NEW YORK (AP) — Prized Japanese free agent Roki Sasaki may visit one or two teams before deciding which club he wants to sign with.
Sasaki's agent, Joel Wolfe, said Monday that 20 Major League Baseball clubs submitted information to the 23-year-old right-hander, who listened this month to presentations along with his team of supporters at the Los Angeles office of Wasserman Media Group.
Sasaki returned to Japan and is considering along with family and advisers how he wants to proceed ahead of his signing window, which runs from Jan. 15-23. Wolfe said Sasaki is likely to narrow the field but might meet with one or two more clubs and could visit one or two cities.
“He is definitely driving the ship and calling the shots. Roki is a very driven and intelligent and particular person. I’ve learned a lot about why he wanted to come to MLB right now and so badly,” Wolfe said during a 20-minute Zoom session with reporters. “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. I see that now that.”
Sasaki has reportedly met with the New York Yankees and New York Mets, Los Angeles Dodgers, Chicago Cubs, Texas and San Francisco. Wolfe said during the winter meetings he assumed Sasaki will “seriously consider” San Diego.
He did not specify which teams Sasaki met with but said clubs were not prohibited from publicly discussing their meetings.
“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 the more long-term, global view of things. I believe Roki is also very interested in 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 said each meeting had a two-hour limit and the sessions were attended by general managers, assistant general managers, managers, pitching coaches and members of biomechanics, performance and training staffs. Teams were told not to bring players but some included one or two players in video presentations.
“He didn't seem overly concerned about whether a team had Japanese players on their team or not, which in the past as I've represented Japanese players that was sometimes an issue,” Wolfe said.
Because Sasaki is under 25, he is limited to a minor league contract subject to the 2025 international signing bonus pools. Team figures range from $7,555,500 to $5,146,200, though they can start trading allocation in $250,000 increments starting Jan. 15. They are limited to adding 60% of their initial amount available.
Shohei Ohtani went through a similar system when he signed with the Los Angeles Angels for a $2,315,000 bonus ahead of the 2018 season.
“When he first came over it took him many years to get settled as a player and I’m sure personally as well,” Wolfe said. “Roki is by no means a finished product. He knows it and the team know it. He's incredibly talented. We all know that.”
Wolfe said some teams had spent months working on their presentations. They were delivered to his office electronically, FedEx and even by hand.
“While quality and the uniqueness varied, it was really something," Wolfe said. “It was like the Roki Film Festival. There were highly in-depth PowerPoint presentations, short films, some teams made actual books. ... They had people that clearly spent hundreds of hours researching Roki and his personal background, his professional background.”
Each team Sasaki met with was given what Wasserman said the pitcher termed an identical “homework assignment.”
“It was a great opportunity for the teams to really show what they specialize in,” Wolfe said. “It showed how they can analyze and communicate information with him and really showed where he was coming from in analyzing and creating his selection criteria in looking at different teams.”
Wolfe said Sasaki decided he wanted to leave the Chiba Lotte Marines of Nippon Professional Baseball’s Pacific League after playing alongside Ohtani, Yu Darvish and Shota Imanaga as Japan won the 2023 World Baseball Classic and watching Imanaga dominate on the mound with the Chicago Cubs in the first half of the 2024 season.
If Sasaki waited until after the 2026 season to sign with an MLB team, he could sign a major league contract as a free agent, possibly for hundreds of millions of dollars.
“I’m speaking my own opinion," Wolfe said: "He realized in order to take it to the next level he had to come here to 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.”
AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/mlb
FILE - Roki Sasaki, of Japan, pitches during their Pool B game against the Czech Republic at the World Baseball Classic at the Tokyo Dome in Japan Saturday, March 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko, File)
