Will the Rangers make a play for Sasaki?

Published 5:34 pm Friday, November 8, 2024

Let’s just start with all the disclaimers to note how difficult it will be for the Rangers to make an impact move in the offseason player acquisition market:

Owner Ray Davis doesn’t want to go over the CBT threshold for a third straight time, meaning the payroll is going to be reduced; Davis doesn’t know how much TV revenue he will get from his attempt to start his own regional sports network; the Rangers are thin when it comes to tradeable young prospects, particularly on the position player side.

So, in other words, it’s going to take a miracle to make a major move.

The miracle — or at least a miracle — happened in the wee hours of Saturday morning. It was a Japanese earthquake, the tremors of which were felt all across MLB. Flame-throwing right-hander Roki Sasaki, dubbed “The Monster of the Reiwa Era,” is coming to the United States. His Japanese team, the Chiba Lotte Marines have agreed to his desire to be posted this winter. All of baseball shakes.

Sasaki, 23, is the next great Japanese pitcher. He has all the special tools. A 100-mph fastball. An elite splitter. A special slider. It all makes baseball people salivate.

Here’s what makes them drool: All things considered, he’s essentially free. Not a free agent. But, for all intents and purposes, he’s free. You see how this particularly fits the Rangers very particular set of needs? At least he will be in the beginning. All it’s going to take is the sell job of the century.

Because he’s not yet 25, the only way he can come to the U.S. is under the posting system. Under the posting system, he is subject to the same rules as a Latin American teenager, which means teams have an assigned pool of bonus money they can use to apply to sign him. At this point, teams have pennies left in their 2024 pools. The 2025 pools, into which teams can dip, can be accessed after Jan. 15. Which is convenient, because if, say, it takes Chiba Lotte and MLB about three weeks to work through all the complicated paperwork and details related to posting, he would get posted right around Dec. 1. Under the system, he’d have 45 days to negotiate with MLB teams. Do the math. The conclusion of the 45-day period and the opening of the new international pools will just coincidentally coincide.

As for the pools, teams are assigned maximum caps. They range from $5.1 to $7.55 million. The Rangers will have $6.26 million, along with 11 other teams, to spend. They are right in the middle. He would also have to sign a uniform minor league contract out of the gate. In other words, there isn’t any wiggle room.

Not that it matters. It’s just details.

It’s natural to think Sasaki already has the Los Angeles Dodgers in mind. If you believe he’s a follower. He could join Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and the world champions and blend right in.

If, however, he wants to blaze his own trail, then it’s going to come down to who can present him the best vision.

Enter Chris Young.

“Vision,” particularly connected with Young, is a word every big-time free agent the Rangers landed in the last three years has mentioned in explaining why they came to a team that lost 102 games in 2021. Young sold them on his “vision” first. It worked with Corey Seager and Marcus Semien. Worked again on Bruce Bochy. And then Jacob deGrom and Nathan Eovaldi.

When he gets going on the vision thing, Young’s passion for winning is palpable. His delivery is earnest, energetic and focused. His drive is singular: Winning. He is not about the college recruiting pitch, which may have been the biggest weakness, if there was one, in the presentation to Ohtani back in 2018. Young was a player and a pitcher. He’s won a World Championship as both a player and an executive. Even with a language barrier, he can reach a player. He went to see Sasaki pitch in person at the end of the Rangers’ season, so he’s not simply relying on others.

But the others in his orbit on this have strong ties in Japan.

And if Sasaki wants to win a world championship, well, the Rangers do have a still relatively shiny one. It’s only a year old. The core of that team remains. Seager’s presence alone makes a pretty good argument.

If you land Sasaki, it changes every dynamic.

Even with Juan Soto on the free agent market, the Sasaki saga is likely to dominate baseball through the winter meetings next month in Dallas and into January. Landing him would be a game-changer for a franchise. Everybody knows that. But it may very well come down to what team can best communicate exactly how to Sasaki.

In that regard, Chris Young and the Rangers can’t be overlooked.

Evan Grant covers Major League Baseball for The Dallas Morning News