Mariners making Japanese ace Roki Sasaki ‘a priority’

DALLAS — The Mariners had the most productive starting pitching staff in the majors this year, a rotation that virtually every MLB club would envy.

And now the Mariners are determined to add one of the world’s most talented arms to the mix.

Club executives Jerry Dipoto and Justin Hollander expressed cautious optimism about their chances to woo Roki Sasaki, the 23-year-old Japanese phenom who is making the jump to MLB this winter.

At least, they’re going to give him their best pitch.

“We have a good story to tell,” Dipoto said Monday at the end of the first day of the MLB Winter Meetings.

Sasaki was formally posted Monday by the Chiba Lotte Marines, his Nippon Professional Baseball club, opening a 45-day window for him and his agent, Joel Wolfe, to negotiate with MLB clubs.

That sets a Jan. 23 deadline for a deal to be completed. Sasaki almost certainly won’t sign until after Jan. 15, when the league’s 2025 international signing period begins.

The Mariners have been preparing for the chance to give their presentation centered around their pitching-development program, which has produced four established homegrown starters over the past few years: Logan Gilbert, George Kirby, Bryce Miller and Bryan Woo.

“We have established ourselves over the last four seasons as a really good team,” Dipoto said. “We’re in the mix year in and year out. We play in an awesome environment. We have, if it’s not the best rotation in league, is one of the best rotations in league. We are, I think, positioned better than most to be able to accommodate a six-man rotation, if that’s required.

“There are a lot of positives that are potentially in our favor.”

It could be a compelling sell built around the Mariners’ highly regarded major league pitching coaches, Pete Woodworth and Trent Blank, and the club’s advanced processes for pitchers.

“We’ve talked about celebrating our pitching programs, our pitching coaches, from the success we’ve found on the field to the environment that we play in,” Dipoto said.

And perhaps above all, Dipoto said the Mariners will emphasize how they’ve helped their starting pitchers stay relatively healthy in an era when pitching injuries have become a major concern around the sport.

“We do a really good job of bringing pitchers in, helping them become the best versions of themselves and keeping them on the mound, throwing their innings,” he said. “And that’s not common when you look around the game. And I don’t want to ever take that for granted.”

Hollander cited the overall pitching culture throughout the organization as a prime selling point for someone like Sasaki.

“We spent some time talking to our pitchers about what they believe are our strong points: What do we do? What can we do better?” Hollander said. “A common theme or feedback point from them is how much they all care about each other and believe in the person next to them, whether that person next to them is another pitcher or an analyst or a pitching coach or a trainer. There’s a real culture of trust and growth and development among the staff — a big family in a lot of ways, and I think that is something that is pretty unique among our group.”

Sasaki is certainly unique in his own right.

The lanky 6-foot-2 right-hander touched 101 mph while in high school — breaking Shohei Ohtani’s national record — and then threw a perfect game with 19 strikeouts as a 20-year-old in the NPB in April 2022.

In 64 appearances over four seasons in the NPB, Sasaki has a 2.02 ERA with 524 strikeouts and 91 walks in 414 2/3 innings. He has a fastball that sits in the upper 90s and a devastating splitter. He was limited to 111 innings this year because of oblique and shoulder injuries.

The Los Angeles Dodgers are seen as the favorites to land Sasaki, and the San Diego Padres expect to be heavily in the mix too. Padres veteran starter Yu Darvish has been described as a mentor to Sasaki.

Because Sasaki is under the age of 25, MLB classifies him as an amateur, thus subjecting him to the international bonus pool system. That was the posting process through which Ohtani initially came to MLB as a 23-year-old in December 2017, when he signed for $2.3 million with the Los Angeles Angels.

It was a different process for another Japanese star, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who was 25 last winter when he signed with the Dodgers on a 12-year, $325-million deal, the largest contract ever for a pitcher.

The Mariners will have about $7.5 million in bonus pool money for 2025, tied for the most that any MLB club has available.

“My guess is … 30 teams are going to make a pitch,” Dipoto said. “And a certain number of those teams are going to get to go to round two or round three (in negotiations). And for us, that’s a priority.”