rewrite this title The Los Angeles Dodgers Have Landed Roki Sasaki

Major League Baseball had its “Kevin Durant is a Warrior” moment on Friday, when 23-year-old Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki agreed to sign with the defending World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers for $6.5 million. Sasaki himself announced his decision via his Instagram, while his bonus was reported on X by The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya and Alden González of ESPN.

If he can stay healthy, Sasaki is a likely front-of-the-rotation arm who has the talent to win Cy Young Awards. When he’s been fully operational, his fastball has averaged nearly 99 mph, he has an elite splitter, and his slider became a useable weapon in 2022. He joins a loaded Dodgers roster that has five or six other players who either have won a Cy Young or MVP (Freddie Freeman, Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Blake Snell), or could conceivably do so in their best season (Tyler Glasnow and maybe Yoshinobu Yamamoto). One and a half of those players weren’t even on last year’s Dodgers title team. As I’m writing this, the Dodgers have not yet announced the signing. Though Sasaki’s contract is technically a minor league deal, and he isn’t yet on the 40-man roster, he is overwhelmingly likely to break camp with the Dodgers’ big league club and be part of their squad that opens the season against the Cubs in Japan on March 18-19.

Sasaki did not have his peak stuff in 2024 (more on that below), but in his four NPB seasons – 414 2/3 IP, 275 H, 0.883 WHIP (lol), 524 K, 91 BB, 2.02 ERA – he has at least met, and arguably exceeded, the all-world expectations foisted upon him since he was in high school. He has been a viewed as a generational talent, the LeBron James of Japanese baseball if you will, since his junior year. His exploits in Japan have been Herculean. Sasaki’s fastball was touching 101 in high school; he once threw nearly 500 pitches in an eight-day span, including a 12-inning, 194-pitch complete game during which he also hit the game-winning two-run homer.

He was the first pick in the 2019 NPB Draft by the Chiba Lotte Marines, had a sub-2.00 ERA in his 2021 rookie season, and then transcended the sport in 2022 when he threw 17 consecutive perfect innings that April. The 6-foot-2 righty retired 52 consecutive batters during that stretch, more than the MLB record of 47. It was at this point that Sasaki became something approaching an international household name. His fastball averaged just shy of 99 mph and touched 103 mph in 2022, making him the hardest-throwing pitcher in the history of NPB. He was having an even better 2023 – 85 IP, 39% K%, 5% BB%, 62% GB%, 1.88 ERA, 0.92 FIP — before he was shut down with an oblique tear that July. It cost him to most of the rest of that season.

Then in 2024, Sasaki missed time with shoulder soreness, and his stuff was down when he pitched. His strikeout-to-walk ratio was roughly halved compared to 2023. Here are some splits illustrating the dip:

His bouts with injury combined with this dip in performance create some risk that we’ve already seen Sasaki’s peak. He’s a spindly guy with a very violent delivery, and injuries could conceivably be something he deals with frequently. This, plus the Dodgers’ unbelievable depth of starting pitchers, means Sasaki can be handled with extreme caution in his first year if the Dodgers so choose. He’ll likely provide premium rate performance and less in terms of innings volume, at least initially. If Sasaki’s fastball returns to its prior level of performance and his body keeps getting stronger into his mid- and late-20s, then we’re talking about a frequent Cy Young candidate in the mold of Kevin Gausman or Nathan Eovaldi, except Sasaki signed for just $6.5 million and is subject to the same six-year window of team control as any other rookie.

The Dodgers began the 2025 International Signing Period with a $5,146,200 bonus pool, tied for the second lowest in baseball. Sasaki’s deal is reportedly for $6.5 million. MLB rules dictate that teams can trade for up to 60% of their original pool space, which puts Los Angeles’ maximum potential pool at just over $8.2 million. The Dodgers made two trades for bonus space on Friday, one with the Phillies (for prospect Dylan Campbell) and one with the Reds (for prospect Arnaldo Lantigua) for a combined total somewhere in the range of $2.25—$2.5 million in additional space. (The specifics of the Phillies deal are unknown but have a $250,000 range.) In the days leading up to the start of the 2025 international signing period on January 15, three prospects who had verbal agreements with the Dodgers changed teams: Darell Morel (Pirates), Oscar Patiño (White Sox), Teilon Serrano (Twins). All three seem to have done so of their own volition — though likely in response to the risk that Sasaki would be a Dodger — and got more money from their new teams than they were slated to receive from Los Angeles. Cuban journalist Francys Romero reported that the Dodgers intend to honor their other agreements, which they’ll have to get done with, at most, roughly $1.7 million (their $8.2 max pool minus Sasaki’s bonus). The ripple effects of Sasaki’s signing — which so far are those prospects’ changing organizations for more money and a couple of bonus space trades that included marginal prospects — have been relatively benign.

Where should Sasaki fall on Ben Clemens’ annual midseason Trade Value rankings? If he’s healthy and productive on a rookie deal, with six years of team control, one could argue he belongs in Paul Skenes and Elly De La Cruz territory, in the middle of the top 10. The surplus value of Sasaki’s deal for the Dodgers is almost incalculable. In addition to his signing bonus and league minimum rookie salary, the Dodgers will need to pay Sasaki’s NPB club, Chiba Lotte Marines, a 20% posting fee of $1.3 million. It makes their first-year outlay for Sasaki about $8.5 million when you include his league-minimum salary. That’s less than the first three picks in the 2024 draft received for their bonuses. Sasaki’s on-field performance is likely to outpace his salary several times over, plus he is also now an intercontinental celebrity in the second-largest media market in the U.S., on the team with the sport’s biggest global star, and generating interest and revenue on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. This is as quintessential an example of “the rich get richer” as you’ll find in sports, where amateur player acquisition is almost always tailored to funnel elite young talent to the bad teams.

Will the concentration of talent in Los Angeles cause meaningful disillusionment among baseball fans? As excited as everyone is to watch Sasaki pitch, our culture tends to tire and make villains of dynastic sports franchises. One of the many (seemingly spurious) things that Sasaki’s agent, Joel Wolfe, stated publicly during a poorly mic’d Winter Meetings press conference was that Sasaki did not have an enjoyable experience with the media in Japan, going so far as to say it might be beneficial for him to land in a small market in order to avoid more of it. Well, now Sasaki has chosen the antithesis of that. He is intentionally moving into the place where the spotlight is already shining brightest, and where most baseball fans look with ire at the reigning champs. Is $6.5 million enough to subject yourself to schadenfreude from swaths of three different countries in the event that the 2025 Dodgers are the 2012 Marlins or 2011 Eagles? Is “begrudging respect” Sasaki’s cultural ceiling? These are much more difficult questions that will take years to answer.