The Roki Sasaki sweepstakes will crown one winner, many potential losers

When Shohei Ohtani signed with the Los Angeles Angels in Dec. 2017, it was seen as a curious career decision. Why would a talented player forego his chance to make hundreds of millions of dollars with his first professional contract by leaving Japan before age 25? The answer, considered likely then, is obvious now: because Ohtani is an anomaly himself.

Six years after signing his original contract with the Angels, Ohtani cashed in with a then-record 10-year, $700 million contract with the Dodgers.

Now, Roki Sasaki is hoping to follow the same path.

A 23-year-old pitcher from Japan, Sasaki has reportedly narrowed his list of finalists to the Dodgers, San Diego Padres and Toronto Blue Jays in his foray into MLB free agency. Like Ohtani, Sasaki will be limited to signing a minor league contract with a paycheck not in excess of a team's international amateur signing bonus pool — up to $7.5 million, approximately.

Unless Sasaki has a hidden talent as a 50-home run hitter, he is not poised to become the same kind of generational baseball talent as Ohtani. Nonetheless, he was unbothered by the idea of forfeiting hundreds of millions of dollars by waiting a couple years to make the leap from Nippon Professional Baseball to MLB.

To some — namely fans in Los Angeles, San Diego and Toronto — Sasaki's anticipated signing is a source of joy.

To others, it's a source of frustration.

Orlando Patiño might never become a household name for the Chicago White Sox, but the Venezuelan outfielder has a few years to try. He was originally set to sign with the Dodgers on Wednesday, when the new signing period for international amateurs began. Now, according to multiple reports, he's flipped his commitment to the Chicago White Sox.

Why? The Dodgers might need all the money they were going to give Patiño — and shortstop Darrell Morel, who effectively "decommitted" and chose to sign with the Pirates — to Sasaki. Or they might not. We don't know yet. Patiño, understandably, wasn't willing to wait and see.

Sasaki's deadline to sign is not until Jan. 23, when his 45-day window to negotiate with MLB teams closes. The Dodgers, Padres, Blue Jays, and all their other international prospects, are playing the same game of wait-and-see.

It's an accident of nomenclature that Sasaki is considered an international "amateur," even though he has been paid by the Chiba Lotte Marines (a professional team in Japan's Nippon Professional Baseball league) to pitch for the last four seasons.

When he was 21, Sasaki's fastball sat 100 mph at the 2023 World Baseball Classic, which Japan won to beat the United States in the championship game. He is already among the game's elite; he merely hasn't lived long enough to meet MLB's definition of a "professional." Therefore he is an amateur.

But the rules around Sasaki (the Jan. 15 signing period, the international amateur spending limits) were never meant to apply to a player like him. They were not written with any caveats for a potential world-class pitcher arriving in MLB as a top-of-the-rotation starter at age 23 — or even with the foreknowledge that such a pitcher could exist.

Sunday, Hector Gomez of Z101 Digital reported that Dominican baseball trainers met to propose that MLB remove professionals like Sasaki from the budget for international amateur players so that their hiring does not affect the signing of prospects from the Dominican Republic and other Latin countries.

As the trainers note, the Latin American amateur players have been banking (perhaps literally) on signing a life-changing contract on Jan. 15, 2025 for years. If decommitting is the only way to go to keep the promise of that paycheck in place, they will — even if it leaves the two finalists that don't sign Sasaki in the lurch.

It's a classic case of two seemingly contradictory truths being applicable in the same instance. It's unlikely a player like Sasaki will ever arrive on the scene again. (Recall, however, that the same was said seven years ago about Ohtani.) It's also true that MLB and the MLB Players Association has a chance to close the loophole by amending the CBA's definition of an "international amateur." The trick there involves threading a careful needle.

The definition of an international amateur must simultaneously exclude players like Sasaki or Ohtani without encouraging them financially to seek a bigger payday in MLB at an earlier age. Otherwise NPB, KBO, and other foreign professional leagues might become mere feeder leagues for the best league in the North America. Baseball fans in Japan and Korea (primarily those two countries) would be deprived of seeing many of their best players overnight.

Nothing can be done to exclude Sasaki from the international signing bonus pools of the Dodgers, Padres or Blue Jays. Any rules change will be too late for him. Only one team can win the Sasaki sweepstakes, but there will be many losers.

For now, this is a problem of uncertainty that affects a few dozen players and their families in Central and Latin America, plus the two teams that won't be able to sign Sasaki, as well as some or all of their anticipated 2025 international amateur class. Let's hope the next Collective Bargaining Agreement addresses this loophole so it never arises again.

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