Our long wait is finally over. After being released by the Chiba Lotte Mariners of Nippon Professional Baseball on November 9, Rōki Sasaki has finally signed with an MLB team, agreeing to an international minor league contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers that comes with a signing bonus of 6, 5 million US dollars.
Japanese star Roki Sasaki has signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers, he announced on Instagram. The 23-year-old right-hander with a sizzling fastball and a deadly splitter joins Samurai Japan teammates Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto with the World Series champion Dodgers.
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) January 17, 2025
Despite a last-ditch effort from the Toronto Blue Jays and an earlier suggestion that the Padres might have been a tempting option, Sasaki ultimately settled on the destination many had predicted for him from the start and will be the latest big-name free agent , who joins him in the new evil empire of the Dodgers.
While the Dodgers’ deep financial resources and willingness to defer millions of dollars have made them incredibly attractive to many free agents, there was a belief that Sasaki’s status as an international free agent could level the playing field. Any team that wanted to sign him was only eligible to offer him the money they had in their 2025 international signing pool. Other teams offered more money and more job security in the rotation, including the Blue Jays, who had over $2 million more in offer than the Dodgers, but in the end none of that mattered. Sasaki ended up with the Dodgers, which might have always been the case months ago when the process began.
What does it all mean?
At the start of this offseason I wrote an article breaking down Sasaki’s resumehis pitch mix and why so many teams lined up to sign him. So I recommend you check that out if you want a detailed breakdown of who he is as a talent. In this article, we’ll focus more on what this means for the Dodgers, the teams that hit and missed on the Japanese right-hander, and Sasaki’s fantasy value in 2025.
What does this mean? the Dodgers?
The Dodgers did not sign Sasaki to play in the minor leagues, so it is expected that he will join the MLB rotation from the start of the season. This improves the Dodgers from a great rotation to, well, great rotation. But whenever you can add a pitcher who has a 2.02 ERA with a 0.88 WHIP and 524 strikeouts to 91 walks in 414.2 innings over the last four seasons, you know you’re improving your rotation.
However, the Dodgers appear prepared to utilize a six-man rotation. They added Blake Snell to their roster this offseason, but Yoshinobu Yamamoto struggled with injuries last year, Shohei Ohtani is in his first year of pitching after coming back from Tommy John surgery, and Tyler Glasnow ended last year on the IL with an elbow problem Tony Gonsolin missed all of last season due to injury, and young pitchers Bobby Miller and Dustin May missed significant time last year due to injury. Whether the Dodgers start the year with a true six-man rotation or reconfigure their rotation throughout the year to keep innings under control, it’s safe to assume that the aforementioned starters are all of some sort Have innings monitoring.
That should also apply to Sasaki, who pitched just 91 innings in 2023 due to an oblique injury and then dealt with some upper-body fatigue issues in 2024 that limited him to 111 innings. He also had only thrown 129 1/3 innings in a fully healthy 2022 season, so it’s safe to assume the Dodgers will be cautious with his workload in 2025. While it may not be a hard innings cap, it would still be a challenge to assume over 150 innings for every Dodgers starter in 2025.
What does this mean for the Blue Jays?
It’s another heartbreak for the Blue Jays team that finished second in the pursuit of Shohei Ohtani, Juan Soto and Corbin Burnes. While the Blue Jays mostly have a full rotation and starting pitching won’t be a weakness for them in 2025, Sasaki would have given them a young potential ace to complement an aging and declining rotation led by Kevin Gausman, Jose Berrios, Support, and Chris Bassitt.
Signing Sasaki would also have been a huge benefit for the Blue Jays as they try to convince Vladimir Guerrero Jr. to stay in Toronto long-term. The Blue Jays even went so far as to take over the remaining $14 million of Myles Straw’s contract from Cleveland in exchange for more international signing bonuses they could offer Sasaki.
It still wasn’t enough and the Blue Jays are now looking for more than $10 million from Straw’s contract. If that prevents them from acquiring more talent this offseason, it will be another major blow to the Blue Jays.
Where should Rōki Sasaki be drafted in the 2025 fantasy baseball drafts?
In some ways, this was the best landing spot for Sasaki because the team context couldn’t have been better. However, the aforementioned innings concerns and crowded rotation will make his workload a bit riskier than if he had signed in San Diego or Toronto. We also have some potential concerns that I laid out in my article (linked above) that Sasaki also saw a decline in both the movement and velocity of his fastball in 2024 as he struggled with arm fatigue. If that speed doesn’t come back immediately, we’ll have to adjust our expectations for the pitcher Sasaki will be in 2025.
Still, I would easily take Sasaki 1.1 in First Year Player Drafts and place him in the top 50 overall in Dynasty formats.
Sasaki posted better numbers than Yamamoto in Japan, and Yamamoto finished his first season with the Dodgers with a 3.00 ERA, 1.11 WHIP and 105 strikeouts in 90 innings. Sasaki’s 28.4% K-BB% over the last three seasons in Japan is 6% better than Shohei Ohtani, Yu Darvish and Yoshinobu Yamamoto when they arrived. Since Ohtani has an MLB ERA of 3.01 and Yu Darvish has an MLB ERA of 3.58, it seems reasonable to assume that Sasaki can reach a low 3.00 ERA if he comes to the United States. It’s an imperfect comparison, but as a baseline it’s not a bad guide to the kind of stat line Sasaki is capable of.
In my article earlier this offseason breaking down Sasaki’s pitch mix, I projected that he would finish with an ERA of around 3.10 to 3.30 and a strikeout rate of around 28 to 29%. Now that he’s officially landed with the Dodgers, I think we can project him to pitch somewhere between 130 and 140 innings for these stats. That could give him about 10 wins and 160 total strikeouts, which would put him close to what Tyler Glasnow managed in 2024 when he had a 3.49 ERA, 0.95 WHIP, nine wins and 168 strikeouts. According to FanGraphs Player Rater, that was good enough for SP20 this year.
You might want to think of Sasaki as Luis Gil with slightly better odds, as Gil struck out 171 batters in 151 innings but had a 3.50 ERA and a 1.19 WHIP. Gil finished as SP26 on the FanGraphs Player Rater, so you’re probably still expecting Sasaki to finish around SP18-22.
Now, this prediction is conservative, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable. The innings limitations will be real and while there is a chance that Sasaki will come stateside and dominate, we have yet to see a foreign pitcher have a season like Paul Skenes in his first taste of MLB action. Could it happen? Sure, but I don’t believe in paying for it to happen.
How works Does Rōki Sasaki have an impact on the rest of the Dodgers rotation?
I’m not sure we can say with certainty that Sasaki landing with the Dodgers impacts every pitcher’s fantasy value. As I mentioned above, there are injury question marks with many of the starters in the Dodgers’ rotation, and it would have been risky to assume that any of them would have handled a full season’s worth of workload. We know Ohtani will be closely watched in his first year back from Tommy John surgery, so Sasaki’s presence shouldn’t have an impact on Ohtani’s innings totals.
Snell, Glasnow and Yamamoto expect to stay on the leash as long as they can during the season, but Glasnow has always had injury concerns, so projecting him for more than 130 or 140 innings is a risk, regardless , whether Sasaki is his teammate or not.
That means the pitchers most impacted by this are the pitchers we never expected to commit to a rotation spot anyway. Guys like Landon Knack, Dustin May, Tony Gonsolin and Bobby Miller are now limited to the Flyers at the bottom of the draft because they don’t have the chance to have a great spring training and earn a rotation spot early in the season. The signing of Sasaki could also be a sign that Dustin May, who has battled injuries throughout his career, could end up in the bullpen, where his 100-mph sinker and slider could make him an effective late-inning reliever .
Whatever the consequences, we saw that the Dodgers had “too many pitchers” early in the season and many of them still found a way not to pitch a full season, so we shouldn’t change our evaluations of each other adjust people, too much at the moment.
Are there broader implications for MLB?
The international signing deadline needs to be changed. We knew this before, but Sasaki’s free reign only reinforced it. He was a professional for four seasons in one of the best leagues in the world, but was placed in the international amateur signing phase due to his age. While some people might argue that this process gave every team a fair chance to sign him because they could only offer him what was in their international signing pool, we know that’s not true. Money was not a deciding factor for Sasaki as he currently has a minor league contract that can be renegotiated later to balance the budget of the organization that signed him.
What actually happened was that we had a specific timeline set for Sasaki’s free agent process, which dragged the whole thing out. We also had several teams hold off on signing their international free agents (who are actually amateurs) or tell them they needed to find other teams to sign with. It may seem like a small thing, but Major League Baseball definitely needs to address this if more players from foreign leagues want to try to come to the states when they are younger.