For the third time in 13 months, the Dodgers are signing a superstar from Japan.
And this time it’s coming at a discount, with the club on Friday striking an agreement to sign 23-year-old pitcher Roki Sasaki for a $6.5-million signing bonus, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly.
Sasaki announced he was signing with the Dodgers in a post on Instagram.
A hard-throwing right-hander with a tantalizing splitter-slider repertoire, Sasaki was posted last month by his Nippon Professional Baseball league club, the Chiba Lotte Marines, and effectively became eligible to sign Wednesday, when the international signing period opened.
Because he is not yet 25, MLB international signing rules limited him to taking a minor-league contract; similar to when Shohei Ohtani first signed with the Angels out of Japan for $2.3 million in 2018.
The situation made Sasaki a prized target for the Dodgers and much of the rest of the majors this winter, adding to the value of a pitcher with a 2.10 ERA in four seasons in Japan. Under his restrictions, Sasaki will be under team control at a minimal salary for six seasons. Given his promise as a budding star, it made him one of the most coveted players on this free-agent market.
The Dodgers always were seen as his most likely destination. They have a track record of winning, coming off their second World Series title in five seasons and 11th division title since 2013. They’re renowned for their ability to develop pitchers (a recent trend of injuries notwithstanding). And they boast two former Team Japan teammates of Sasaki in Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who signed a 12-year, $325-million deal last offseason as an unrestricted free agent from Japan.
Had Sasaki waited two more years, he might have been able to rival Yamamoto’s deal — the most for a pitcher, excluding Ohtani, in MLB history. However, Sasaki’s dream has been to play in the majors, according to his agent, Joel Wolfe, of Wasserman Media Group. And now, he’ll realize it in a Dodgers uniform, presumably beginning with the team’s season-opening trip to Tokyo in March.
The Dodgers didn’t exactly need Sasaki to shore up their World Series title defense. After nearly being derailed by pitching problems in the postseason, they signed two-time Cy Young Award winner Blake Snell in free agency, are expecting the return of Ohtani, Tony Gonsolin and Dustin May from injuries, and are banking on better health from Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow. Also, Clayton Kershaw is expected to re-sign.
Lacking starting pitching, they were not.
Sasaki, though, gives the team a piece all clubs covet: elite young pitching on a cost-controlled salary scale.
Sasaki could make as little as the league minimum in his first couple of seasons, then earn annual raises through arbitration. Over Ohtani’s six seasons in Anaheim, for comparison, the two-way star made less than $40 million while winning two most valuable player awards. Sasaki has the potential to be an equally stunning bargain.
Though money wasn’t the main factor in Sasaki’s decision, the Dodgers did have some financial constraints to work around. While they had the most money remaining in their international bonus pool for last year’s class, Sasaki and his agents (in conjunction with guidance from MLB) decided the pitcher wouldn’t sign until the 2025 period, in order “to make sure this was going to be a fair and level playing field for everyone,” Wolfe said.
Because of luxury tax-related penalties, the Dodgers’ $5.1-million bonus pool tied for the smallest in the majors, behind some teams with upward of $7.5 million to spend. Yet, they were among the handful of teams granted a first-round interview with Sasaki at Wasserman’s Southern California offices last month. And this week, while other clubs such as the San Francisco Giants, New York Yankees and New York Mets were informed they were out of the running, the Dodgers were saving their international bonus pool money.
Several top Latin American prospects expected to sign with the Dodgers ultimately landed elsewhere, after the team communicated to its commits that they would have to wait to sign until the Sasaki sweepstakes concluded. Meanwhile, the team explored potential trades to acquire more bonus pool money.
That made the Dodgers a clear contender, but they weren’t the only ones.
The San Diego Padres had long been seen as the Dodgers’ biggest rival in Sasaki’s free agency. Like the Dodgers, they had a former World Baseball Classic teammate in veteran pitcher Yu Darvish. And despite a recent ownership dispute that led to a lawsuit filed last week, their on-field product remained strong, giving Sasaki another West Coast contender with Japanese ties to consider.
The Toronto Blue Jays also emerged as a finalist. The pitcher held a second round of meetings with all three teams in the last week.
Earlier Friday, speculation around the Blue Jays’ pursuit heated up when they acquired an extra $2 million in bonus pool money from a trade with Cleveland, giving Toronto more than $3 million more to spend on a potential signing bonus.
All roads, however, eventually led back to Los Angeles — where the Dodgers on Friday also acquired additional bonus pool money in a trade with the Philadelphia Phillies for outfield prospect Dylan Campbell, according to a person with knowledge of the situation not authorized to speak publicly.
The Dodgers’ pitch to Sasaki was strong from several angles. Their newfound popularity in Japan — borne from the signings of Ohtani and Yamamoto, and lucrative in the potential marketing opportunities they provide for players such as Sasaki — helped them. So did their talent-rich roster and track record for helping pitchers develop.
When the team held its second meeting with Sasaki, star players were in attendance, underscoring the club’s message as being the premier destination in Major League Baseball. And now, Sasaki will have the chance to immediately compete for a World Series, becoming an instant factor in their title defense.
In Sasaki, the Dodgers will get a 6-foot-3 hurler armed with all the tools needed for big-league success. His fastball has topped out at 102-plus mph, according to scouting reports, and averages in the upper 90s.
Sasaki’s best two breaking pitches, a late-biting splitter and steadily improving slider, also have enamored scouts during his Japanese career, which included two All-Star selections and a perfect game in 2022. Dodgers evaluators have long rated Sasaki as one of the best pitchers in the world, devoting considerable international scouting efforts to him in recent years.
Sasaki endured deep personal tragedy in his childhood, when his father and grandparents were killed in a tsunami in 2011 when he was only 9. That backstory added to the support and popularity he received in his home country as a young player rising to stardom. But it also increased the spotlight he faced from the nation’s vast array of media and tabloid outlets.
When Sasaki began contemplating his early jump to MLB — a controversial decision to many in Japan, especially for a pitcher who had amassed 100 innings only twice in his career — the public pressures the pitcher faced intensified, according to Wolfe.
“There’s been a lot of negativity in the media directed at him because he has expressed interest at going to play for MLB at such a young age,” Wolfe said. “That’s considered in Japan to be very disrespectful and sort of swimming upstream.”
Yet after he stayed put in Japan amid rumors of a potential posting last offseason, Chiba Lotte announced in November it would allow him to leave.
“From the time he joined the organization, we were told by him of his dream to play in America,” Chiba Lotte’s general manager, Naoki Matsumoto, said in Japanese in a release. “Taking into account the last five years as a whole, we have decided to prioritize his thoughts. We are hoping he does his best as a representative of Japan. We are cheering for him.”
In that same announcement, Sasaki set a new goal for himself too.
“So that I don’t have regrets in my one and only baseball career, and so that I can respond to the expectations of those who gave me a push in the back, I do my best to rise from a minor league contract,” he said, “to become the No. 1 player in the world.”
Those lofty ambitions match Sasaki’s lofty potential. And, as they had been hoping for so long, the Dodgers are the team with whom he chose to try to achieve them, putting a celebratory bow on yet another blockbuster offseason.
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