Getty

Roki Sasaki

Even after acquiring the top-of-the-rotation ace they have been missing since Chris Sale was shut down with an elbow injury that required Tommy John surgery after the 2019 season, the Boston Red Sox have made no secret of the fact that upgrading their pitching staff remains the team’s top offseason priority.

Boston on December 11 traded four highly regarded minor leaguers, including their fourth-ranked overal prospect catcher Kyle Teel, for Chicago White Sox lefty power-pitcher Garrett Crochet. They expect that the 25-year-old who struck out 12.9 batters for every nine innings pitched last year will anchor their rotation and take some pressure off Tanner Houck, Brayan Bello and the other Red Sox starters.

In 2024 the Red Sox starting staff ranked a respectable seventh in the Major Baseball when it came to ERA, posting a 3.81 figure that was actually good enough for fourth in the American League. But the Boston starters had quite a bit of trouble simply staying in the game. With 839 2/3 innings pitched, the Red Sox rotation placed a mediocre 16th in baseball for durability — an average of barely over five innings per outing.

Red Sox Need to Do Better With Starting Staff

In other words, the Red Sox need more and better starters, over and above Crochet. On December 10, a starter became available who immediately leaped to the top of the “most sought-after” list for the Red Sox, as well as the New York Yankees, Los Angeles Dodgers and several other franchises — even though he has never thrown an inning, or even a pitch in the Major Leagues.

That pitcher is 23-year-old Japanese fireballer Roki Sasaki, who pitched the last four seasons — the first four of his professional career — for the Chiba Lotte Marines of Japan’s Pacific League. In his four-year career at the top level of Japan’s pro baseball circuit, Sasaki has put together an ERA of 2.41 and a stunningly low WHIP of 0.833. His fastball has been clocked as high as 102 mph.

Sasaki’s Japanese team “posted” him on December 10, meaning that MLB teams had 45 days from that date to lure the young star and sign him to a contract.

While Sasaki has been termed a “dream target” for the Yankees, and the Dodgers are widely seen as favorites to land him due to the West Coast’s relative proximity to his home country of Japan, the Red Sox are now seen as “very serious” suitors for the international phenom hurler, according to MLB.com.

Boston’s ‘Impressive’ Pitching Development a Selling Point

“(The Red Sox’) main selling point might be the history of Japanese pitchers having success and positive experiences playing in Boston: Daisuke Matsuzaka, Koji Uehara and Junichi Tazawa,” wrote MLB.com columnist Jonathan Mayo. “They have an impressive pitching development program and it certainly doesn’t hurt when the general manager, Craig Breslow, can speak directly to it (as opposed to just handing it off to ‘the experts’). Breslow also personally scouted Sasaki for one of his starts in Japan in September.”

Another factor that might work in the Red Sox favor is Sasaki’s reported preference to play in a smaller market, as stated by his agent Joel Wolfe. Though Boston is a team that often finds itself in the national spotlight, it has only the 11th largest market, in terms of population, in MLB according to statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Jonathan Vankin JONATHAN VANKIN is an award-winning journalist and writer who now covers baseball and other sports for Heavy.com. He twice won New England Press Association awards for sports feature writing. Vankin is also the author of five nonfiction books on a variety of topics, as well as nine graphic novels including most recently “Last of the Gladiators” published by Dynamite Entertainment. More about Jonathan Vankin

More Heavy on Red Sox News

Loading more stories