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Roki Sasaki (Photo by Kenta Harada/Getty Images)
What do you get the World Series champions as a gift?
The best prospect in baseball.
Japanese righthander Roki Sasaki announced on Friday evening that he will be signing with the Dodgers. That ends months of speculation surrounding the 100-mph flamethrower’s ultimate decision, as he chose the team he’d long been expected to join.
Sasaki’s final three options came down to the Padres, Blue Jays and Dodgers, but the Dodgers had long been considered the favorites, even if the argument could be made that they are the team least in need of his services.
The 23-year-old has flashed some of the best pure stuff seen anywhere in the world, even if he’s still working to develop the durability and consistency to pair with a 100 mph fastball and a devastating splitter.
This gives the Dodgers the deepest rotation possibly in baseball history.
With the Dodgers, he will join a rotation that includes Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Shohei Ohtani and Tyler Glasnow as well as likely one of Bobby Miller, Dustin May, Tony Gonsolin, Landon Knack, Justin Wrobeleski and Nick Frasso filling out a sixth rotation spot, if Clayton Kershaw doesn’t re-sign.
The rest of that group is set to go to Triple-A as rotation depth, giving the Dodgers a Triple-A rotation that will likely be better than some teams’ big league rotations. Every one of that Triple-A group has started in the majors. It also doesn’t include River Ryan, Emmett Sheehan and Gavin Stone, who will be sidelined as the rehab from injuries.
Los Angeles has 13 plausible MLB starters on their current roster, which doesn’t include Kershaw, who could still re-sign with the team.
Snell is a multiple-time Cy Young winner. Glasnow was a 2024 all-star. Yamamoto was a three-time Pacific League MVP and Sawamura Award winner in Japan. Ohtani finished fourth in American League Cy Young voting in 2022.
And Sasaki has already thrown arguably the best back-to-back games in baseball history. As a 20-year-old, he threw a 19-strikeout perfect game where only two balls left the infield to beat Orix in 2022. In his next game, he threw eight perfect innings against Hokkaido before Chiba Lotte lifted him from the game because of his pitch count. The Marines lost the perfect game after Sasaki was pulled, but he came within three outs of throwing the first…