Roki Sasaki may be under contract with an MLB team next season, two years before he and the Lotte Marines are eligible to cash in on the riches that would be theirs if he moved as an international free agent, instead of as an international amateur, as defined by MLB’s collective bargaining agreement with its players union.

I have spoken to people with some knowledge of the situation, and have a good idea where the leak occurred that Sasaki will be posted. But I am not here to tell you that he will or he won’t. Even if the Marines agree to let him go, the final decision would be Sasaki’s, not his agent’s and not the sports marketing company that has a stake in him.

Instead, I want to explain how it might take place.

There are those who have reasoned that it cannot happen because Lotte will not give its permission to a posting move, on the grounds that it would see the Marines give up a solid gold asset for peanuts, and according to that logic, there was no reason for them ever to do that.

This individual reasons that if Sasaki refused every offer from Lotte in the autumn of 2019 to turn pro with the Marines unless they included a contractually binding agreement to post him at his discretion, the team would be better off letting him walk than make such a stupid promise.

Agreeing to such a condition would be really bad for Nippon Professional Baseball as a whole going forward. Unfortunately, the cost of not signing Sasaki under any condition would have hit Lotte the hardest.

Had Lotte stood up for the sanctity of owners to rule the baseball world and bow to the whim of young punks, the Marines would have gotten zero profits from Sasaki instead of the huge windfall in tickets, merchandise, concessions and publicity that they actually received through the 2024 season. On top of that, the Marines had even more to lose.

That’s because teams who fail to sign players they earned the rights to, get nothing in return, no compensation the following year, nothing. The Yomiuri Giants are the reason why compensation picks are not allowed, and part of the leverage an exceptional talent has.

No compensation

Because the Giants are the most successful franchise in Japanese pro baseball history, there are players who only want to sign with Yomiuri. In the past few decades, three players fell into this camp: pitchers Tetsuya Utsumi and Tomoyuki Sugano, and outfielder Hisayoshi Chono.

Utsumi and Sugano did so for personal reasons. Utsumi’s grandfather was a Giant, and Sugano’s uncle was the Giants manager. Chono simply wanted to be a Giant. All three of those guys’ rights went to other teams on draft day, twice in Chono’s case, forcing the Giants to go for an alternate first-round pick after the top-tier prospects were mostly taken.

To discourage teams from messing up their draft plans, the Giants have steadfastly refused to allow compensation picks, although if Sasaki does move to MLB this autumn, that rule may go the way of the thousand fungo drill.

If a player refuses to sign, one option is to not play ball at all for a year, as Sugano did, and re-enter the following year’s draft, or if it’s a player that MLB teams are drooling over, he could sign a minor league deal with an MLB club when the international signing period opens the following summer, or the player could go play at another amateur level, typically corporate or independent league ball, for two years before re-entering NPB’s draft.

Cash on the barrel

One part of the leverage teams have is instant cash. They are officially allowed to offer a signing bonus worth around $1 million, and offer a first-year salary of around $100,000. It is said that former Giants outfielder Yoshinobu Takahashi, who turned pro at a time when college and corporate league players had the right to negotiate directly with the teams of their choice, agreed to join the Giants instead of his first pick, Tokyo’s Yakult Swallows, because Yomiuri promised to erase his family’s sizable debts.

Teams can, and do, offer players all kinds of goodies to sign.

That’s because Nippon Professional Baseball’s contract system is not analogous to MLB’s with its strict rules on what can constitute compensation, and the fact that contracts have to pass muster with both the commissioner’s office and the players union.

Japan’s secret

All Japanese pro baseball contracts are for one year at a time. Technically, there are no multiyear contracts. The only indication to NPB that there are any other outstanding agreements between a team and a player is a checkbox on the contract indicating an additional existing contract.

I have a copy of one of those contracts. It spells out future raises, the number and quality of air tickets to be provided to family members for visits to Japan, living arrangements and so on.

Multiyear contracts exist in this legal netherworld, that are legally binding provided only that they do not contravene NPB rules. Thus a team cannot promise to assign a player to another team, or to make him an owner. But that’s about it.

These contracts are extremely common for players who have options other than signing with a team. While all players reach international free agency after nine years of major league service time, imported players often skip around from team to team after a year or two.

When it comes to free agency, Japan treats imports and players who join through the draft exactly the same. Only a handful of imported players have had to wait for free agency to move, because every import with an agent, signs a contract that spells out the terms of his release.

Why this matters for Roki Sasaki

The last player to have as much leverage when he turned pro in Japan was Shohei Ohtani, who received a number of promises from the Nippon Ham Fighters in order to sign. While it is clear that one of those was a promise to post him, the exact details were considered to be team friendly. But unless Shohei wants to show us his copy of the agreement, we’ll never know.

It couldn’t have turned out any better for Ohtani, who would never have become a two-way player if the Fighters hadn’t had to bend over backwards and jump through hoops to sign him. For doing this, the team and manager Hideki Kuriyama was severely criticized even after Ohtani proved he could thrive doing both.

And though everything worked out for Ohtani, it is unknown how much advice he was getting in his negotiations with the team outside of his high school manager and his parents.

In 2019, Ohtani had yet to have the MLB manager who would give him the free reign he would need to be an everyday two-way player, but his value was on the rise, especially off the field where his endorsement income was making him one of the most highly compensated MLB players despite earning the MLB minimum.

This could not have gone unnoticed by Japanese sports marketing companies eager to cash in on the next big thing, and so enter Dentsu, Japan’s sports marketing goliath.

There are reports that Sasaki received $2 million upfront from Dentsu when he turned pro, and, unlike Ohtani, had a huge team of savvy advisors backing him from Day 1 in his negotiations with Lotte.

This put Sasaki in an unusual position. His signing was announced Nov. 30, three days after the 11th of that year’s 12 top picks signed. It wasn’t absurdly late by any means and, unlike this past offseason’s prolonged holdout, gave no hint of difficult negotiations.

The first whiff of smoke

In the late summer of 2023, some MLB sources began telling that Sasaski might be available through the posting system after the 2024 season – while MLB still placed him under amateur restrictions and limited the amount of money he and Lotte could receive in a posting.

This was an unprecedented bombshell. Learning that the agent informing the teams was not Scott Boras, but one with a solid reputation for being straight with teams, clients and the media, it seemed unlikely this guy was simply spouting off and had some reason to believe Sasaki would be available years before anyone expected.

I had not heard at that time that Dentsu was involved with Sasaki, leaving open the possibility that the marketers last year were running the Sasaki circus and misrepresenting his possible availability in 2024. But, given who the agent is, I think it unlikely, and that the obvious conclusion to draw from this drama is that in 2019 Sasaki’s side got Lotte to agree to a supplemental contract that obligates the Marines to allow him to move to MLB at a time of his choosing.

The principle doubter to this story has argued that, because it is impossible Lotte would agree to such conditions, every story written about it is “click bait.” But from where I stand, the number of people who would have to be in on this scam for it to be a hoax would make even a sucker for conspiracy theories suspicious.

Perhaps most people paraphrasing reports in social media don’t understand the details, but given who I know to be involved, it is far easier to believe Sasaki has an unprecedented amount of leverage with Lotte.

I can see a scenario where the Marines signed the agreement on the understanding that both sides believed it would be in Sasaki’s best interest to wait for the gargantuan payday that could come with a posting at the age of 25. It is very possible Sasaki’s side encouraged this.

In my experience, verbal agreements with Japanese companies last as long as they suit the company. The second they don’t, a company will tell you that no such agreement ever existed. In one scenario, however, it could have been Sasaki’s side that was disingenuous, and played the Marines with a verbal agreement not to go until he’s 25, when the contract said otherwise.

What’s next?

 If Sasaki decides it’s in his best interest to move now, and he does in fact have the leverage to force it, he’ll go. Posting him would be a disaster for Lotte because they’ll get a fee equal to 20 percent of his signing bonus and his minor league minimum salary.

But, there’s another possibility for the Marines. It is possible that the language of Sasaki’s supplemental contract does not specify he be allowed to move via the posting system. In such a case, the Marines might satisfy that by telling Sasaki they will let him move as a free agent, provided he buys out the remainder of his contract for a fixed sum that might reap Lotte two or three times more than the $2 million or so they could get for a posting.

Because Lotte believes Dentsu is behind this whole scheme, the Marines might ask Dentsu to put up the cash in advance, and if Sasaki can’t swing that, the Marines could say, “We gave you a way out. You didn’t take it.”

If the Marines do post him, you can already quote a team executive as saying, “We believe it is in the best interest of Roki and the fans for him to be allowed to pursue his dreams to the fullest, and we wish him the best.”

Aftermath

If Sasaki moves, Lotte’s dilemma will now be NPB’s nightmare, where every elite top draft pick becomes accustomed to making unprecedented demands, because the rules allow it. The easy first step would be to amend the draft rules to allow for compensation picks, which would make the draft more competitive.

The second way, to limit the concessions players can receive in supplemental contracts, would constitute a change in working conditions. As such, this would require NPB to get union approval before enforcing it. This would require concessions to the union, which is in direct conflict with most Japanese company’s labor policy that can be paraphrased as: “We hear you, but we’re giving you nothing, because we know better than you.”