Juan Soto, Corbin Burnes and Alex Bregman are the biggest names of the MLB offseason, but perhaps the most interesting is Roki Sasaki, the 23-year-old Japanese flamethrower who might or might not become available to teams stateside this winter.
For years, the Chiba Lotte Marines star has loomed as the next great import from Nippon Professional Baseball, following in the footsteps of Shohei Ohtani, Yu Darvish, Masahiro Tanaka and Ichiro Suzuki. The date of his arrival, however, is unknown.
Why? Let’s get into that.
Who is Roki Sasaki?
Sasaki is perhaps the most exciting pitching prospect to ever come out of Japan. A native of Rikuzentakata in the Iwate prefecture, he was on MLB teams’ radars when he was in high school before he opted to declare for the NPB draft, in which the Marines won his draft rights in 2019.
Sasaki has since dominated the league, posting a career 2.02 ERA with 524 strikeouts in 414 2/3 innings across four seasons. He doesn’t have the greatest numbers ever by an NPB pitcher (that title probably belongs to Yoshinobu Yamamoto, now of the Los Angeles Dodgers), but Sasaki might be even more intriguing because of an arsenal that Japanese hitters are surely sick of facing.
When did people start learning about Sasaki?
Sasaki was great for a while in Japan, but he started drawing international eyeballs in April 2022, when he threw a 19-strikeout perfect game. It’s not hyperbole to call it the most impressive pitching performance ever.
Sasaki followed that by throwing eight perfect innings and 14 strikeouts in his next start before he was taken out due to workload concerns. That’s when a lot of MLB fans started trying to figure out when he could move stateside.
More attention came during the 2023 World Baseball Classic, in which Sasaki was a member of Team Japan’s vaunted pitching staff that led the country to victory. Sasaki started the semifinal game against Mexico, giving up five hits and three runs and recording three strikeouts against a lineup of mostly MLB hitters.
What can we expect from Sasaki in MLB?
Sasaki is an exciting prospect, but he’s not a perfect prospect.
We can compare Sasaki and Yamamoto. While Sasaki has a bigger frame than Yamamoto, can throw harder than Yamamoto, and has a splitter that outshines Yamamoto’s, Yamamoto came over as the more…