The initial list of major league teams that expressed interest in Japanese right-hander Roki Sasaki stretched to 20, his agent, Joel Wolfe of Wasserman Group, said Monday.
Sasaki, the uber-talented young starting pitcher, will join one of those teams at some point in the second half of January and is currently back home in Japan, pondering the second phase of his highly scrutinized recruiting process.
Wolfe did not provide many specifics during a conference call with the media, only to state that Sasaki met with “a set few number of teams” over these past few weeks and will make his decision at some point between Jan. 15, when the new international signing period opens, and Jan. 23, when Sasaki’s posting window closes.
Market size, living dynamics and even tradition of winning won’t be the foremost priority.
“He doesn’t seem to look at it in the typical way that other players do,” Wolfe said. “He has a more long-term, global view of things. I believe Roki is also very interested in the pitching development and how a team is going to help him get better, both in the near future and over the course of his career. He didn’t seem overly concerned about whether a team had Japanese players on their team or not, which, in the past, when I represented Japanese players, that was sometimes an issue. That was never a topic of discussion.”
At 23, Sasaki is already one of the world’s best pitchers, possessing a triple-digit fastball and a devastating splitter. While playing for the Chiba Lotte Marines of Nippon Professional Baseball over the past four seasons, Sasaki posted a 2.10 ERA with 505 strikeouts and just 88 walks in 394⅔ innings. Because he would be classified as an international amateur — meaning he would cost a team its international bonus pool and essentially sign a minor league contract, not allowing him to become a traditional free agent until accruing six years of major league service time — the bidding for his services was expected to be fierce.
Wolfe experienced that at the start of Sasaki’s 45-day posting window on Dec. 15, shortly after sending a letter to every team asking each club to send information if it were interested. Within days, recruiting pitches flooded his offices.
“While the quality and the uniqueness varied, it was really something,” Wolfe said. “The level of preparation, the videos — I mean it was like the Roki film festival. There were highly in-depth PowerPoint presentations, short films. Some teams made actual books. They had people that had clearly spent hundreds of hours researching Roki and his personal background, his professional background.”
Various reports have listed the Los Angeles Dodgers, San Diego Padres, Texas Rangers, New York Yankees, New York Mets, Chicago Cubs and San Francisco Giants among the teams that were granted initial meetings, none of which has been confirmed by Sasaki’s camp. And though there has been a lot of speculation that the bidding for Sasaki could come down to the Dodgers and Padres, Wolfe said it was important to his client that everyone operate “on a level playing field,” prompting specific demands for those initial meetings: that they all last within two hours and take place at Wasserman’s L.A. offices. Sasaki stressed that current players not attend, though some sent their pitches over video.
“I think that the teams that met with him would tell you he was engaged, he asked questions — and he gave every team something that he called a homework assignment, the team that he was going to meet with,” Wolfe said. “And I think it was a great opportunity for the teams to really show what they specialize in. Without giving the actual details of what that assignment was, every team got that very same assignment, and it enabled them to show how they can analyze and communicate information with him and really showed where he was coming from in analyzing and creating his selection criteria in looking at teams.”
Sasaki’s next step hasn’t been fully formed. It could involve tacking on a small handful of additional meetings or, more likely, whittling his list. Visiting certain cities as part of his final decision-making process is also possible.
At the moment, Wolfe said, Sasaki isn’t expected to pick a team when the new international signing period opens Jan. 15. Though Wolfe did not note this specifically, utilizing the additional eight days would allow teams to trade for additional international bonus pool money that essentially would act as Sasaki’s signing bonus. International bonus pools for 2025 range from about $5.1 million to $7.5 million, but teams can trade for up to an additional 60%.
Had Sasaki waited two more years to turn 25, he could have instead signed a nine-figure contract similar to what Yoshinobu Yamamoto obtained from the Dodgers last offseason. Instead, he followed in the footsteps of Shohei Ohtani, an international amateur when he joined the Los Angeles Angels in December 2017. Wolfe believes being around Ohtani and Yu Darvish during the World Baseball Classic in 2023 and watching Shota Imanaga dominate with the Cubs as a rookie in 2024 pushed Sasaki to challenge himself sooner.
The sooner he could face the world’s best hitters and utilize major league resources, the better it would make him.
“Roki is by no means a finished product,” Wolfe said. “He knows it, and the teams know it. He’s incredibly talented; we all know that. But he is a guy that wants to be great. He’s not coming here just to be rich or get a huge contract. He wants to be great. He wants to be one of the greatest ever. I see that now, and he’s articulated it. And to be that, he knows he has to challenge himself.”