On Saturday, the Lotte Marines announced they would post 23-year-old flame thrower Roki Sasaki two years before both he and the Pacific League club could really cash in through his transfer to MLB.
Last week, I heard the Marines were working on some conditions they would ask Sasaki to swear to in order to secure their blessing, but couldn’t really guess what those might be. They could not, for instance, ask him to kick back some of his first MLB salary, since that would contravene the NPB-MLB posting agreement. Perhaps they asked him to hire someone from Lotte to help in his transition? Who knows.
If you stay up to date with the various media reports, you might not be too surprised if Sasaki were to show up for a press conference wearing a Dodgers shirt and hat, so closely has he been linked to them. But Sunday morning, I heard from a source close to Sasaki, who informed me nothing is etched in stone.
A few people on Twitter attacked me when I reported that his ascension to Chavez Ravine is not a lead-pipe cinch, because it wasn’t what they wanted to hear, I suppose, and who the fuck am I to rock their Dodgers love boat fantasy.
Although my personal preference would be for Sasaki to join the San Francisco Giants, and not the Dodgers, in my heart of hearts, I want him to become the best pitcher he possibly can be regardless of where he ends up.
“We prefer he’s in a smaller media market with a softer landing after the way he’s been tarred and feathered by the Japanese tabloid media for two years,” the source said, adding that the principle concern was finding the place that was in “his own best interest for short term and long term success.”
For the past year, since learning who it was who was telling MLB teams that Sasaki might be available in 2024 through the posting system, I’d been laying out the reasons why I thought he might conceivably be posted despite it ostensibly making no earthly sense for Lotte to do so.
My latest take on this, “Roki Sasaki’s unprecedented situation,” spells these out that reasons, and also maintained my prediction that if the Marines do post him this year, it was only because of the team’s desire to wish him well on his journey – no matter the cost to the organization.
This scenario played out as predicted Saturday: “Marines: Altruism behind Sasaki posting” when the team rejected the idea that the team was posting their biggest star because he had put their baseballs in a vice as a 19-year-old.
Because Japan’s media doesn’t typically call bullshit on companies they report on and depend on for news, there has only been a smattering of comments suggesting that Lotte’s reasoning was a fabrication.
One of those came from former Marines general manager Tatsuro Hirooka, who was quoted as saying, “Although the team rejects it, it is my personal belief that he concluded an agreement (to post him) when he first joined the team.”
Hirooka, who had some extremely harsh words for both Sasaki and the team, advocated changes to the rules to prevent this situation in the future, which I, too, believe are in order, and will deal with in another blog.
However, Hirooka stopped short of rehashing his complaints about Sasaki from the pitcher’s high school days, but still bristled that “Japanese pro baseball is not a stepping stone to MLB!” Which, regardless of how much he wishes it weren’t, it in fact is.
This is even worse than Dodgers fans getting upset when they are informed that the world might not work the way they’ve been told it would. In Hirooka’s case, it takes not only a moral conviction that the way things used to be is the way they must be, and a willful ignorance to accept that the world has indeed moved on.
