Roki Sasaki Sweepstakes Could Create Chaos For MLB International Signing Market

Ohtani’s contract came at a time when the international signing period opened on July 2 and closed the following year on June 15. During the pandemic in 2020, Major League Baseball adjusted the international signing period beginning in 2021 to open on Jan. 15 and continue through Dec. 15, with a closed period in between when no signings can occur until the next Jan. 15.

For Ohtani, there was only one signing period for him to fall under. There was no potential for him to sign during the following signing period and potentially disrupt agreements on the table between Latin American amateur players and teams. Instead, teams could just offer Ohtani whatever was left in their bonus pool for the signing period that had already opened five months earlier.

For Sasaki, he could have the option to sign during either the current period that ends on Dec. 15 or wait until the new bonus pools kick in on Jan. 15.

That could potentially make for a big, big problem that will have ripple effects for every team—regardless of whether a team expects to compete for Sasaki—and create chaos throughout the international market.

The Chiba Lotte Marines intend to make Sasaki available through the posting system. They haven’t officially done so yet, but once they do, teams will have 45 days to sign him. As long as the Marines wait until Dec. 2 to post Sasaki, he would have the option to sign during either the current signing period or wait until the next one begins on Jan. 15. 

The Dodgers are the favorites to sign Sasaki, something we’ve been saying since early in the year. They have a touch over $2.5 million left in their 2024 bonus pool, the most of any club. Teams can trade for an additional 60 percent of their original bonus pool allotment, but there is more bonus money available for Sasaki if he waits until Jan. 15 to sign. In the 2025 signing period, the bonus pools range from $5,146,200 for the Dodgers and Giants up to $7,555,500 for the Athletics, Brewers, Mariners, Marlins, Rays, Reds, Tigers and Twins.

Of course, those are the official amounts teams have available to spend. Unofficially, all 30 teams line up deals with players multiple years in advance of when they’re eligible to sign, typically when they’re 13 or 14, sometimes younger. A team could have $6 million in its bonus pool, but it might have agreements with anywhere from 10 to 50 players in place to use the majority, if not all, of its bonus pool once the signing period officially opens on Jan. 15.

That’s where it becomes messy.

Teams do back out of deals with players (and vice versa) every year. Sometimes it happens early because a team signs a player or multiple players who rejected a qualifying offer, which lowers a team’s bonus pool, so the club no longer has room to sign a player it might still like. More often, there’s an issue with a physical or the player just hasn’t progressed the way the team had expected when they initially reached the agreement, and the team backs out. At this point, with two months to go before the signing period opens, if a team still has an agreement in place with a player, the club is expecting to sign him on Jan. 15. There might be players within that group who the team feels aren’t as good as they had hoped they would be relative to the bonus they had agreed to years ago, but these are generally players the team likes and wants to sign.

But, ultimately, the amount teams have spent from their 2025 bonus pools so far is zero. These players might have agreements, but they don’t have signed contracts. And even if you’re signing the best 16-year-old shortstop from the Dominican Republic or the top 17-year-old hitter in Venezuela, that player’s value doesn’t come near Sasaki’s. With Sasaki, a team is getting the best pitching prospect on the planet: a 23-year-old righthander who should immediately step into a major league rotation with the upside to be a No. 1 starter. 

Teams like the Dodgers and Padres stick out because they have less pool space committed for the next period than usual and relative to other clubs, a signal of their foresight to position themselves to sign Sasaki if he waits until Jan. 15. But the reality is that there are teams—probably many teams—that will be willing to throw away their commitments with Latin American players to sign Sasaki.

Those decisions are going to come from owners, team presidents and general managers. If an owner or GM thinks he has a realistic chance to sign Sasaki, he’s going to try to sign him. He’s not going to care about losing some 16-year-old outfielder who might get to the major leagues in four or five years in a perfect-world scenario or a group of players who will be in the Dominican Summer League in 2025 while Sasaki could be an immediate frontline starter making the league minimum salary and under team control for six seasons with huge marketing potential. He’s going to tell the international scouting department, “We’re signing Sasaki. It’s on you to deal with whatever fallout or negative consequences there are with the players we won’t be able to sign any more.”

That’s a situation no international scout— from the director down to area scouts—want to be in. It’s uncomfortable. It’s a bad thing to do to players and their families. It risks creating hostility with a lot of trainers. It is, frankly, dangerous.

If a team throws its entire bonus pool at Sasaki, that club is likely going to have to break off deals with other players. The team could trade for more bonus pool space, but there’s a limit on how much a team can trade for, and any pool space a team does trade for will likely be earmarked to bid for Sasaki. Players signing for $10,000 or less won’t be affected—those bonuses are exempt from the pools—but it will leave other players looking elsewhere.

It’s not just the team that signs Sasaki that will have its commitments affected. If Sasaki is unsigned on Jan. 15, what happens? Any team that sees itself as a serious competitor to sign Sasaki will be hesitant to sign players right away on the 15th. Instead of a mass of signings, some teams will hold off on signing players.

“Let’s say 15 teams offer him their whole pool,” one club official said, “and Sasaki hasn’t picked a team yet. None of those teams will sign anyone. They’re going to wait because they might be the team he picks. They can’t sign anyone because it reduces what they can offer him.”

If you’re a trainer for one of the players who has a deal with a team that’s holding off on signing players because they’re trying to sign Sasaki, what do you do? What if it’s Jan. 20 and Sasaki still isn’t signed? Do you just wait around and hope the team with whom your player has a deal doesn’t sign Sasaki so that the deal can continue? Or do you shop around the player elsewhere? 

That’s where Sasaki could potentially affect the entire international market, regardless if a team is planning to be in the mix for him or not. At a certain point, trainers and players will get uneasy. Teams that don’t plan to be in on Sasaki and are preparing for business as usual on Jan. 15 could take advantage and try to go after commits from other organizations. It won’t have to be the teams approaching the player or his trainer because the trainers will be the ones approaching them looking for what else might be out there. 

Teams could offer to push some of their commits back another year to sign in 2026, but that’s difficult because clubs already have significant commitments in place for that class and both players and trainers typically don’t want to wait to get paid. For many trainers, the cost of their operations have increased because of how early they now have to get players ready to sign. If teams are trying to reach agreements with players at 13, that means bringing players into their program years in advance and continuing to pay all their upfront costs up until they sign—if they do sign at all—when they’re 16 or 17. Some of them have borrowed money from loan sharks that they need to pay back because they’re counting on a commission from a signing bonus. Some programs are better capitalized, but typically, trainers and players don’t want to wait to get paid.

The cleanest outcome would be for Sasaki to sign by Dece. 15, but given the incentives both for him and the Marines, it makes more sense for him to wait until January. Typically, Jan. 15 is a day for players and families throughout Latin America to celebrate signings that have often been in the works for years. For 2025, there’s now more uncertainty in the air.