Offseason Notebook - Roki Sasaki
A look at Roki Sasaki and how to value him for fantasy baseball 2025
Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but Japanese players transferring over to the MLB seems to be all the rage now. This has happened for decades, of course, but these last few offseasons, we have seen major names coming over - including some very young names.
We have quite possibly the most electric player becoming available since Shohei Ohtani. He is a 23-year-old right-handed pitcher who will become an MLB free agent in the coming weeks. Let’s check the numbers:
2022: 129 IP, 2.02 ERA, 0.796 WHIP, 12.0 K/9, 1.6 BB/9, 0.5 HR/9
2023: 91 IP, 1.88 ERA, 0.747 WHIP, 13.4 K/9, 1.7 BB/9, 0.1 HR/9
2024: 111 IP, 2.35 ERA, 1.036 WHIP, 10.5 K/9, 2.6 BB/9, 0.2 HR/9
To put those numbers in perspective, here are the league average:
3.04 ERA, 1.187 WHIP, 7.1 K/9, 2.7 BB/9, 0.6 HR/9
What you probably noticed above is the lack of innings in 2023 and then the much worse performance in 2024. The guy has a history of injuries, and some shoulder fatigue and oblique issues undoubtedly hurt him last season.
What makes this different than the Yamamoto situation last year is that Sasaki only qualifies to sign a minor league deal since he has not turned 25 yet. Turning 25 changes things for a Japanese player and gets rid of that cap. I suppose this is in place to help the Japanese League not lose all of their young talent immediately. You would usually see guys wait until 25 so they can get that huge payday, but in this case, he’s coming now. That means all teams will technically be in the running; the Dodgers can’t just outright bully 90% of the league out with a $100 million dollar. That probably doesn’t really change anything since some theoretical extension talk will certainly be part of the story. But just know that there are more possible suitors here than the Yamamoto situation. There is more detail on all of this stuff in this MLBTR article.
To focus on Sasaki, the player, he appears to be a lot like Yamamoto. His fastball touches triple-digits, and he pairs that up with a splitter. Here’s a look at one of his outings from the World Baseball Classic in 2023:
That was a big game where he was probably a bit extra juiced up, but you can see the easy velo there on the fastball as he averaged 100.5 and touched 101.9. Crazy stuff. We saw in the beginning of this post how few walks he gave up, and that suggests he has strong command of the splitter as well.
It’s pretty clear that Sasaki will be one of the MLB’s best pitchers right away. Few guys have this kind of fastball velocity to go with a splitter that they can land for strikes.
The difference with him is the history of injuries. We saw that derail Yamamoto’s first season in the Majors last year, and we also saw last year that high fastball velocity may very well be correlated with elbow and shoulder injuries.
I don’t know the guy, and anything can happen since it won’t take much money to sign him - but the Dodgers would seem to be the overwhelming favorite. The Dodgers have three things no other team has:
Shohei Ohtani
Yoshinobu Yamamoto
The World Series Trophy
And one thing that very few other teams have: the willingness to give out insane contracts. Sasaki is basically already a Dodger, as far as I’m concerned, but we’ll see.
For fantasy purposes, he feels a lot like Tyler Glasnow. I would view him as a pitcher whose only question is his health. If he’s healthy, he’ll pitch like an ace. That’s the nice thing about pitchers starting with the ball - you can much more easily predict if their stuff will play in the Major Leagues. A 101-mile-per-hour fastball in Japan is a 101-mile-per-hour fastball in America, and no hitter anywhere can do much with a 101-mile-per-hour fastball. I’d be much less confident about a hitter who would suddenly be facing a whole different level of pitching. Pitchers are facing a different level of hitters, yes, but they start with the ball - they just do what they do, and we can use the previous data to figure out if that will work or not. You can’t do that with hitters.
Sasaki is an ace, and I think he should be drafted as a top-25 starter immediately. That doesn’t help many of you right now, but there are those insane NFBC drafts going on, so if you want to jump in and see if you can get a discount on him - there you go.
Love the offseason content!