by Cary Osborne
Roki Sasaki was a senior at Ofunato High School in Iwate Prefecture, Japan, in March 2019 when Galen Carr saw him pitch in person for the first time.
It was at the beginning of the Dodgers’ work to learn more about the teenage sensation who was drawing hordes of scouts from Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball league.
Carr, then director and now vice president of player personnel for the Dodgers, recalls nearly six years later how “blown away” he was.
“It was a hyper-mobile athlete. Just folds up so easily, and he has long limbs and the ball comes out easy. And he’s touching 100 (mph),” Carr recalled. “As an athlete, as a kid with poise and presence on the mound from a raw-stuff standpoint, it was as good as you’ll see from someone that age.”
Carr e-mailed Dodger President of Baseball Operations Andrew Friedman after witnessing Sasaki’s physicality and dominance as a 17-year-old.
“This is it,” Carr recalled saying in the e-mail.
Carr compared the excitement he had to seeing Shohei Ohtani play in high school.
“Those conversations in 2019 were just about how incredibly talented this pitcher from Ofunato is, and someone that we should keep very close on our radar over the coming years,” Friedman recalled of the communication with Carr.
Friedman said there is only one Japanese high school player that he remembers garnering this much attention and following from Major League teams — Ohtani.
Thus, the Dodgers kept their eyes — and focus — on Sasaki, with scouts seeing him “a lot.”
Friedman saw Sasaki pitch once in person. He made the trip to Japan at the end of the 2024 NPB season to see the 23-year-old finish his dominant four-year run in the NPB.
The right-handed pitcher was posted by the Marines on Nov. 9, giving Major League clubs the opening to court him beginning on Dec. 10. Whichever team signed Sasaki would be bringing him in on a Minor League contract because he is considered an international amateur free agent — being that he is under 25 with less than six seasons of foreign professional baseball experience.
The Dodgers were one of the numerous Major League teams that reached out and presented to Sasaki. Sasaki reportedly asked teams why they thought he experienced a slight dip in velocity in 2024.
“There was going to be limited time for me to understand the differences among many teams,” Sasaki explained on Wednesday at his introductory press conference at Dodger Stadium. “I just felt like this homework assignment was a really good opportunity for me to be able to find out how the teams think.”
“For us, we felt like the homework assignment was right in our wheelhouse,” Friedman said. “Our ability to showcase our performance-science group, our training staff, our performance staff, our pitching coaches, how connected those groups are — we felt really highlighted a strength of ours. And so going through this process, we felt like the most important thing was going to be to put our best foot forward. And we felt like we did that.”
On Friday, the Dodgers found out that Sasaki had picked them.
“It was jubilation, just incredible excitement,” Friedman said. “There were a lot of people kind of around outside the offices when we got the text and then the call from (agent) Joel Wolfe. And it immediately kicked into this is a big responsibility to partner with a talent like this and help him in reaching his incredibly lofty goals — which is a lot of responsibility, and it’s something that we are going to take very seriously and do everything in our power to fulfill everything that we said to him in terms of the player care and what we do for players and families and our ability to help make players better.”
Sasaki said there were a lot of appealing features with the Dodgers — one specific being the stability of the front office. He said it wasn’t a priority for him to choose a team that had Japanese-born players. But he is looking forward to reuniting with his 2023 World Baseball Classic teammates Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
Ultimately, Sasaki’s journey as a 23-year-old parallels his journey as a 17-year-old.
In both cases, it’s a player who has garnered immense attention but who is focused on proving himself.
“I’m going to have a lot of new experiences,” Sasaki said. “And since I signed a Minor League contract, my goal is first and foremost to beat the competition and make sure that I do get a Major League contract.”
From the moment they saw Sasaki, he became a priority for the Dodgers was originally published in Dodger Insider on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.