It will likely be at least another couple of weeks before Roki Sasaki, the star 23-year-old pitcher coming to MLB from Japan next season, decides which big-league club he chooses to sign with.
Joel Wolfe, Sasaki’s agent at Wasserman Media Group, said at the winter meetings that the pitcher — who will be restricted to signing a minor-league contract with a modest signing bonus, since he is not yet 25 — will wait until the 2025 international signing period opens on Jan. 15, when clubs will have bonus pool money available to sign him.
In the meantime, though, Sasaki’s list of potential destinations has become increasingly clearer.
Dodgers officials, as expected, met with the hard-throwing right-handed pitcher before the holidays, according to people with knowledge of the situation not authorized to speak publicly. Five other teams are publicly known to have also met with Sasaki: the New York Yankees, New York Mets, Chicago Cubs, Texas Rangers and San Francisco Giants. It’s likely Sasaki’s full list of meetings was longer, too, with other teams like the San Diego Padres seen as contenders for his services. The Philadelphia Phillies are the only team known to have been denied a meeting.
Around much of the industry, the Dodgers are still seen as favorites to land Sasaki.
Their interest in him dates to last offseason, when there was brief hope among some in the organization Sasaki would come to MLB for the 2024 season. Entering this offseason, the Dodgers also had the most money remaining in their 2024 international signing pool; an indication to some around the sport they were saving funds to sign Sasaki.
Ultimately, however, Sasaki decided to wait until the 2025 period to ink his MLB deal — a decision Wolfe said Major League Baseball preferred “to make sure this was going to be a fair and level playing field for everyone.”
Wolfe has strongly denied speculation about Sasaki already having a “predetermined” deal with the Dodgers, or any other team.
Nonetheless, the Dodgers are still viewed as the most logical Sasaki landing place, given their status as defending World Series champions, the presence of fellow Japanese stars — and Sasaki’s WBC teammates — Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and their long track record of pitching development.
If they do land him, on what would effectively be a league-minimum salary, it would only further reinforce an injury-prone rotation that was among the team’s lone weaknesses last season.
