Dodgers Complete Japanese Hurler Trifecta with Roki Sasaki Signing
By wchung | 17 Jan, 2025

Baseball's most coveted free agent gambles on a minor league contract with the World Series champions.

The $6.5 million Roki Sasaki is thought to be getting under last Friday's minor-league deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers is chump change compared with the billion-plus total the team committed to its recent deals for Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.  That relative pittance also belies the two months of quiet furor set off in the entire MLB by Sasaki's November 9, 2024 free agency announcement.

By jumping from Nippon Professional Baseball to MLB at the age of 23, and before racking up six years of professional play, Sasaki's near-term earning potential was held down by the bonus pool limit on international signings.  But money isn't top of mind for the 6-4 righthander.  

“He’s not coming here just to be rich or to get a huge contract," agent Joel Wolfe told Sports Illustrated.  "He wants to be great. He wants to be one of the greatest ever.”

And Sasaki's own Instagram post gushed like a humble fanboy about the prospect of slipping into a Dodgers jersey.  He expressed the hope that at the end of his career he would look back with satisfaction at this difficult decision at this fork in his career.

Speaking of forks, Sasaki's forkball (or splitter) — his most effective pitch notwithstanding his 102.5 mph fastball — is credited with a league-leading 57.1% whiff rate.  The highest rate for an MLB starter is Mariners’ Logan Gilbert's 50.6%.  The most impressive of Sasaki's creds is the perfect game he pitched in April 2022 against the Orix Buffaloes in which he racked up 13 straight kills.  That's 3 more than the 10 straight that tops the MLB stat.

By the reckoning of a team that had to win the 2024 World Series by cobbling together a starting lineup of relievers for four of the five games, Sasaki is prayer answered to fill the 5th slot in a five- or six-man rotation. It is also likely to consolidate the Dodgers' highly lucrative status as the favorite MLB team among Japan's hundred million or so avid baseball fans, a bigger following than it can claim in its home market.

For all his current glory and success, Roki Sasaki is a product of tragedy.  He was born in 2001 in Iwate Prefecture on Japan's northeastern coast.  The tsunami unleashed by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake washed away his family home, killing his father and grandparents.  His mother had to move with him and two brothers to a nursing home where they lived until they were able to move to another town.

A 101 mph fastball in high school earned him the title "Monster of the Reiwa Era" which stuck with him through his 4-year career with the Chiba Lotte Marines between the 2020 and 2024 seasons.