How Roki Sasaki’s Arrival in the MLB Could Upend the Entire 2025 Latin American Signing Class (Video)

Roki Sasaki’s impending arrival in the MLB should be cause for celebration. The 23-year-old Japanese phenom will immediately become one of the must-watch players. Whichever team signs him will have a potential starter for the next six seasons. And Sasaki, the most talented young hurler we’ve ever seen, will be able to showcase his skills at the highest level.

Unfortunately, the story also has a much darker side. And it has very little to do with Sasaki himself.

Sasaki will enter U.S. baseball as a non-American, non-Canadian player under the age of 25 as part of international amateur free agency. The international market is a complicated, often unsavory world in which the vast majority of players involved are Latino teenagers. It is also an incredibly fragile ecosystem built on handshake agreements and verbal promises. That means Sasaki’s entry into the market has the potential to upend much of the 2025 international signing class and leave a tornado of chaos in its wake.

There remains a slim chance that Sasaki will sign within the 2024 international window that ends Dec. 15 – which would make that process much easier – but Commissioner Rob Manfred told reporters on Wednesday that he expects Sasaki to sign in the new year signs. Because his Japanese team, the Chiba Lotte Marines, will receive more money through the deployment in 2025.

But to understand how Sasaki’s entry into the MLB could wreak havoc on the international amateur market, it’s important to first understand how the system works.

Each year, all 30 MLB teams have a set amount of money to spend on signing bonuses for international amateur players, colloquially called the “bonus pool.” The overwhelming majority of these players are Latin teenagers, but every now and then a player like Sasaki or Shohei Ohtani – an established pro from a foreign league who happens to be under 25 – takes the plunge and shakes things up in the system.

The size of each team’s annual budget depends on (1) a club’s market size and (2) whether the club signed a high-paying free agent who received a qualifying offer in the previous year. For the upcoming 2025 window, the Dodgers and Giants have the smallest bonus pool size at $5,146,200, while an octet of teams share the largest sum at $7,555,500.

But while teams can’t officially sign players in the Class of 2025 until Jan. 15, most amateurs have had verbal agreements in place for years, even if such “early contracts” are technically against the rules. In other words, many MLB teams have already allocated their bonus budgets for the upcoming window.

This makes Roki Sasaki – a worthwhile, unexpected prize for the team that signs him – an agent of chaos.

Sasaki’s decision to come to the MLB now rather than in two years, when he would be available to the highest bidder as a traditional free agent, suggests that maximizing his earnings is far from his top priority. The 23-year-old right-hander has to forfeit at least $100 million. However, Sasaki won’t be signing for free, and there’s a real possibility that the difference between $2.5 million and $5 million will end up playing a role.

As a result, and because all agreements for the 2025 amateur window are only verbal for now, a team interested in Sasaki has an incentive to cancel or revise any major agreements currently in place to release bonus funds for the Japanese flamethrower.

Here is a theoretical example. One of the class’s former top players is a Dominican shortstop named Elian Peña, who has a verbal agreement with the New York Mets for a bonus of over $4 million. If the Mets believe they have a great chance with Sasaki and think a few extra million in bonus money could make the difference, they could approach Peña’s representation and try to lower his agreed-upon bonus number.

Peña’s representatives, who have little leverage in the current system, could do one of two things: accept a revised deal from the Mets or resume negotiations with other teams. But while option #2 might make more money, that money may not be available anywhere. Remember that most teams have the majority of their budget already allocated.

Things could get even more complicated and chaotic here, according to sources familiar with the international market.

Teams not seriously involved in the Sasaki sweepstakes, knowing that talented amateurs could come back onto the market at the last minute, could try to renegotiate their own verbal deals to access the discarded players. That could set off a catastrophic domino effect, with clubs and players trying to rework deals at the eleventh hour in a turbulent, frantic game of musical chairs — all because of Sasaki, a pitcher with nearly 400 innings pitched in the league’s second-best league World, somehow falls into the same category as a 16-year-old who hasn’t been paid yet.

Others were skeptical that Sasaki’s arrival would have such a big impact, citing the importance of maintaining relationships with the coaches and agents who work with most of Latin America’s top amateurs. A team backing out of a deal at the last minute could cause lasting discord with one or more of the region’s largest energy brokers.

There’s also the possibility that Sasaki, having already left so much money on the table, doesn’t care too much about his final bonus amount, instead prioritizing whichever team he feels most comfortable with.

Sources said the order of operations surrounding Sasaki and any reductions in bonuses are still unclear. It is unclear whether teams will preemptively renegotiate contracts before Jan. 15, when signings can be completed on day one, or whether they will wait for the fallout from Sasaki’s signing to materialize. But no matter the order, it’s almost certain that at least one unlucky amateur will end up with a smaller bonus because of Sasaki’s strange fit in the system.

The problem with the whole dynamic is that Sasaki and the amateurs seven years younger than him are grouped into the same structure. Sasaki will spend all of 2025 in the major leagues; His 2025 co-signees likely won’t make their debuts until 2030 at the earliest. Sasaki could get Cy Young votes next year. Most international amateurs will spend 2025 in the Dominican Summer League, the lowest tier of professional baseball.

The only other precedent involves soon-to-be three-time MVP Shohei Ohtani, who made the jump across the Pacific after the 2017 season. But Ohtani’s entry into the market didn’t spark chaos in Latin America because (1) his arrival was less surprising than Sasaki’s and (2) the signing deadline at that point was in July, not January, which meant Ohtani showed up in the middle of the financial year. Still, Ohtani’s involvement in the international amateur system, a system designed for players of an entirely different type, made little sense at the time.

And since then this problem has not been fixed. In fact, things have gotten worse. One source called the system “a mess.” Another called it “broken.”

Most teams negotiate with players as young as 12 years old, although a player must be at least 16 years old on signing day. Some of the amateurs set to sign in the upcoming window verbally agreed to the deals back in spring 2021, around the time Sasaki debuted with NPB. But due to current international bonus rules, Sasaki’s contract will take money out of someone else’s pocket – which is by no means his fault.

It’s like comparing apples and motorcycles. Any team would rather have Sasaki, especially at such a low price, than any other player available in the 2025 class, and that’s not even close. Sasaski is the only proven product on offer.

As one evaluator put it, “I would much rather sign Sasaki than wait six years to find out if (a player from the 2025 international class) is good.”