is abuzz with excitement as the 23-year-old Japanese pitching sensation, Roki Sasaki, has announced his intention to join Major League Baseball (MLB) this offseason. This announcement has made him the most sought-after pitcher available this winter, thanks to his unique blend of talent, youth, and the terms of his contract.
With the 2025 international free agent signing period opening on January 15 and Sasaki’s posting window closing on January 23, we could find out where Sasaki is headed as soon as Wednesday. The anticipation is palpable as teams vie for the chance to add this promising young pitcher to their rosters.
Because Sasaki decided to come to the majors before his 25th birthday, he is limited to a minor league deal with a signing bonus coming from a team’s international bonus pool, capped at just over $7.5 million. This makes Sasaki a rare free agent star that every team can afford to sign, adding to the intrigue and competition surrounding his decision.
As we eagerly await Sasaki’s decision, we turned to our MLB experts to understand what makes him such a coveted free agent, which major league pitchers he reminds us of, and which teams seem most likely to land him.
What Makes Sasaki Such a Coveted Free Agent?
Bradford Doolittle: Sasaki is young, accomplished, and possesses measurable tools that might make him baseball’s top prospect right now. But he’s not a prospect in the “maybe he’ll be ‘X’ if he reaches his ceiling” sense. He’s already been successful in a high-level league and can seamlessly slide into a big league rotation. A limited workload threshold, for now, is the only thing holding back Sasaki’s 2025 projection. With his full collection of team control seasons intact, there is no risk to signing him. As good as he is now, he has room to grow in terms of his arsenal and physical development. You just don’t get a combination of factors like this often, especially with Sasaki’s eagerness to make the jump, prioritizing the opportunity over max earnings.
Buster Olney: As we’ve seen with Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Juan Soto — and even going back to Alex Rodriguez — excellence at a young age is everything. Sasaki is expected to be a high-ceiling talent already at 23, and the team that lands him will have years of control while paying him relative pennies.
Kiley McDaniel: In describing his client’s potential nine-figure deal to me this winter, an agent emphasized why he was confident that would happen, even if Sasaki had a down year, by saying: “age is a hack.” Rosters are getting younger, and teams have more money to spend but are hesitant to offer long-term deals to older players. They generally seek short-term free agent deals or trades for players with a year or two of control. Long-term deals are generally acceptable to a large swath of teams only when they can land a standout young star still in his peak years. Sasaki could be under team control for his entire peak as a bona fide ace, at a price every team can afford: a true unicorn of an opportunity for all 30 teams.
David Schoenfield: Entering his age-23 season, it’s not a stretch to say Sasaki has the potential to be the best starter in baseball. In four years in Japan, he has a 2.02 ERA, averaging 11.4 strikeouts per nine innings. He has hit 102 mph and stands 6-foot-3 with athleticism. You can argue that he’s right up there on the Stephen Strasburg/Paul Skenes scale as a pitching prospect, except he has already dominated as a professional.
Which Current or Former MLB Pitcher Does He Remind You Of?
Schoenfield: With his power fastball/splitter combo, I think of two former MLB greats: Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling. There are certainly some similarities to Shohei Ohtani, although Ohtani slowly ramped down his splitter usage and didn’t use it much in 2022-23, opting more for his sweeper. In Japan in 2024, Sasaki induced a 57% whiff rate on his splitter, which would have ranked second in MLB behind Reds (now Yankees) reliever Fernando Cruz.
Doolittle: I don’t know that there is any one guy. The splitter kind of reminds me of the one Logan Gilbert throws, with a spin rate so low it’s kind of freaky to watch in slow motion. The easy, heavy, hard stuff he offers kind of reminds me of Kevin Brown, only with a different fastball. The most exciting thing about Sasaki is that it’s hard to call him the next so-and-so. He’s his own thing, and novelty is a great and too-rare thing in sports these days.
McDaniel: There isn’t a perfect comp, and Sasaki is still evolving as a pitcher, so I’ll point out some players with similar qualities. Hunter Greene had a similar combination of arm speed and hype at the same age, along with some questions on his fastball shape and breaking ball quality. Sasaki’s standout splitter has a number of comps to former NPB pitchers but only a handful of U.S.-born players, such as Clemens and Schilling. The total package (power fastball, slider, and splitter-ish offspeed pitch) is similar to Paul Skenes’, though Sasaki’s command and fourth and fifth pitch are areas he’ll need to address to truly stand up to Skenes’ MLB debut.
Buster Olney: He reminds me of Yu Darvish, with his build and his rangy athleticism. He looks like he’ll have the ability to make adjustments as needed. Darvish is known for being able to mimic the deliveries of other pitchers, and watching Sasaki move, it would not surprise me if he had the same gift.
Are There Any Concerns About How His Game Will Translate from Japan to MLB?
McDaniel: Sasaki’s fastball shape and velocity regressed last season, his slider velocity also tailed off even more, he likely needs to add a fourth and maybe fifth pitch, and his execution within the strike zone could be a bit better. These are all simple enough on their own to be addressed in the first half of 2025 as long as Sasaki chooses a strong pitching development club, as I suspect he will. Some mechanical adjustments and mental cues could do a lot of the heavy lifting as these things can all be related. I would expect to see glimpses of Sasaki’s potential in 2025 while we wait until 2026 for the first dominating string of five or six starts in a row.
Olney: We really need our colleague Eduardo Perez to jump in here, because he’d be the one to tell us if Sasaki has any blatant tells such as pitch-tipping. That’s what Yamamoto experienced in his first months with the Dodgers. But Sasaki could have such excellent stuff that it doesn’t matter. His splitter seems to be so good that it won’t be hit even if the batter knows it’s coming.
Doolittle: Well, the different ball means we don’t know exactly how the measurements on his pitches will change, but that’s not a major concern. He looked great in the World Baseball Classic, which offers a nice preview of that adjustment. It’s really durability. He has never thrown a lot of innings, his best pitch is a splitter, and his velo was down last season. These things would be much more worrisome if he was getting a Yamamoto-like contract, but he’s not. I’ve seen his splitter carry an 80-grade, and when you match that with a triple-digit fastball that moves and a track record of plus command, health is the only thing there is to worry about.
Schoenfield: The same as every starter: Health and durability. He has topped out at 20 starts and 129 innings in Japan, back in 2022. His fastball velocity was down a bit in 2024 as he missed time with a torn oblique and shoulder fatigue. He’ll also have to adjust to facing more power hitters than he faced in Japan.
Are the Dodgers the Team to Beat as His Decision Approaches?
Doolittle: They always are.
McDaniel: They are the most likely landing spot and have been seen that way for a while, but don’t underrate how little we truly know about Sasaki’s process of eliminating and ultimately choosing a club. We have some clues and potential leans, but don’t truly know very much right now.
Olney: Sure, because they seemingly land every player they want, with a bottomless pit of money. The Dodgers will be the team to beat for years on the field, and off.
Schoenfield: I’ll say no. I’m betting on Sasaki wanting to forge his own path and signing with a team that doesn’t already have Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
Which Other Teams Do You Think Have the Best Chance of Landing Him?
McDaniel: The Padres, led by their ultra-aggressive GM A.J. Preller, are perceived as the second-most-likely landing spot behind the Dodgers, and San Diego clearly needs Sasaki more: He would change the outlook for the whole franchise. Beyond that, we’re mostly guessing from teams we know he has met with that seem to have a good environment for Sasaki to develop and compete in meaningful games: the Giants, Mariners, Mets, Yankees, Cubs, and Rangers seem to come up the most, but I can’t even say that’s a complete list of teams getting a long look.
Doolittle: For me, the Mets stand out. Sasaki and his representation have been pretty opaque when it comes to offering glimpses of his thinking, which has led to a lot of reading between the lines. It’s such a rare thing for a player of this caliber to be able to choose any team he wants with money barely being a part of the equation. So who knows? The Mets offer a good pitching environment, a strong possibility of sustained contention, and a budding pitching development program highlighted by the pitching lab they built in Port Saint Lucie. Why be another Dodger?
Olney: It’s pretty evident that Sasaki is not afraid to ignore conventional wisdom, in the same way Ohtani did when he arrived — he passed up many, many tens of millions of dollars by pushing to get to the majors now, rather than just waiting. With that in mind, I think the Padres will be the most intriguing alternative to the Dodgers, because of the weather, Darvish’s presence, and the chance to play against the best, in the same division.
Schoenfield: If Sasaki is primarily concerned with his own development as a pitcher, is there a better place than Seattle? Unlike the Dodgers, the Mariners have kept their young starters healthy. They also play in a great pitcher’s park, they play on the West Coast, and it’s not like Seattle doesn’t have a chance to win. But we haven’t heard much about the Mariners being in the running.
Originally Written by: Bradford Doolittle,Kiley McDaniel,Buster Olney,David Schoenfield
