The Blue Jays Met With Roki Sasaki in Toronto

So right off the bat, let’s set our excitement meters to about 10%. We’re not going to lose our minds here. We know how this goes. The Blue Jays have a meeting with a top free agent, the top free agent signs elsewhere, and the Blue Jays tell reporters they were just grateful to be part of the process. We all remember Shohei Ohtani visiting the Dunedin spring training complex, and we all remember his phantom flight to Toronto. We’re not trying to set ourselves up for heartbreak here. That said, let’s crank it up to 10% excitement! According to Ken Rosenthal and Andy McCullough of The Athletic, Japanese ace Roki Sasaki met with the Blue Jays in Toronto last week. Previous reporting had indicated that of the 20 teams that made presentations to Sasaki and his agent, Joel Wolfe, only seven would get to meet with him: the Cubs, Dodgers, Giants, Mets, Padres, Rangers, and Yankees. The Red Sox reportedly couldn’t get a meeting with Sasaki. Even if it leads nowhere, as it probably will, this is still allowed to be exciting news.

We previously noted that the Jays were reportedly "all-in" on Sasaki. I’m not going to get into the weeds about how adding Sasaki would affect the roster. Suffice it to say that he’s one of the best pitchers in the world and there’s no such thing as a starting rotation that wouldn’t be much better with him on it. The 23-year-old has a career 2.10 ERA in NPB while striking out more than 10 batters per nine innings. His fastball velocity ticked down a bit in 2024, but it still averaged a hair under 97 mph, and his trademark splitter ran a comical 57% whiff rate. Those kinds of numbers will play anywhere.

Like Ohtani, Sasaki is so determined to challenge himself against the best the world has to offer that he’s entering the posting system early, before he reaches nine years of professional experience. That means instead of signing a free agent contract for the hundreds of millions of dollars that he’s actually worth, he’ll be on a rookie contract, with a signing bonus of whatever his chosen team has available in their international free agent bonus pool, likely around $7 million. (The Blue Jays are actually  toward the very bottom, with just under $6.3 million available in their bonus pool.) It’s an enormous bet on himself, and it also means that every team is on roughly the same financial footing, so money won’t be a factor. Sasaki will have his own reasons for his decision.

The smart money is still on the Dodgers. Even the byline of this report tells you that. Ken Rosenthal and Andy McCullough are both national writers, but McCullough wrote for the Los Angeles Times until 2019, was a Dodgers beat writer until 2018, recently wrote a book about Clayton Kershaw. However, the small possibility of landing one of the game’s best arms for the next six seasons is an excellent reason to get just a little bit excited.