Whenever Roki Sasaki Gets Posted, He Should Become Jed Hoyer's Full-Time Job for a Month

[Matthew Trueblood]

Let Jed cook... the Sasaki family dinner. If he's a good cook. Do we know whether he is?

Image courtesy of © Sam Navarro-Imagn Images

When it comes to running an MLB franchise, there are big moves, and there are small moves. The Roki Sasaki sweepstakes do not fall along the spectrum between one and the other. They are, instead, a degree of big not even captured by that word. Free-agent contests for top players are vital, because they decide the fate of hundreds of millions of dollars in team budgets and can often be the difference between 85 wins and 90. The thing about the Sasaki showdown, much like the one for Shohei Ohtani seven winters ago, is that it has just as good a chance to make the difference between 85 wins and 90—but it won't cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Instead, this is the rare potential deal in which the excess value in a transaction might be fairly expected to be in nine figures.

After Rob Manfred said he expects Sasaki not to sign until the opening of the new international free-agent period Jan. 15, the auction for his services figures to be wide-open. Like many teams, the Cubs would only have been able to offer Sasaki a paltry amount to sign with them next month. However, they could (if they're willing to renege on some deals with teenagers from Latin America, distasteful though that would be) free up $5 million or so to offer him as a signing bonus in January. That's competitive with most of the rest of the league, and we know for sure that Sasaki isn't looking for the absolute top dollar, anyway. If he were, he would have waited another two years to make his migration, at which point he could have made an amount close to the $325 million Yoshinobu Yamamoto commanded as a more unfettered free agent last winter.

So, Sasaki is likely to sign for somewhere south of $10 million, while the market rate for his services is acknowledged to be somewhere north of $200 million. Is it just me, or would it be ludicrous not to allocate massive resources of personnel, time and energy to the recruitment process? In fact, why have Jed Hoyer focused on anything else for whatever amount of time it takes for Sasaki to make his decision.

If this were a position player, or even a traditional, domestic starter, that would be one thing. Again, you'd generally be paying a nine-figure price for this caliber of player. There'd also be a clear opportunity cost even to signing such a player. You'd be displacing someone by bringing them in. With Sasaki, however, that's simply not the case. He has touched as high as 103 miles per hour and routinely works in the upper 90s, with one of the best splitters in the world and a promising slider, but he's never eclipsed 130 innings of work in a professional season. His injury issues and his relative youth make it unthinkable that any team would bring him in and throw him into a five-man, five-day rotation schedule. In other words, either you win the bidding for Sasaki and operate a six-man rotation, or you lose, and nothing about the other steps you were taking to build your roster changes at all.

One of the virtues of having a two-headed monster at the top of the baseball operations decision-making tree is the option of triggering this kind of extreme specialization, on a temporary basis. Carter Hawkins is the Cubs' GM, and while that title doesn't carry all the authority and prestige it once did (since the widespread advent of the president of baseball operations), it reflects a certain amount of belief in Hawkins's ability to find and execute transaction opportunities. It reflects a real degree of responsibility for roster-building. While Hoyer could (and obviously would) stay in the loop, there's just no reason why Hawkins couldn't be entrusted with the bulk of the non-Sasaki hot stove work for the two or three weeks Sasaki's free agency is likely to last.

What could Hoyer do with the extra time and attention? First of all, presumably, making a strong pitch to Sasaki will be important. That means compiling compelling evidence of the organization's recent progress (which they believe is substantial) in terms of scouting and player development, and it would be great if it could be rendered faithfully into Japanese, so it wouldn't need to be conveyed to Sasaki primarily through a translator. Hoyer could and should hire a dedicated Japanese translator with experience working in baseball, work closely with them to create the best form of the presentation possible, and build a version thereof that could be delivered in a dynamic way in a meeting including both Sasaki and his English-speaking agent, Joel Wolfe.

If, in the process of building that presentation, Hoyer also discovered that part of it rings hollow—if there is anything, based on what needs to be extensive background work, that he thinks Sasaki will want from his new club that the Cubs don't yet offer—then he should deploy resources to bringing the team up to snuff. That, too, could take a significant amount of time and energy. For these reasons, it would be best if that was Hoyer's only focus. It's only a chunk of one month. Hawkins needn't enter into any major deals without at least checking with Hoyer, and ownership would still sign off on anything huge.

While Sasaki is a free agent, though, Hoyer should never be more than one call away from him, and the team should show its commitment to him by dedicating more of their manpower to him than any other team does. Sasaki is eschewing a larger payday because he craves something the United States can offer, which he didn't find in his time in NPB. He's proving that factors well beyond money matter immensely to him. The Cubs should meet him at that high level of purpose, and show him that they hold that alignment of priorities in high esteem.

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