The Rōki Sasaki saga won’t wrap up for at least two more weeks, but some light has been shed on the cherished right-handed pitcher from Japan, a focused and driven figure who will grace the Major League Baseball stage in 2025.
“He is definitely driving the ship,” Joel Wolfe, Sasaki’s agent, said in a media teleconference Monday night. “And calling the shots.”
Sasaki, who has dominated in four seasons with Chiba Lotte in Japan’s Pacific League, with a 2.02 career ERA, can sign with any MLB team beginning Jan. 15 – and all 30 clubs ostensibly have a decent shot at him since, thanks to posting regulations between Japan and MLB, he cannot be paid more than what any club might have in its international signing pool.
Yet the field realistically consists of one or two serious contenders or perhaps just the six teams Sasaki has taken a meeting with – with the door slightly ajar for one or two more teams to get a sitdown with the 6-foot-2, 178-pound 23-year-old. And Wolfe’s update illuminated the pragmatic reality of this process.
Wolfe invited all 30 teams to send information touting their franchises as destinations; just 20 teams took him up on the offer, leading one to wonder why a full third of big league franchises lacked the self-esteem to consider themselves worthy of Sasaki’s destination.
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Meanwhile, Sasaki himself laid out ground rules for his recruitment: No players invited to the meetings with teams, which meant Dodgers stars Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto and San Diego starter Yu Darvish, one of Sasaki’s idols, could only appear via videotaped message.
And Wolfe was sufficiently moved by the presentations he did receive.
“The level of preparation, the videos, it was like the Rōki Film Festival,” says Wolfe. “Highly in-depth power point presentations, short films. Some teams made actual books. They had some people who’d spend hundreds of hours researching Rōki, his professional background, his personal background.
“Rōki and his family appreciate the time spent in preparation by those working for teams. He wanted to make sure everything was a fair ane level playing field, both for his process and the teams.”
Six teams have been publicly confirmed as meeting with Sasaki: The New York Yankees and Mets, Chicago Cubs, San Francisco Giants, Texas Rangers and, most recently, Los Angeles Dodgers. More ground rules: Those meetings all took place at the agency’s office in Los Angeles. No lavish trips to see stadiums, no image of Sasaki in the home team’s uniform on the videoboard.
All meetings would last no more than two hours and Sasaki, Wolfe said, gave clubs a “homework assignment” to specifically answer questions he had, most notably with regard to pitcher development and communication flow from staff to player.
And now? Wolfe says Team Sasaki may meet with “one or two more additional teams, or narrowing the field, which I think may be more likely.”
It’s unclear where that leaves the Padres, considered just behind the Dodgers as favorites to land Sasaki, or the Boston Red Sox, whose GM, Craig Breslow, acknowledged Monday that they had not met with Sasaki but were hoping to do so.
It will all be over with by Jan. 24, when Sasaki’s posting window closes. And we’ll find out which team will take home the only statuette that matters from the Rōki Film Festival – and how big that payoff may someday be.
“Rōki is by no means a finished product,” says Wolfe. “He knows it; teams know it. He’s incredibly talented, but he’s a guy that wants to be great.
“He’s not just coming here to get rich or get a big contract. He wants to be one of the greatest ever.”
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