Manfred expecting Sasaki to sign after Jan. 15
-
Jorge Castillo, ESPN Staff Writer
NEW YORK — With uncertainty looming over when Japanese baseball star Roki Sasaki will sign with a major league club, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred offered some clarity Wednesday, saying that he expected Sasaki to be part of the 2025 international amateur class.
That would mean Sasaki, one of the top pitchers in the world, will be posted after Dec. 2 and will not sign with a club before Jan. 15.
“It kind of looks like the way it’s going to shake out that the signing there, just because of the timing, will happen in the new pool period,” Manfred said at MLB’s Manhattan offices, where the owners meetings are taking place this week.
Earlier this month, the Chiba Lotte Marines made official what was anticipated around the baseball industry for months, announcing it would post Sasaki this winter.
The signing period for international free agents stretches from Jan. 15 to Dec. 15 every year. All 30 clubs have 45 days to negotiate with a player from Nippon Professional Baseball once he is posted. If a deal is not struck in that 45-day period, the player is returned to his NPB team.
In Sasaki’s case, he is considered an international amateur free agent and, as a result, can only sign a minor league deal because he is under the age of 25 and didn’t play six seasons in NPB. That designation, combined with international bonus pools being capped, suppresses the amount of money teams can pay the 23-year-old Sasaki, who surely would have reaped a nine-figure contract in an unrestricted market if he had waited another two years to join an MLB club.
Sasaki would have been eligible for the 2024 signing period only if he were posted before Dec. 2 because the 45-day negotiating window would elapse before the 2025 signing period begins. Most clubs have spent their allotment for the 2024 period. Sasaki waiting until the 2025 period resets each club’s budget. That theoretically could give more teams a better opportunity to land a starting pitcher with a triple-digit fastball, nasty splitter and top-flight slider at a bargain price a year after the Los Angeles Dodgers signed then-25-year-old Yoshinobu Yamamoto to a 12-year, $325 million contract last winter.
The Dodgers have been widely considered the favorites to sign Sasaki, too. They had the most international bonus pool money remaining for the 2024 signing period — about $2.5 million — ostensibly to offer Sasaki. Rules stipulate their 2025 bonus pool is capped at approximately $5.1 million.
The largest bonus pools for 2025 are set at around $7.5 million, though most teams have committed the majority, if not all, of their money to players in nonbinding deals. Clubs could, however, choose not to honor those verbal pacts and trade for international bonus space to offer Sasaki more money.
MLB to test robot umpires in spring
Also Wednesday, Manfred said MLB would test robot umpires as part of a challenge system during spring training at 13 ballparks hosting 19 teams, which could lead to regular-season use in 2026.
MLB has been experimenting with the automated ball-strike system in the minor leagues since 2019 but is still working on the shape of the strike zone.
An agreement for big league use would have to be reached with the Major League Baseball Umpires Association, whose collective bargaining agreement expires Dec. 1.
“I would be interested in having it in ’26,” Manfred said Wednesday. “We do have a collective bargaining obligation there. That’s obviously a term and condition of employment. We’re going to have to work through that issue, as well.”
Manfred said the spring training experiment would have to be evaluated before MLB determined how to move forward.
MLB to give Tampa area time on ballpark
Manfred also discussed the Tampa Bay Rays‘ ballpark situation following Hurricane Milton, saying there has been no thought to allowing the team to explore a relocation.
Manfred said Tampa-area politicians will be given time to sort out the situation.
“Given the devastation in that area, it’s kind of only fair to give the local governments in the Tampa Bay region an opportunity to sort of figure out where they are, what they have available in terms of resources, what’s doable,” Manfred said.
Tampa Bay announced a stadium plan in September 2023 but following Hurricane Milton, which damaged Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg on Oct. 9, the Pinellas County Commission has not approved financing bonds for the new ballpark. The Rays said this week the new ballpark wouldn’t be able to open until 2029, if at all.
“We’re committed to the fans in Tampa Bay,” Manfred said. “Given all that’s happened in that market, we’re focused on our franchise in Tampa Bay right now.”
No 2025 games in Mexico City, San Juan
Manfred announced that MLB has scrapped plans to play regular-season games next year in Mexico City and San Juan, Puerto Rico.
The season opens on March 18 and 19 with a two-game series in Tokyo between Shohei Ohtani‘s Dodgers and the Chicago Cubs. The collective bargaining agreement agreed to in 2022 also called for Mexico City games next May, the first Paris games in June and San Juan games in September.
MLB called off the France games in 2023 after failing to find a promoter. It played 49 regular-season games at San Juan’s Hiram Bithorn Stadium from 2001 to 2018. Scheduled games at San Juan and Mexico City in 2020 were canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“We’re not going to San Juan. We did not have, despite a lot of efforts, an arrangement that made economic sense for us,” Manfred said. “We’d like to do San Juan and what’s available kind of changes year to year and I hope it all works out in the future.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
LOS ANGELES — Shohei Ohtani hit two homers in an 11-5 win over the San Francisco Giants on Saturday night, emphatically ending the three-time MVP’s longest homer drought since joining the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Ohtani led off the bottom of the first with his 24th homer, hammering Landen Roupp‘s fourth pitch 419 feet deep into the right-field bleachers with an exit velocity of 110.3 mph.
The slugger had been in a 10-game homer drought since June 2, going 10-for-40 in that stretch with no RBIs, although he still had an eight-game hitting streak during his power outage.
Ohtani led off the sixth with his 25th homer, sending Tristan Beck‘s breaking ball outside the strike zone into the bleachers in right. He also moved one homer behind the Yankees’ Aaron Judge and Seattle’s Cal Raleigh for the overall major league lead.
Dodgers fans brought him home with a standing ovation as Ohtani produced his third multihomer game of the season and the 22nd of his career.
Ohtani reached base four times and scored three runs in his first four at-bats, drawing two walks to go with his two homers.
Ohtani hadn’t played in 10 straight games without hitting a homer since 2023 in the final 10 games of his six-year tenure with the Los Angeles Angels.
Ohtani had slowed down a bit over the past two weeks after he was named the NL Player of the Month for May with a formidable performance, racking up 15 homers and 28 RBIs.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
BOSTON — Hunter Dobbins had quite the week.
First, he said last weekend that he would rather retire than pitch for the Yankees because his father was drafted by New York twice before being traded.
Then, he went out and beat the Yankees.
A few days after his comments about never wanting to pitch for New York, he had to defend his dad’s story about being drafted by the Yankees in response to a New York Post article that cited multiple official databases and the Yankees’ own records that couldn’t confirm Lance Dobbins ever played with the organization.
On Saturday night, Dobbins (4-1) followed up by going six shutout innings in Boston’s 4-3 victory over New York, his second win over the Yankees in less than a week.
“It’s a lot of fun,” he said. “I’m more worried about just the win column, whether it’s against them or anybody. My job is to try and help this team win as many ballgames as we can, and pitch in meaningful playoff baseball games. That’s what I’m more focused on.”
But he realizes what it means to the fan base in this longtime rivalry, with the Red Sox fans heard chanting about the Yankees outside the park before he spoke in an interview room.
“Yeah, I love being able to perform and get those wins for the fans here,” he said. “They deserve it. It’s a great city, passionate fan base, so being able to get those wins — especially twice in one week — means a lot and looking forward to trying to build on that going forward.”
In his victory over New York last Sunday, Dobbins held the Yankees to three runs over five innings, two on a first-inning homer by Aaron Judge.
On Saturday night, Judge went 0-for-3 against him, striking out twice on curveballs.
“It was just kind of scouting,” Dobbins said of his game plan against New York’s slugger after Garrett Crochet struck him out three times in the series opener Friday.
“Crochet has an electric fastball. I can throw it hard, but the shape isn’t quite as elite,” he said. “So we knew we had better weapons to go at him with, so I felt like we did a good job of kind of keeping a balanced attack throughout the order.”
Dobbins struck out five and gave up only two singles Saturday.
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Sports2 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut