The Los Angeles Dodgers did it again.
On Friday, Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki announced on Instagram that he was signing with the Dodgers in free agency.
The Dodgers, just months after winning the 2024 World Series, are loading up again, this time landing the prize of this year’s free agent class due to his talent, age, and affordability.
Sasaki, 23, is coming over to Major League Baseball after four dominant seasons in Nippon Professional Baseball in Japan.
The hard-throwing right-hander went 29-15 with a 2.10 ERA, 505 strikeouts, and just 88 walks across 394.2 career innings pitched.
Then, he decided to make the jump to MLB, even though he was giving up hundreds of millions of dollars by doing so at this point in time.
At just 23 years old and with less than six years of service time, Sasaki was considered an amateur international free agent.
Thus, he didn’t get to be the center of a bidding war like Dodgers star Yoshinobu Yamamoto was last year. Instead, he was subject to just a minor league deal with a signing bonus of international bonus pool money.
The Dodgers, who have long been interested in Sasaki after scouting him for years and traveling to Japan on numerous occasions, knew how important the international bonus pool would be in landing Sasaki. However, after having the most to close out the 2024 period, the Dodgers had the least amount of money of any MLB team in the 2025 period.
The Dodgers, like the 29 other MLB teams, would be eligible to trade for more international bonus pool money to sign Sasaki. However, if money was important to Sasaki, L.A. was at a disadvantage.
Nevertheless, Sasaki chose the Dodgers, not because of their financial willpower, but because of the reputation the organization has built for being great.
In addition to the winning — the Dodgers have the longest active postseason streak in MLB at 12 years — the Dodgers are an organization that is known for developing its players, while also putting its players first.
Sasaki was very interested in a team’s pitching development, something the Dodgers have thrived at over the last decade. He also saw how the team became so popular in Japan, and clearly was impressed by the two meetings he had with the organization over the last month.
“Roki is by no means a finished product. He knows it and the teams know it. He is incredibly talented. We all know that,” his agent Joel Wolfe said earlier this offseason. “But he is a guy that wants to be great. He’s not coming here to be rich or to get a huge contract. He wants to be great. He wants to be one of the greatest ever.”
Yes, the Dodgers have spent a lot of money over the last few offseasons, whether it be adding Freddie Freeman, Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, or, most recently, Blake Snell in free agency.
But they’ve also drafted as well as any team, while simultaneously scouting and developing players who struggled in other places and turned into key players in the Dodgers’ championship runs, such as Max Muncy, Evan Phillips, and, most recently, Anthony Banda.
That scouting and drafting has also put them in position to use their top prospects to acquire big-name players, and they haven’t been shy to do it, whether it be Mookie Betts, Tyler Glasnow, or, most recently, Jack Flaherty in big trades.
The Dodgers have built a juggernaut, and on top of it all, they treat their players in a way that makes people want to be Dodgers.
“The Dodgers, they’re different,” outfielder Teoscar Hernández said earlier this month after taking less money to sign back with the Dodgers.
“They think about everybody. Not only the players, not only the things I can do on the field. For me, they just give me the confidence. I never got that really in the other places that I worked.
“They trust in everything that I can give them and to this team and this organization.”
The Dodgers are one of the greatest organizations in sports, and have set themselves up to be a destination spot for just about every top free agent for the foreseeable future.
So, no, they’re not ruining baseball. They’re just better at it than everyone else.
