Major League Baseball’s international signing period opened on January 15. As of yesterday, MLB clubs were permitted to formally sign players who meet the eligibility requirements of the current Collective Bargaining Agreement.

Among those eligible to sign are players who have been made available under the Japanese Posting System. There are several requirements for signing – or attempting to sign – a player from NPB, Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball.

Those requirements include that “all 30 MLB clubs have 45 days to negotiate with a player after he is posted. If no agreement is reached in that timeframe, the player returns to his NPB club for the coming season. He cannot be posted again until the following offseason.”

In this current signing period, the acknowledged top available talent is Japanese pitcher Roki Sasaki. The right-hander was posted a little more than a month ago as the Winter Meetings got underway in Dallas. He has until January 23 to reach an agreement with an MLB club.

Sasaki Stats and Achievements

The 23-year-old nicknamed “The Monster of the Reiwa Era” has pitched for the NPB’s Chiba Lotte Marines since debuting in 2021.

Sasaki has become a 2x NBP All-Star. He hurled a perfect game in April 2022, the first in NBP in two decades. During that masterpiece against the Orix Buffaloes, Sasaki tied the NPB record with 19 strikeouts. He also set a world record by striking out 13 consecutive batters.

During his next start, Sasaki nearly one-upped Johnny Vander Meer, the only MLB pitcher to ever throw back-to-back no-hitters. Sasaki nearly had back-to-back perfectos, hurling eight perfect innings against Hakkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters before being removed for health reasons.

Over the course of the two outings and stretching back to his outing prior to the Orix game, Sasaki retired 52 consecutive batters to set another NPB mark.

Standing at 6’4” and weight just over 200 pounds, Sasaki’s regular pitching repertoire includes a fastball, splitter, and slider. In April 2023 he threw four pitches that were clocked at 102.5 miles per hour, tying Shohei Ohtani for the fastest ever by any NBP pitcher.

During his four-year NPB career with Chiba, Sasaki has compiled a 30-15 record over 69 games. He has allowed just 275 hits across 414.2 innings with a 524/91 (5.76) strikeout-to-walk ratio. He has a cumulative 2.02 ERA and 0.883 WHIP.

Scouting Reports

Jonathan Mayo at MLB Pipeline provided a scouting report on Sasaki in a piece back in mid-November. That piece included the following pair of quotes from two different MLB scouting directors.

“He’s as good as advertised. He has an ideal projectable, lean and athletic frame. He has excellent arm action and delivery, with three plus power pitches with control over command. He has No. 1 upside.”

“In my opinion, he’s a top-end starter. I wouldn’t say he’s Ohtani, but from a pitching standpoint, it’s very comparative. I’ve been seeing him since he was 19 and saw him on the national team. It’s an explosive arm.”

Mayo went on to break down each of Sasaki’s pitches.

Fastball: “It’s at least a 70 on the 20-to-80 scouting scale, and depending on when you saw it, it might get the rarely spotted 80. It’s been up to 102 mph in the past and averaged 98.8 mph (96-100 more often than not) in ’23 with some armside run. In 2024, it averaged 96.8 mph (95-99 most of the time).”

Splitter: “88-90 mph range…kills spin with it…comes out of his hand looking like his heater until it falls off the table. It produced an absurd 57.1 percent whiff rate in ’24. The Major League average whiff rate on the splitter this past season was 34.5 percent.”

Slider: “Sasaki’s “third” pitch but some scouts grade it out as above-average, if not plus…missed bats with it at a 40.7 percent rate, throwing it in the 83-85 mph range.”

In February 2024, Brandon Tew at Sports Information Solutions provided these comments after seeing every Sasaki start over the 2022-23 campaigns.

“Sasaki’s splitter is his best pitch, and it might be the best splitter in the world…racks up the whiffs and chases at an astronomical rate…darts toward the ground at the last second, as it holds plane with his fastball. It creates a tunnel effect that is hard to decipher, especially down in the zone with his four-seam.”

The consensus around baseball is that Sasaki has a chance to become a true ace as he continues to develop. He should be able to step right into a big-league starting rotation this coming season and immediately prove to be an important member of any staff.

Injury Concerns

Sasaki’s stuff took a step backwards in the 2024 season. His four-seam fastball velocity dipped from comfortably above 98 mph the prior two seasons to just under 97 mph last year. And his strikeout rate dropped precipitously from 24% in 2023 to just above the 13% mark in 2024.

Due to a series of injuries, Sasaki has never thrown as many as 130 innings during any of his four NBP seasons. He missed over half of the 2023 campaign with an oblique injury. Then last season an arm injury that was never fully explained caused him to miss more time.

Even if healthy, Sasaki is likely to be eased into an MLB starting rotation. He could perhaps be utilized as part of a six-man rotation with his outings limited in most starts to the six-inning mark.

Who Gets Him?

What had been a list of roughly eight finalists was whittled down this week to a final three. Those teams reportedly are the Los Angeles Dodgers, San Diego Padres, and Toronto Blue Jays.

One factor the teams have to consider is the allotment of their international signing pool money. It is likely that Sasaki’s agent, Joel Wolfe, will be seeking as much of that pool money as possible.

Bonus pool money can be traded to some extent, which has created interesting possibilities for the three contending clubs looking to increase their offers to Sasaki and other clubs looking to acquire prospect assets or big-league players.

“We’re sitting quietly, waiting for teams to call us, because we have international money that we’d be happy to trade, but we value that money,” said one anonymous club executive to The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal. “If we’re trading it to you to get Sasaki, that should garner some sort of return that has legitimate value.”

Whoever lands Roki Sasaki will be getting a supremely talented young arm. Based on all the scouting reports and projects the Japanese righty should be a productive starting pitcher in MLB for years to come.

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