Two years ago, Roki Sasaki was North American baseball’s yeti. He could be real, but none of us really knew what to think or had seen him with our own eyes. In 2025, Roki Sasaki is very much real and on the Los Angeles Dodgers. 

Prospect signings typically fall into three categories: A player gets drafted out of high school, a player gets drafted out of college, or a player signs internationally at a young age. For the high school and international signings, we typically can see a player grow throughout multiple years in the minor leagues, where we can gain background information and watch a player on our TVs. For college draftees, there is plenty of publicly available information to consider that puts them in a similar ‘knowledge standing’ to our other prospects. 

Roki Sasaki is in our rare fourth category, where a player is older and has played professional baseball in another country. Gathering information on Sasaki requires reading reports from those who have seen him, analyzing stat pages from unfamiliar sites, and some Google Translate. This is where our yeti analogy begins to make more sense, as everything we hear on this type of international prospect is much more vague and unfamiliar to the baseball fan. There is plenty of information on the internet regarding Sasaki, but it’s much harder to access and understand than we are used to. We also are not given the same luxury of watching the Sasaki type of player develop in the farm, as they are older and ready for MLB competition from the jump.

The Shohei Ohtani sweepstakes are the closest thing to Sasaki’s decision that we can analyze. They were two of the best Japanese high school baseball players of all time, both played professionally, and both came over early, making them subject to international bonus pool money rather than free agency. The aura around Ohtani’s signing was that he could be awesome, but we didn’t really know since so few of us had seen him play or even heard of him. Well, he ended up being the best player in the MLB in a couple of years, proving the yeti is real and Sasaki could be next.

Let’s begin our Roki Sasaki deep dive now, from the start.