Your Local SEO and Digital Marketing Experts in San Diego County
Roki Sasaki has returned to Japan after completing his initial round of meetings with interested teams, agent Joel Wolfe said in a conference call with reporters on Monday afternoon. Per Sasaki’s request, all the meetings occurred on a level playing field — at Wolfe’s Los Angeles office — and teams’ participants were limited to front office executives, managers, pitching coaches and sports performance and training staff.
In other words, the people who will have a direct hand in the 23-year-old’s acclimation to Major League Baseball.
“Roki is by no means a finished product,” Wolfe said. “He knows it and the teams know it. He’s incredibly talented. … but he is a guy that wants to be great. He’s not coming here just to be rich or to get a huge contract. He wants to be great. He wants to be one of the greatest ever.”
Toward that end, participating teams — which included the Padres, a team source confirmed for the Union-Tribune — were asked to complete a homework assignment for the meeting. While Wolfe declined to discuss the specifics, it was tailored to allow teams to “show how they can analyze and communicate information with him,” Wolfe said, “and really showed where he was coming from in analyzing and creating his selection criteria in looking at different teams.”
Wolfe declined to specify the number of teams that met with Sasaki in Los Angeles in order to protect the integrity of the international signing period that begins on Jan. 15. The next phase, which will likely run up until his signing, could include narrowing teams to finalists and perhaps city visits.
Posting rules dictate that Sasaki has until Jan. 23 to make his decision. Nippon Professional Baseball’s Chiba Lotte Marines posted Sasaki during the winter meetings, triggering the start of a 45-day window for MLB teams to court the next potential superstar jumping from Japan to the United States.
Twenty teams, Wolfe said, responded to his initial request for information with a plethora of video, PowerPoint presentations and even books that likely required “hundreds of hours” of work on Sasaki’s career and background.
It was Sasaki who requested that no players participate in the in-person meetings, though some teams’ sent video messages from players. Because what Sasaki can sign for is capped by international amateur rules — he falls under that jurisdiction because he’s younger than 25 — it’s only beginning to become clear what his preferences are in picking a landing spot, even to Wolfe.
“We’ve had numerous conversations about team location, market size, team success, things like that,” Wolfe said. “He doesn’t seem to look at it in the typical way that other players do. He has a more long-term, global view of things. I believe Roki is also very interested in the pitching development and how a team is going to help him get better, both in the near future and over the course of his career.”
Wolfe added that Sasaki wasn’t overly concerned about whether a team had other Japanese players, as is the case with the Padres (Yu Darvish, Yuki Matsui), the Dodgers (Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto) and the Cubs (Shota Imanaga), among others.
“That was never a topic of discussion,” Wolfe said.
Why now certainly was.
Sasaki has won 30 games over four years in Japan, striking out 524 batters over 414 ⅓ innings (2.02 ERA, 0.88 WHIP) in becoming one of the country’s premier talents.
As such, he would have been in line for a major payday had he waited two more years to jump to the States, as Yamamoto did in netting a 12-year, $325 million deal from the Dodgers last winter. Instead, Sasaki will be coming to the majors after next month’s international signing window opens and will be limited to those guidelines as an under-25 player. Under those rules, the most that Sasaki could collect is $7.56 million from the eight teams in the top tier. The Padres are among the 12 teams in the third tier ($6.26 million), while the Dodgers and Giants have only $5.15 million to spend — although teams can acquire additional pool money through trades.
The Padres did this last spring to sign Humberto Cruz out of Mexico because they’d been docked for signing Xander Bogaerts as a luxury tax offender.
Organizations had been working for years on the 2025 international class; Sasaki’s decision to come to the United States threw a curveball in teams’ plans.
In addition to the Padres, the Dodgers, Mets, Yankees, Cubs, Giants and Rangers are teams that have reportedly met in person with Sasaki.
“I think his experience at WBC, being around Darvish, being around Ohtani, and then seeing Imanaga come over and dominate at such a level in the first half,” Wolfe said, “I believe he realized … in order to take it to the next level, he had to come here, play against the best players in the world every day and tap into all the resources that major league teams have to … help him become one of the best pitchers to ever, not just come out of NBP, but to be one of the best pitchers in Major League Baseball.”
Notable
- The Padres have signed reliever Logan Gillaspie and infielder Mason McCoy to minor-league deals. Both were non-tendered at the start of the offseason to remove them from the 40-man roster.
- Mike Nutter, team president of the Padres’ high Single-A affiliate in Fort Wayne, Ind., was named the Citizen of the Year by The Journal Gazette for bringing the TinCaps national recognition and keeping Parkview Field as a focal point of downtown’s renaissance.
Originally Published:
Your Local SEO and Digital Marketing Experts in San Diego County